Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies.

We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion that influence is the new capital. And we are replicating the systems that allow for the accumulation of capital in this new digital age.



It's hard to see how this wasn't by design. Elon loudly released the source code to the algorithm so SEO engineers could optimize their systems to have total control over the narrative. Sure "anybody can read it", but realistically only propagandists are going to go to the trouble and then have the time and resources to act on it.

He basically handed the site over to the IRA and told them to go nuts.


The ‘ra? Did I miss a step here?


>IRA

Irish republican army?



That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But it’s worth remembering that this only holds power if we choose to participate.

Personally, I’ve stepped away from anything associated with X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from the ecosystem entirely—and life is better for it. No doomscrolling, no algorithmic nudging, no subtle behavioral conditioning. Influence may be the new capital, but opting out is still a form of agency. Disengagement can be a powerful act.

We often forget: participation isn’t mandatory.


I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff.

Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics.

Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any of those companies might cease to exist if Elon gets high and does something stupid, then I'll be stuck without support.

Similarly, a social media account is an investment. I would never invest my time into building relationships on a platform like X. Even if it does survive Musk, the community is broken permanently.


Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies.

Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.

But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile.

He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.


He did not baselessly claim a critic was a pedophile. He baselessly claimed the first foreign rescuer called to the scene [1], who called in his friends who successfully navigated and mapped the caves and found the kids, a pedophile.

[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/exclusive-interview-with...


> In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.

You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it? Also, I can't find the source for this bet, only some bets about covid, and whether the tesla roadster could be built at all.


> You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which one is it?

What's the conflict? I can call something reckless without the recklessness itself making me particularly opposed to it.

Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward.


>What's the conflict? I can call something reckless without the recklessness itself making me particularly opposed to it.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun

If you start off a sentence with "Some cracks started to form in this when", and then describe a situation using negative adjectives (ie. "reckless"), it's fair for most assume that the "recklessness" was your justification for the aforementioned claim. If that detail is irrelevant to your argument, then you shouldn't include it.

As for the object level question of whether taking such a bet is "reckless" at all. It's entirely impossible to tell without knowing the bet amount, and his finances at the time. Musk was recently able to take a $40B hit to his finances when he was forced to buy twitter (after trying to back out), with seemingly little consequence, so it's unclear whether an absurdly large bet would actually be "reckless".

>Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and then also didn't share the reward.

Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.


You can argue that it hurts the flow of the comment, but I wouldn't act like a play has a huge plot hole because it had a gun that never got used. The comment said X, then it said Y, and those things don't conflict. "Which one is it?" doesn't make sense as a question.

> Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.

I don't see how this affects anything the GP said.


>You can argue that it hurts the flow of the comment, but I wouldn't act like a play has a huge plot hole because it had a gun that never got used. The comment said X, then it said Y, and those things don't conflict. "Which one is it?" doesn't make sense as a question.

It's called confirming what your opponent's argument is, so you're not arguing against a strawman. If you check how the OP actually replied, it seems like he entirely abandoned the "he kept it all for himself" objection.


Oh it was reckless. That was the era when built quality was rock bottom. People were getting cars that were missing parts, or where things were attached completely wrong.[1] He was expanding production so fast that it caused a serious liquidity crunch at Tesla. But he got lucky and managed to squeeze through the problem.

I will have to look harder to find the name of the investor whom Elon made the production bet against, but I think this article is talking about it: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/tesla-workers-in-ga4-tent-de...


>I will have to look harder to find the name of the investor whom Elon made the production bet against, but I think this article is talking about it: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...

Unless there's something the article totally omitted, your original retelling of the story was heavily misleading. For one, it's not a bet and is seemingly actually a performance bonus, which nearly every F500 company has for their executives. As such, there was very little downside if he lost the bet. It's also unclear why CEOs trying to hit aggressive performance targets is a bad thing in and of itself. You could still object to it on the basis of bad working conditions for workers, or corners cut on the product being made, but you mentioned none of that in your original comment, which seems to imply you were fine with all of those things, and was only upset that Musk didn't share in the rewards (???).


Based on some of the videos of him it looks like its Ketamine.



Thanks for sharing that.

The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. I can't help but feel that there is a link.

Like ketamine, other psychedelics can trigger mild psychosis and with it conspiratorial thinking, grandiosity, and all of the other symptoms described here.

The rise in legalization seems, anecdotally, to match the "normalization" of tin-foil hat thinking in society. Years ago Dan Quayle was essentially disqualified from office for misspelling potato, now Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly decries the Jewish Space Lasers and nobody blinks. I feel like there has to be more to societies changes over the last ~25 years than "the internet".


> The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization.

Are we switching the horse and cart places here? It's highly likely that people resort to drugs in order to cope with the distress caused by conspiracy talk. Musk is using drugs as stimulants to increase his "productivity" which is the other common reason for taking drugs. BTW, his "productivity" isn't the source of his success, but that's tangential here.

In both cases, conspiracies aren't the root cause and fighting them ends up fighting free speech without reducing either conspiracies or drug use.

The same is true for the normalization of wild conspiracies - MTG followers aren't engaging in them because of drugs, they are doing it because MTG is promoting them from a place of authority and bot-love. If you think she's not playing by a script but simply spilling out the contents of her concerned heart... you know very little about propaganda.


You're very much welcome!

Regarding conspiracies, I really must share ContraPoints' new video ... CONSPIRACY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teqkK0RLNkI


I think we should be careful of too much cynicism (although too little is bad as well). There is the old Aesop tale of the fox and the grapes. Being unable to reach the grapes the fox sulks away saying "they were probably sour".

There is a lot to gain for the powerful if they can convince those that they wish to hold that power over that the "grapes are sour", so to speak. That leaves less people fighting for the few grapes available, as we stretch this analogy to its breaking point.

No man is an island, and all that. If the holders of influence decide to start a war, you are in it if you like it or not.


There's no probably here, and it is healthy to avoid social media platforms run by people who perform nazi salutes in public and attempt to destroy democracy.


Agreed, I don’t think the analogy holds in this case. Elon is grape maker and he can dole out sour or sweet grapes as he pleases. No point in eating them if you don’t favor him because he often gives out sour ones to those folks.


Yes, but eventually normal people will just end up leaving.


It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/

But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v...

That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around, which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years, virtually every single new post on the site was radically right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/

The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding.

You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger, and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.


AKA the “Nazi bar” problem.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar


One problem I have with the Nazi Bar framing - or perhaps, how people read it - is that it assumes the behavior is accidental. That is, that the sites that have become Nazi bars did so purely out of a misguided sense of free speech absolutism that has been abused.

In practice, most Nazi bars are run by people actively choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis. Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep end.

During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform, neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar, making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got shadowbanned.

Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of speech".

And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public, all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned the bar - both in Germany and abroad - were rallying behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They're the bits of the deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power for himself.

Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis can independently worm their way into a system and ruin it. However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi bar don't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace them.

[0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking rules.

[1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to exist. All states start deep, formal hierarchy is a transparency mechanism to make it shallow.

See also https://xkcd.com/898/

[2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/


Very well said. And in relation to your [2] I remember that happening before the boom of "AI" - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: