1y ago

can we please keep this community about technology and not Twitter/X and elon news?

312 comments

This is a technology community, and (whether you like it or not) Twitter being rebranded to X is pretty big news in the world of tech.
Especially with the slipshod way they are doing with it, there is bound to be a lot of articles covering different weird tangential effects from the rush job.
- Yeah I don't like this. Can't we just use our upvotes to decide which news are important?
  
  Most people on All don't check what comm a post is from before upvoting. That's why on Reddit all subs that regularly hit r/all are basically the same. I'm fine with the Twitter news here, but upvotes don't work as quality control.
  
  The point is that news about Twitter rebranding is simply not related to technology. This is a technology community. These submissions should not even be posted in the first place to have the opportunity to be voted on.
  
  Are you really suggesting that we take the low quality Reddit approach to high quality subs like /r/funny?
  I suppose this is what happens when the lowest common denominator goes down coupled with ignorance of how the lowest common denominator affects community quality.
  Communities lose their niche by catering to the lowest common denominator and become homogeneous with each other. This has been a long-standing phenomena on Reddit, one which I would expect to not be carried over to Lemmy since it's largely a symptom of a user base that has more interest in memes, funnies, and celebrity worship than discussion and real news.
  
  I keep downvoting them. But I am apparently alone.
- Twitter being rebranded to X is pretty big news in the world of tech.
  Maybe, but we have seen it now. If every fart of Musk needs a new thread, maybe better to make a Musk group.
  
  reddit used to have r/EnoughMuskSpam lol
- Big news, yes. But not tech related at all. Those Elon news should be on TMZ.
- twitter isn't relevant in technological development, it's just a toxic social media site which hasn't changed in any significant way since its inception (technologically speaking)
  
  I agree with you that no one in the tech world is looking at Twitter for advice atm, but to say nothing changed at Twitter in any significant way since it's inception is disingenuous at best. Twitter's rapid growth and adoption led to the development of a number of key technologies needed to run global 24/7 uptime services at scale, just to name one macro example.
- Twitter being rebranded to X is pretty big news in the world of tech.
  Is it? It doesn't change anything.
- Is this place called technology news, or technology? Asking for a friend
  
  Neither. It's a rant about "Twitter/Elon/whatever billionaire does something stupid today" community.
  As you can see, nothing tech related. Just people related to the tech industry somehow
- It is definitely very big news, but I guess the amount of articles on that topic is overshadowing the rest of tech news.
  Maybe we could consider that news relative to Twitter/X should be on their own community, that users can choose to subscribe, ignore or block?
- That is not Tech news that is business news.
  What technology was developed, explored, integrated, improved, or otherwise innovated or more broadly applied by this?
  Nothing, it does nothing, it's a branding decision, business news, not tech news.
  
  Curious, those criteria you listed out are not present anywhere I can see in the community rules.
  Perhaps you should petition the mods to change them if you feel so strongly about it.
  
  What technology was developed, explored, integrated, improved, or otherwise innovated or more broadly applied by this?
  This is an interesting standard to apply and I'm curious to see how many posts would actually fit that, especially posts which seem to be about tech. Arguably, 30-60% of the top posts right now don't meet this.
- No, a rebrand is not a true technological news. It is regular news. Same would apply if Pizza company changed it's name. Internal policy changes of a website are not technological news either. Appointing a new director or firing staff, is still are not technological. Sure they its news, but have nothing to do with technology.
- I agree. I don't use Twitter and I really don't know much about Elon, but when one of the wealthiest people in the world is doing something with a major tech company, Id like to be somewhat informed
- Elon must stay rich from living in everyone's heads rent-free..

I’d rather want to know why we have 10 posts about twitter changing it’s name but the one post about grindr employees unionizing gets removed because it’s apparently not tech related
- Are unionization posts getting removed here? That seems against the whole idea of an open internet here.
- Wait, what? I dont give a fuck about the elon musk shit, but I care about grindr employees. Seems this community is earning a block from my side
- This sort of situation is why I believe the human interests around technology should be covered.

I get that this is a contentious topic and I agree that Musk gets too much coverage, but....I strongly believe that people should be able to post whatever they want as long as it adheres to the community's topic (technology) and adheres to the rules.
The arguement of, "I don't wanna see {topic here} so stop posting about {topic here}" is a really slippery slope. Clearly there are quiet users here that DO actually want to hear about X news and DO want to dicuss it. What about topics that appeal to you, or like 20% of the community, but 80% couldn't give a shit? Where is the line?
Realistically, this is on you. You don't like it? Downvote and scroll past it. Want a perfectly curated source of news you care about? Use an RSS reader that offers topic filters. This is a community of diverse interests that may not always reflect yours. Deal with it, or go elsewhere.
- Your point is absolutely valid, but what's happening at Twitter really is only relevant to social media news. There's no tech changing or advancing, just a really bad marketing decision. I personally do not believe that this is tech news or relevant to it.
  
  I agree. It's more political than technology related.
  
  To be fair it's a tech company though so it can impact those in the tech space. Generally it doesn't but you know what I mean.
- Politely disagree, in that I suspect this is a hypocritical sentiment. Most users who get off of Elon news will agree with this position now but then cry foul when this community is spammed with a subject not to their liking. And as much as the ideology of free speech (rightly) resonates, just like with free markets, some minimal regulation is needed in practice; otherwise some fanatics could choke this feed up with, I dunno, 99% Microsoft news, all the time, and you wouldn't be able to say shit because you "strongly believe people should be able to post whatever they want". I doubt that you would stand by your lofty convictions so strongly then.
  Beyond that, there is nothing wrong with expressing a desire for more or less of something—it's just an opinion. It's a bullshit argument to say, "If you don't like it, instead of articulating why, just use the limited non-descriptive tool provided to reduce your passionate sentiment into a trivial binary value and cast it into the sea of thousands just like it; or else, like, go create an entirely new community or a custom feed or whatever you want. But mainly, just fuck off."
  
  Let me make this clear.
  I don't give a FLYING FUCK about Elon. I actively ignore any posts about him or his shitty empire. Stop using the behaviors of his idiot stans to argue with me. I am not them.
  What I do care about is a community telling people what they can or cannot post, not through rules changes, not through mod action, but by agreeing internally to bully every person who dares to post what every tech publication is talking about.
  I think you need to evaluate why you let this shit trigger you. I mean, this is like going to a coffee shop and raising a stink because they sell pumpkin spice lattes. Don't consume it. Use Lemmy's tools to filter it out if you really need to.
  Its not the community's job to cater to your specific content desires. This isn't a news site. Its a place for people to talk about whatever they think technology is. It's your job to moderate what you pay attention to.
  
  Funny enough I think it's a hypocritical sentiment but on the other foot -- users who are tired of this news are going to eventually find some news they are interested in, and then resist having it sequestered somewhere else.
- What rss reader are you using? I've been using feeder and have like it so far. Also have freshRSS running but don't use it so much
  
  I've tried so many and I'm always on the hunt for better ones. I wss on Pallabre until it went abandonware. Currently on inoreader but still hunting.
  Problem is that I want something that can easily sync my feed and subscriptions across devices, but the ones that support that compromise in other areas. I might need to just settle for good import/export functionality. But Inoreader works for me for now.
  But the nice thing is there are a ton of RSS apps out there. So, theres bound to be something for everyone.

Or limit it to a pinned permathread?
- Just call it "Elon Madness"
  
  One for Elon, and another for Reddit.
  
  Melon ad-ness. It’s partly newsworthy but mostly free publicity.
- That's what !technology@beehaw.org does: https://lemmy.ml/post/2431344

Yeah, Lemmy is for obsessively shitposting about Reddit, not Twitter.
- Also, memes about that movie I was promoting.
  
  Yay oppenheimer
- We can keep that Twitter shit over on Mastodon where it belongs.

Currently chatting with the other mods about this and while we don't want the community to be overrun by Elon, the articles are some of the most upvoted in the past few days. It seems, that people do want to hear about what's going on but not at a rate that drowns out other content. We've been careful to prune out duplicates to keep the flow down, but the volume of Elon posts and Twitter / X is definitely... a lot. I do see how some find it annoying so we're keeping an eye on the situation, but I do agree it does meet the criteria of being both news and tech related. I assume that he'll eventually run out of Twitter pieces to break, right :P
Please do keep an open line of communication with us and all replies, feedback and opinions are always welcome! Cheers!
- why did you remove the Grindr unionization post
  
  @enu reply to this please
- It's not just an inconvenience. I unfollowed the sub because the quality of the content was poor. I want to learn about technology, not social media companies and every minutiae about their employees bowel movements. I'm getting more value from Linux than from here, despite the fact some of it is more low level than I'd like.
- I see the role of moderators as guiding the flow of people's interests. If you went solely on upvotes, it wouldn't matter what you called the community or whether it had moderators. If you want it to be about technology, make it that way. If you want it to be about the business decisions of social media companies tangentially related to technology, at least do the kindness of changing the name so that people don't mistakenly come here thinking they'll hear about new technology.
- Great, and thank you for implication and consideration. This community, like any other needs some rules or guide lines. Yet, if people are interested in other topics, they can just subscribe to communities about those other topics.
  To be more precise, "technology" "technology news" and "news" are very different subjects that may have their own communities.
- I believe the upvotes mainly come from rage engagement. I don't wanna see them either, but they provoke a reaction.
  
  It's not rage, it's amusement from watching the slow motion train wreck.

Like it or not, it's tech news. When Intel does something interesting, or Google wets the bed again, we'll talk about that a lot, then. Right now it's Elon doing dumb stuff. Last month it was spez. If we ban every hot news topic, what's left to discuss?
- I was under the impression that this was a community to discuss technology, not one that discusses the business decisions of companies in the technology sector, and certainly not the decisions of a social media company that is only tangentially related to the technology sector.
  
  Whether we like it or not, it's pretty damn hard to separate technology from business (and also politics)
  The direction of technological advancement, as it stands today, is largely driven by businesses. What technologies are developed and what they get used for, depends on who's throwing money at it and how they want to make money from it.
  Don't get me wrong, I'm sick of hearing about Musk. But the internet is one of the most amazing technological achievements humanity has ever created, and a lot of people use it for Twitter/X, and so their business decisions have pretty far-reaching implications for the rest of the internet. Trying to ignore that leaves out big chunks of the picture.
  
  Would not be opposed to a new community that focuses on the business side of tech companies!
  
  Oh, and an interesting follow on, if someone runs a technology consultancy, can they post about their business successes and issues? They're in the tech business after all. Or is this simply limited to the who's who of bad actors? The big, 3 4, 10, 15? What is the cut off?
- I disagree. It's not tech news. Twitter or X losing a few subscribers to mastadon or threads is a Sunday. And on Monday we'll get an article about people moving in the other direction. Distilling entire categories of news to one person or company makes us less informed, not more. We're just echoing the same talking points back and forth at eachother.
  I'm definitely not saying Elon or Twitter is NEVER tech news but, jesus, I don't need or want to know about every tweet he makes and every shit he takes. I also don't think these things shouldn't be recorded in some way. But the magnitude it's posted is straight up Elon worship whether you hate him or support him.
  I do what I'm able and willing by downvoting items that aren't news or discussion-worthy and not interacting with those comment sections but there is just so much. Is there a place to just read news about technology and not tech business tweets turned into "news" stories? This is a genuine question if someone has info.
  
  I guess it's subjective, but from my perspective the weekly thought bubbles of billionaire / millionaire owners of tech companies is not what I think of when I think about "tech news".
  Is the solution here to have megathreads?
  For me personally I'd be happy enough for someone to create a redditandtwitternews community and then ban any such news from this community - but I'm pretty sure my views on this are not generally held.
  Edit: actually no, I don't think it is really subjective. If twitter invented a new database language that would be tech news. A social media company re-branding is not tech news.
- What technology from Twitter is being discussed?
- You mean like non-reactionary content? Stuff that teaches us, and we learn, and we feel hope? Quality rather than hyperbole.

Hear, hear! I’m so sick of watching that douche get all the free publicity in the world. It’s like his haters haven’t all figured out that this why he does half the shit he does.
- Ex- fucking- xactly! People keep talking about him. I don't understand fucking why. My suspicion is that they have a team of people to open discussions about him, so the media is talking abiut him. Otherwise I cant imagine someone that wants to keep talking about him. Its nuts! Just let him die already.
  
  I watch because it's my favorite train wreck

My favorite technology is bronze smelting.
What about you guys?
- My favorite is any system for writing. That's when we started sending actual information into the future. An argument could be made for art on cave walls, and that does communicate with future humans, but the meaning is interpreted rather than dictated.
  
  But it isn’t. Culture and technology was transmitted into the future for millennia prior to writing was developed.
- Personally I'm more of an irrigation fanboy. I just love an efficient way to get water to my crops.
- The plow. The greatest of all inventions.
  
  I personally feel the trebuchet is the pinnacle of engineering, which is the superior siege weapon.
  
  Pff, where's my lever gang at?
- Do you smelt bronze from bars or can you smelt directly from ores?
- I like cement. Roman cement with quicklime. Shit cracks on the limestone flakes which erode and re-calcify within all the micro-fractures. Fuckin Romans were mad smart.
- I'm a pretty big fan of food preservation. Ancient methods like smoking and pickling, to modern ones like freeze drying. Shout out Steve1989MREInfo!
- Huge fan of lead refinement.
  
  Laden or unladen?
- Typewriters and fountain pens for me.

Seriously idgaff about how a media business is performing.
- Agreed. News about X is not news about technology.
- I get why we all talk so much about Elon, but man I wish collectively as a society we could all agree to stop talking about him so he could disappear into obscurity

Yes! Social media gossip is NOT "technology".

But it’s news about tech.
- It is not
  
  It’s about a website that is on the internet that runs on technology

Found a handy script to minimize this:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/471718-lemmy-post-keyword-filter

Yeah. Just because a tech company does something, that doesn't make it technology news. Call me when there's actual technologic development coming out.
- my coffee maker has Bluetooth
  
  So that it can hear music and take work calls without disturbing you while it makes you coffee?
  
  Now this is the sort of hard hitting technical news that I come here for /s

I am automatically down voting everything with musk in title

Please and thank you.

Too late for that. Technology has been redefined to mean whatever Si valley IT tech bros are up to.
I recommend to unsub and build topical communities.
- As a last resort maybe. There are also other technology communities on other instances. Let's see who hands this issue best. But for now, mods have taken appropriate action.

Agreed whats more annoying is getting double X posts back to back
- We need c/enoughMuskSpam
  
  Joining a community centered solely around content you want to avoid seems counter-productive.

I want to post a non-news idea I had about verifying people online, though with Google's current destructive proposal for a web standard in the headlines, I am admittedly a bit worried it's going to get conflated.
The idea would be that it serves the same kind of purpose as what a company would ever need - verifying that someone is a unique person, verifying that they are over a certain age - only when the user volunteers that info, and without actually giving said online company actual information about them.
When I read the headlines about such systems being attempted by game companies or web companies, it basically comes with a "Trust us!" caveat that I can't imagine anyone following. BUT, they at least give some respectable PR language about how such things might be useful to combat harassment, fake accounts, etc, and it does give me some ideas. The internet is kind of a limitless place, but having no limits for everyone is in some ways a limitation in itself.
So, I'm curious if people would actually want threads like that in this Community instance.
- Yes! That sounds like a very interesting discussion!
- Discussing user generated ideas is actually a pretty fun concept
- I think that this is doable for most of the normal population (and likely not novel (which does not diminish its value)) with public private crypto and some authority (eg government issued ids having keys like Portugal) and then using those to authenticate to a service that allows specifically what you want to share. So normally you'd only ever share say age or something

Well, it is tech, what do you expect?
- twitter isn't any more "tech" than Nanna's blog about knitting.
  
  It's literally a tech company. The laws the company tests are all about the impact of tech.

This community's best use case is finding niche and/or new and exciting tech ideas and tools

True, the antics of a social media site shouldn't really be the focus of this community
- It's odd how many people in this thread are calling Twitter a tech company. It's a media company, closer to the New York Times and Washington Post than to Google or even something like John Deere.

I’m almost ready to block this domain. Bunch of Musk shit and bad news all around.
- Well most big tech is going to shit so bad news is still news.

Seriously. At least put the twice daily Elon Musk stories in one thread.
It's fucking ridiculous.

Honestly, Lemmy is starting to really disappoint me. I figured I was leaving most of the circlejerking, reposting, and shitposting behind on Reddit. However Lemmy is every bit just as bad :-/ which is frightening considering how few people are on Lemmy. If it's getting this shitty right now, imagine it if there was a real Reddit migration...
- Lemmy has the same users that Reddit has. What the fuck were you expecting?
- Come to Lemmy as an alternative to reddit!
  ... No don't use it like reddit!?!
- Sounds like you might prefer tildes.
  
  What is that?
- Half my comments just get downvoted for no reason. I told someone I was sorry their houses got messed up by tornados...two down votes. Like I know karma doesn't matter, but it's not fun or encouraging to see and has genuinely made me post less.
  
  You could always go to an instance like beehaw that disables downvotes.
  
  One thing I like about Lemmy is that it shows upvotes and downvotes separately in addition to the composite score.
  When I make a controversial post that gets 7 upvotes and 20 downvotes, I think "Man, this was a good post. 7 people liked it". On Reddit, I would just think 13 people downvoted it. If anything, on Lemmy downvotes are just proof that I made someone I don't like mad on the Internet, which is great.
- I mean, lemmy is just reddit with fewer users haha
- I mean, I'm not sure why you expected any different. This is what the internet is now; A bunch of ads, hate, and shit posting.
- You can't have a large, diverse community without all types. If you would like a community that only focuses on specific things, I would look for a more niche site/forum.
- Some aspects of it are just as bad because they are the human aspects and will plague anything made by or for humans. Attention removed, power hunger, confusion, people who see any gathering of people as something they can exploit, things like that will be a part of any community. Though it does seem like there's less of that here (which is why I'm ok with it not being as popular as Reddit became).
  There's other things I'm not seeing nearly as much of here. There isn't the same bot presence. Troll farms don't seem to be here yet either (though it's probably only a matter of time). Admins aren't acting like powerful dictators since most of the users here just left a place because of that and will do it again. These things will all likely get worse with popularity, too.
- Tildes is, I think faring well for what it's worth
  
  Tildes is anti free speech and has a dictator for life as Deimos, it is well know they can ban you without reasons.
- Like the stupid beans memes
- It will be seriously difficult finding a good instance without the shit posting and reddit-like echo chamber. I still think decentralization is the solution against the censorship machinery coming up we just need to support the right instance.

When we first got here, people were complaining about that everything was about reddit all the time, then it slowed down until r/place happened again.
Just let the news happen naturally, Musk shenanigans with 𝕏 is the tech headline right now.
- Twitter is the scape goat here. We want technology content, not general news.
  
  It is technology news, it is not general. The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter is a technology company.

But my Techno Daddy news?... No, yeah. Reddit had the same issue. Enough with musking up tech subs.

For those of you (like me) who are interested in keeping up with Twitter/Elon antics, “enoughmuskspam” also exists in Lemmy.

Y'all know there's a voting system so people see the kind of posts they would want from a tech sub
- Does downvoting actually demote posts here? There's no karma.
- "they would want" or "whatever drives engagement more"?

Man this post is full of a lot of really angry people that take seeing stuff they don't like in their feed way too seriously.

Agreed. Elmo is only in this because he wants that dopamine hit of attention that front-page news gets him. It's why bought Twitter. Getting on the front page, just for a moment is all that matters to him.
Also, it is LONG past time we got over our child-like worship of billionaires. It's embarrassing to watch.

Twitter is a stage for attention and the "news" posted here is more about the ego than the technical aspects of the stage.

I get where you're coming from, but seeing posts like this for so many popular new topics is getting repetitive too. Its definitely tech related. Elon and twitter news will slow down eventually, and people will obsess over something new, guaranteed. Better to just ride it out IMO.
- Reddit was the same way. The King is dead, long live the King!
- Elon is constantly in the news cycle. He seems to be imitating Trump for some reason. This X rebranding feels like a forced attempt to stay relevant. Maybe he is planning to run for governor in Texas or California. Weird.
- Every trend will slow down, but what if the next is also about Twitter/X? Or for Meta, or some corporate move from another company.

Why are there so many Elon bootlickers on Lemmy?
- Why are there so many Elon bootlickers anywhere?
  
  He got rich off the brand that's basically just himself. That gives gullible idiots the hope that their miserable lives will turn around once they finally "made it" like Musk in their minds did.
- There's also this pathological thing of posting even the negative crap about these types of toxic figures, all the time. The attention they receive - positive and negative - is like flies swarming around shit.
  "Enough musk spam"... then they proceed to carpet-bomb the goddamned place with musk spam.

Could you guys at least find other billionaires to obsess over? A bit of variety would be nice.

LMAO it's hard when he does so much stupid shit

one for c/juxtaposition (does that exist yet?)

No, I want to acquire all the wisdom of the successful super genius tech guru playing 9D chess. /s

The reddit sub always seemed to be a lot more about the business side of technology and I just remember a lot of arguing.
It would be nice to have an actual technology sub that discusses actual technology.
How about the mods unsticky the Twitter/Elon megathread?

I totally agree

I agree, OP. We all know Twitter has the newest cutting edge technology on the planet! Every ounce of information must be reported on about the company here.

Agreed

Twitter renaming to X is definitely something high on tech news. Would love to have a run where similar headlines are removed.

Thanks

b-but muh circlejerk
...
If anything, its a "reflection" of the current state of "online communities" -- circlejerk and "follow the hivemind above all else"-fiesta.
Nobody wants to have "fun" in here -- but to be/feel validated by randoms.

Why not ignore the messages about shithead and his shitty stunts?

Watching Elon work is like watching a snake eat a rat. Horrible, but you can't look away.
Maybe we could restrict it to one Elon thread per day?
- One per year to a decade.

Yeah, how dare people talk about current events.

312 comments