The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X::The former Twitter is incentivizing violent content, which will only become worse to stand out to users.
Then stop already. Stop mentioning the name. Stop posting articles about it. Stop sharing articles about it on other social media.
You know what’s immoral? Posting ragebait articles about a platform because you know users will engage.
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And it would be similar to that if racism was a business that survived based on engagement.
I mean… Isn’t it? Racism is very self-perpetuating. Especially when it’s allowed over other forms of distasteful speech.
I don’t think so. Racism being self perpetuating means it will exist even if we stop talking about it and will probably just be worse because even well meaning folk can be racist if they’re not aware of it.
X on the other hand stops existing if we stop sending it traffic and just let it die.
Nah, self-perpetuating is not the same as spontaneously inevitable. Just like species can go extinct despite all life self-perpetuating in some way.
The people on Lemmy are likely to agree not to use it, and that just makes it more stupid to say, “don’t talk about it.”, since it won’t further its demise at all.
Well, it seems like racism has unfortunately failed to go extinct so I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at there but I’m probably missing something.
I don’t think everyone has agreed not to use it? The more it gets talked about and spread the more people are drawn to the platform. Why do you think Musk has successfully made sure the site has been in the headlines constantly? I’m not saying we have to all stop talking about it and pretend it doesn’t exist. But maybe we don’t need multiple articles every day posted across multiple communities.
Anyway, doesn’t really matter what I think. It keeps getting posted and upvoted so I guess we’ll just have to live with it.
People are not drawn to the platform in a positive way by talking about it negatively on Lemmy…
It’s like you idiots take basic expressions like, “any attention is good attention” and turn it in to a fucking axiom for life. It IS NOT TRUE in all contexts. Fucking grow up and realize generalities are SPECIFICALLY NOT TRUE in all cases. Ever. Generalities are always fucking stupid to use to judge specific occurrences unless it is a quintessential example. Which very VERY few things are quintessential examples of, “any attention is good attention.”.
Something that’s self-perpetuating doesn’t extinguish without being actively stamped out. Noticing it’s still around is the most basic observation that means nothing about it except that it’s still an existant problem.
If everyone shuts up about racism, then racism will be worse. If everyone stopped talking about twitter, then twitter will die. It’s not the same thing at all. Not even close.
You are mixing “talking about Twitter” with “being on Twitter”. If nobody on Lemmy or Mastodon said a single word about Twitter ever again… it would still outnumber them by hundreds of millions users. I don’t like it, but that’s still how it is. But consequently, ragging on it is not going to recruit people who left for the Fediverse.
But if you mean making everyone on Twitter to shut up in general, well, easier said than done.
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Nah. That doesn’t make a bit of sense, that’s stretching those generalizations to the breaking point. How is talking negatively of it going to make it more appealing to people who already left mainstream social media out of dissatisfaction. Who do you think this person is who’s like “I had enough of Twitter, but now that they said it’s vile and falling apart I absolutely must go back there”?
Even if the average person on Facebook could vaguely feel interested in it as a talking point, which is already a strange logic, here it doesn’t seem likely or meaningfully impactful.
The difference is that racists are usually racist due to a moral stance, not because it makes them money; ignoring them means we’ll hear about it less but it won’t actually go away. Clickbait/ragebait, on the other hand, isn’t a moral viewpoint - it’s meant to bring a person money via exposure/engagement, so less engagement leads to less money which leads to less bait because it’s no longer working.
I dunno’, you’d find plenty of economic justification if you go back and read why the confederacy got started. Or why Germany went a little crazy in early 1900’s…
While it is correct to logically dismiss the actual arguments of rage bait, it is purely foolish to pretend that it has no tangible effects worth counteracting all the same.
To say these things aren’t even worth talking about in general is akin stepping aside for bad actors to take over.
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It’s not “x” it’s called Twitter.
This is a good case for deadnaming.Corporate deadnaming is the only good deadnaming.
Facebook also only deserves to be called Meta as a reminder that they rebranded into a failed trend and lost billions because of it.
While some of the same words appear in these two things, they are nothing alike.
The debate over whether recognizing racism can help us eliminate it has nothing to do with an unhinged billionaire who uses shock tactics to generate PR, and the bottom-feeding publications who give it to him by stoking our disgust.
No, it’s very much similar. You’re saying don’t even talk about it, when the article is about how it is a corrupted service. A service that at least used to have global reach. If a service is a globally used resource, it’s kinda’ institutionalized.
Since when did ignoring institutionalized injustice ever fix it? Never. It never gets fixed in the dark.
I understand the concept of not feeding trolls, but do not misjudge and accidentally ask people to ignore villains.
It’s a corrupted service, therefore it’s a service, therefore it’s an institution, therefore it’s institutionalized injustice….
Feeling a little loose after all that stretching? I guess the policies of every website company in the world now constitute institutionalized injustice. I’ll use that phrase next time I’m appealing the Facebook modbot.
I wouldn’t say we should never talk about Twitter and it’s impact on our world. I will say it is a media circus which is paraded about far, far too often to its corrupt owners benefit. And it needs to have less attention than it is getting like a fire needs less air.
Way to treat an association as an exact replica… I’m trying to put bread crumbs down, not rope them together. Stop pretending you do not know what an alegory is.
If you understand the general topic should not be shunned … why are you speaking on behalf of shunning it?
I answered that. Last paragraph. Stop spinning wild extrapolations out of your ass for a second and just read some hard text.
Well kinda, except for these articles that pop now and then in my timeline, I haven’t heard of XformerlyTwitter for a while.
It was fun for a few weeks, joking about what bulls**t idea Musk had during the weekend with colleagues, but after a while the joke was a bit repetitive.
It’s not news because he joked about it. It’s news because he’s flippantly doing it with production.
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It is a sight to behold. There is a certain class of people that don’t know who they are without Twitter because they measure their worth in followers and whatever influence that brings them. They are definitely going through all the stages of grief. Many of those types work in the media, hence all the articles hemming and hawing about whether to stay on Twitter or not.
For those of us that don’t have our egos entangled with the site, the writing was on the wall pretty early on. Twitter, or X, is dead and not worth our time. I’m sure those of us on Lemmy are especially capable of sniffing out the moment a social network turns sour.
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Posting ragebait articles about a platform because you know users will engage.
Lol irony.
Back before Apollo was killed I had the words “Elon” and “Trump” filtered out. I just never saw these rage posts in the first place. Man, I’d love to see that feature in a Lemmy client. Anyone know if it exists?
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The moral case for just shutting the hell up about X finally for fucks sake.
This is your daily reminder to engage and boost Twitter alternatives such as Mastodon. It’s not enough to ignore Twitter. We must build communities to draw in users, show them social media can exist without Elon or Zuck. Only when good alternatives exist, with content and people sought after, do users feel safe to abandon old platforms.
I made a burner to see for myself after using it for work a few years ago. It’s a complete dumpster fire now, way worse than before. Bots and shitty animated gambling ads everywhere. Porn bots and scammers are trying to follow you every 2 seconds. Elon’s dipshit musings/ragebait are forced into your feed even when you block him. Any tweets you make get zero engagement. remaining accounts are either bots, racists, fascists, or creators and celebrities moaning and/or hemming and hawing about leaving all the time because muh ego. It’s not even worth witnessing the spectacle.
It’s also fucking straight up broken half the time. Mastodon is a breath of fresh air in comparison even pre-Elon. Wish more would use it.
You forgot one major thing: the porn has left in droves.
Truth. Total ghost town now.
The forced elon spam reeks of insecurity. I thought the whole reason behind being extremely rich was not giving a fuck about what the world thinks, yet here we are.
Can we all just boycott anything having to do with Musk/Twitter? I just want a browser extension that will automatically prevent me from going to a site that has any sort of links or anything related to twitter. Your blog also links to your Twitter account? Fuck you, I’m not reading it. Your news story references a tweet from somebody? Fuck you I’m not reading it. Your Lemmy post talks about Musk or Twitter? Fuck you, I’m not reading it. I just want all mention of Musk or Twitter or X completely erased from the internet. It may unfortunately impact any reference to anything else ‘X’ related, but that’s a small price to pay for a Musk-free life.
Devil’s advocate, it should be amplified as much as possible, because it reminds the public that billionaires are not inherently intelligent nor worthy of their money.
Problem is you’d also block all the older articles from when twitter was only a mudpit and not a hellhole
Oh no, all those articles from the Trump presidency where Trump posted something asinine and everybody freaked out about it, whatever shall I do?
Is there any app for Lemmy that can filter by keyword? I don’t want to read about Elon and Trump multiple times a day. With some Kanye, Zuckerberg and Tate sprinkled in.
I already know they suck and 99% of the time they are mentioned it isn’t even relevant or is about social media platforms I don’t use.
Even better idea, everyone order a starlink then do a return. Will temp cost you $300 but free return shipping at spacex expense
SpaceX is an amazing company. I don’t want to punish SpaceX.
It’s less than a quarter the cost to get to space now, because of SpaceX
Can we take a step back for a second and think about the human condition that led someone to need a moral argument to get off X? What kind of pathetic, fucked up mind do you have where you can’t just uninstall the app you have to appeal to morality.
My assumption would be the purpose is to shame people.
I don’t think someone publishes an article to try to convince themselves to not use it. Of course it’s to convince other people why to not use it.
This 100%! I barely used Twitter to begin with, but as soon as he went off the deep end, I completely deleted my account.
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I shorted Tesla stock options and made money off his loss.
A couple people I know dumped their teslas because they didn’t want to support the nazi.
I’ve never used Twitter, but X has never been better—250+mg per pill, that’s three times what it was in the early 00s!
I joined Twitter fairly recently as Machine Learning Twitter is/was a thing, and I wanted to stay abreast of news from people like Andrej Karpathy, Chris Olah, Andrew Ng etc., especially since r/MachineLearning went down the shitter.
But I can’t even - I log on and just instantly see ragebait posts from Daily Mail talking heads and bullshit.
Are there any better alternatives for this purpose?
Believe it or not, for tech deep cuts, Mastodon is better.
If you know of a better ML related instance than sigmoid.social let me know, but none of those influential figures I mentioned post there, and the discussion is pretty much non-existent.
Lead by example. At least stop pretending that this news article/opinion piece belongs in a technology.
I love these websites posting, “It’s time to leave X” while also providing bait articles that just describe a Twitter conversation between two celebrities.
Ironically, there’s a “Share with Twitter” button on the left side of the article
Agreed.
Agreed
The fediverse provides an alternative for people who care about using ethical products. Haven’t tried threads/bluesky but they seem like more of the same. Unfortunately I don’t think people care about the ethics of their micro-blogging platform; their biggest priority is having the largest soap box to shout from.
I’m not sure I’d call lemmy ethical considering how much genocide denial there is.
Lemmy isn’t one entity. It’s several different websites. That would be like calling Linux unethical because some people use it for weapons research… it’s open source, so people can do whatever they want with it. Douglas Crockford famously added "“The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” to the license for JSON, but it was determined by various people to be unenforceable and not compatible with free software licensing.
Does anyone here actually use it? I literally never made an account
I have an account that I use exclusively to DM companies for support. I found out that I can get help quicker and more easily than going through their website or call center hoops.
Downvote Musk spam.
The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring him and his businesses stay in the headlines every day. Don’t be a useful idiot.
If torturing primates isn’t enough for u what is,???
paying for twitter
That says so much about u that animal torture is ok but don’t they dare demand $8 from u.
Oh no im not saying that about myself. left a long time ago when he started rate limiting and funding right leaning mfs. I’m just trying to imagine wby people stay on a service like that. I kinda hope elon starts charging for twitter so when i see who actually pays for it, its gonna be much easier to cut them off.
I don’t need a moral reason, I just think it’s shit as it was before it rebranded
I still use X for work and have noticed an increase in the amount of hate speech and racist content. Its started appearing on my feed.
Problem is legacy Twitter still has huge scale so it’s not so simple to switch to something else if you need a big audience. It will take time.
Damn, this is actually quite compelling. I knew X/Twitter was bad, but didn’t realize just how bad it has become. Thanks for posting.
