It’s because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It’s at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him.
Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he’s a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).
I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don’t feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic.
Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.
my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is
there’s also this at the top of the thread:
I’ve been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don’t care enough to have an opinion.
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It’s accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like “Tweet” into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.
turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent
musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed
remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads
this is the part that needs to be recognised as the brand. Changing the name and the logo are kind of good at this point because the blue bird was already dead. Even before musk that cute bird was doing a lot of work to make shitty people seem not-shitty. Musk can’t hide his shittyness behind a blue bird like jack could. Musk is a skid mark but his lack of creativity makes him use his skid marks as logos - which is something that I hope more shit stains copy because its scary how easy it is to mask a bad smell with a pastel colour palette and a pixel-perfect design system
I’ve always wondered why a lot of the leftists in my life had twitter accounts when the site itself was clearly hostile to them at best, and I think you’ve nailed it
now all I can think about is old.reddit’s stupid fucking “come for the cats, stay for the empathy” banner with the Reddit alien mascot doing cartoony shit, and how many hate subs and instances of real-world violence that kind of branding covered for
I don’t mean to spam, but you miiiiight like my writing :) https://fasterandworse.com/the-aura-of-care/
this looks good! gonna read through it while sleepily hacking on some lemmy code
let me know what you think! Trying to work on the follow up but there are so many threads to follow
I finally read the article without any software breaking and needing to be fixed right away (am I cursed?)
it’s good! I really like the point that tools like notion and slack really just do generic collaboration, a feature set that sells to corporations but is pretty much hell to actually use and encapsulates the worst bits of work (always being on-call in some way, all work being open to drive-by comments from folks who aren’t involved in what’s going on, drawn-out processes being universally normalized), cloaked in a frictionless UI to hide how little value the tools actually bring to the table beyond checking the boxes executives tend to think will increase revenue
this is the kind of writing I’d like to do myself sometime soon when work takes a break from draining my writing skills into an uncountable number of collaborative documents. there’s an essay (probably) named Against Technofascism I’ve been mentally outlining for months now, which sometimes threatens to possess my hands and commit itself to an editor buffer in one night of deeply pissed-off typing
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. This one is the result of spending almost a whole month in a much bigger one and finally realising I wasn’t going to get anything done if I didn’t break it into smaller chunks. I hope you can get your one out!
thank you! that’s a great strategy — maybe we should start a writing community here for short drafts and feedback? ironically I can’t think of a good name for it though
Would love that. I almost started a discord for amateur writers supporting amateur writers because I’ve been twitch streaming a lot of my research and writing. But I’m too busy lately to do that and I don’t think I can handle yet another network to pay attention to
Was just rereading Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit and this jumped out as being relevant.