His reasoning for wanting to do this is so bad and clearly a racist dog whistle; everyone should be able to like things that they would be ashamed to like publicly with their name attached!
Pays $40 billion to allow people to be shadow toxic. What an amazing innovator in our midsts. We're all just so jealous we wish we could be so genius ...
He has a point though. Just think of Reddit and Lemmy where people mindlessly hive-mind vote some posts. When you see something massively upvoted, you tend to upvote (immediately). Same goes for downvotes. In contrary, if the votes do no show, you only vote when you actually mean it.
Elon Musk trying to be “edgy” and just coming off like the most divorced man on Earth is pretty funny. I’m still not using Vichy Twitter but it is funny watching a grown ass, 52 year-old man try to be an edgelord.
Lemmy technically doesn't hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That's important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn't like the idea of having to be open even if it's a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.
She said she regrets not having publicized her opinions on this subject earlier, so if her likes wouldn't have exposed her, her subsequent retweets certainly would.
The first time she got internet backlash was when the rape crisis center she was funding wanted to be a safe space where women with extreme trauma would be away from the source of their trauma i.e. humans with penises.
Restricting access by sex rather than gender was seen as deeply offensive and she got a lot of hate, death threats and etc which resulted in her getting in arguments that pushed her into becoming ever more outspoken.
Following the publication of this story, X owner Elon Musk reshared a screenshot of it, saying it’s “important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!”
Thin-skinned Nazis don't like being called Nazis for liking other Nazi content.
A few weeks ago, X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, said the upcoming change is meant to protect users’ public image — because “many people feel discouraged” to like “edgy” content.
That's the fucking point, Wang. Nazis should be discouraged from liking other Nazi content. Society shouldn't tolerate bigots, much less embolden them- the way you and your boss want to do.
This seems like an odd medium to make that complaint in; while technically lemmy exposes upvotes to other instances, so it's not really private, the client doesn't, by default, permit upvotes to be seen.
I've always been curious about who is downvoting my stuff, I know on Reddit I'd occasionally get someone butthurt about my existing on the internet and they'd just go downvote all of my recent posts and comments.
You don't eliminate bigoted and hateful ideology by allowing it to fester in the dark. It must be exposed for all to see.
These two assholes have succinctly summed up the problem: assholes advocating for a white Christofascist ethnostate are emboldened by the lack of consequences that anonymity provides. Musk doesn't want freedom of speech, he wants freedom from accountability of speech.
When cancel culture was not on full throttle, maybe likes being public made more sense. If only the global like count is the more widely known metric, hiding who liked what is not too significant of a change. It's not something totally out of the ordinary either, considering most contries' electoral systems guarantee the individual votes are kept secret.
They have some greatest hits too, like repeating that higher education tends to come with a left leaning bias. I don't think they realize why there is a correlation between education and those politics, but it certainly isn't what they think it is.
No, you see it's not like education makes you see past your own prejudices and that makes you more liberal. If you are liberal you get awarded an education by the shadowy cabal that controls the education system with DEI measures! This guy only wants a tRuE mERiToCrACy where disenfranchised, downtrodden bigots get a chance to attend university where they are taught about the superiority of their white Aryan race.
Regressives should be silenced. Anyone who says "We need to return to a time when X" really just means "I don't like that my race/gender/nation/sexual preference/religion doesn't have as much control as it used to".
You have just proved right there why current internet users in general don't have the maturity to have likes publicly visible. The urge to do a witch hunt is just too irresistible.
I think people with ridiculous views should not have an issue with being ridiculed for those views.
You're under no obligation to agree with another person point of view. But, if you're presenting your arguments in good faith, you should be prepared to listen to the person you disagree with in good faith also. If you immediately disregard what others have to say just because you think it's "too ridiculous to consider", or throw the ad hominem starter pack: bigot, nazi, far-right, trumper, etc, then you're just insulating yourself in a bubble in the best case scenario, or showing you don't have the capability to articulate your argument effectively in the worst case scenario.
It really feels like you're the immature bunch, trying to hide who you are because you're too fragile to own up to it if it's being scrutinized.
It's not a matter of trying to hide anything for the sake of it. It's just that some people use the free availability of a user's previous posts/likes as a shortcut for "whataboutisms". You may disagree with other posts I made, but what is being discussed here is the reasonableness of individual "likes" being public or not.
I think the crude scrutiny of a persons past posts to be, in many cases, dishonored. The person being scrutinized may have changed their views since then, specially when the post is years-old.
As much as I have no obligation to agree with another person's views, I also have no obligation to argue about them.
There's clearly views in this world that can be pretty much dismissed outright, if you disagree you're free to go to a flat earther forum to debate them out of it.
The only reason Musk wants to hide likes is because he agrees with a bunch of really shitty and messed up positions, and he wants to not be responsible for it.
If you like a post saying "I believe that the jews did 9/11" I think it's fair for someone to look at it and go "Hey that's obviously fake, really dumb, and kinda hilarious that you're this stupid."
I'm not saying it's a literal witch hunt. Never heard of metaphors and figures of speech?
And just shouting "your opinions suck!" and running away is hardly productive to a healthy discussion. If you have any counter-arguments to the topic at hand (the individual "likes" being hidden on Twitter/X), feel free to present them.
Every time I think wtf is he doing, I remember about this theory he is destroying twitter on purpose, because it was a network with to much influence for example the arab spring.
A few weeks ago, X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, said the upcoming change is meant to protect users’ public image — because “many people feel discouraged” to like “edgy” content.
