...I had a hard time imaging people worse than Gates, Balmer, and Bush in control of information.

A down vote and no reply? The Twitter bots are invading El Reg! Stop allowing anonymous down votes! If some one can't be bothered to type out why they disagree then it doesn't do you, our them, or me any good to down vote.

@ El Reg: I am serious about this. I don't give rat's ass about your marketing metrics. You have readers that are world leaders in IT. If you won't show them a better way then who will?

I downvoted your second post for complaining about downvotes.

I am not complaining a down votes in general, I am arguing against down voters that do not leave a reply. The whole point of having a public forum is to encourage discussion. The "drive by" down votes kill off discussion because the arrow is too easy to click. If you have to say something before you can click the arrow then it will matter much, much more.

And no, I won't down vote you for making me state the obvious, because maybe you just woke up and the only thing obvious to you is that you need to get ready for work.

Upvoted.

My response to blatant trolls is to down vote and move on without wasting time my time engaging or wasting other people's time by rehashing the same argument. I looked at the down votes on your original post and formed an opinion of where they came from similar to yours.

There was a time when JB was the highest honour in the common wealth (Jailed by the British). Please take the down votes from people not explaining why as a similar mark of respect for your irrefutable arguments.

One of the things about these forums I find is when I'm just about to make a profound, well formed and intelligent contribution [obviously], is that someone else has already said it! This is where the voting buttons are really useful.

I guess the trick here is that if you disagree with something but either lack the time or can’t come up with a new counterpoint of your own you upvote the rebuttals rather than downvoting the original post.

Personally I generally do both just to be on the safe side though… :-)

for the sake of meaningless amusement: though laudable, you greatly overestimate the purpose of a public forum. Wink or no wink, this is the question.

Should we start replying when we upvote too?

> Should we start replying when we upvote too?

No. Upvote means that you agree and/or like the statement, which doesn't really need any explanation, does it.

Downvoting on the other hand requires specifying what it is you found offending: Was it the statement? Which part of it, and why exactly do you think it's wrong? These are things the OP might like to know.

I know I do, if I say something stupid I prefer to be explained what it was, rather than just seeing some inarticulate sign that somebody somewhere disagreed.

Yes

What if someone else has already submitted a post that covers my opinion. Should I restate the same?

What about drive by upvotes?

Have one on me -->

Downvoted for whinging about downvotes.

This reply so you can't moan about no reply for the downvote.

Anonymously posted for shits and giggles! ;)

That is a perfectly acceptable response as it is documented as your reason. (Downvote not mine btw!).

The problem with downvotes where there is no attempt to engage with the seemingly offending post is that no reason is given for the downvote. The original poster is thus oblivious of the nature of the disagreement, and that the "other side" of whatever point is being made is not properly represented in the comments.

methinks a sudden flow of downvotes should (?) flag to the poster there's something wrong with their original proposal and consider all (and then some) the usual suspects.

I thinks it was more for gits and shiggles.

@Chuckufarley

I was joking when I said there were downvote bots here on Reg.com... I get one downvote on a comment lots of times and I can't figure out why... and I made a joke because it was a story about bots...

Click user name, go down list of posts clicking downvote on each one.

You're welcome!

"Click user name, go down list of posts clicking downvote on each one.

You're welcome!"

Noice!

I'm a rich white dude, so fuck you you dumb women and non-whites. Oh I won't let Infowars back becuase I lost a kid, so yeah, y'know, we're like bro's.

Makes me wonder what Machiavelli would have thought of the voice of His Muskiness…

"The Little Prince needs guidance to become a King". "I have just the book for that."

aka 'have an amazon discount voucher'. I'm sure Mr Bezos would be delighted to help.

Machiavelli would probably have been quite amused by the show. He would also have watched closely what happens and learned. Machiavelli’s ideas about power and control are sophisticated ones, and still relevant in today’s world.

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

Tormenting victims by boosting abusers back on the platform and allowing existing convicted abusers exploit the platform even after repeat violations and perma-bans is a very Jerry Springer style of management.

Wonder who taught Elongated Muskrat these abuse techniques...

Nononono I'm sorry come back allisforgiven

Punch you in the mouth calls you an old fart

Falsely accuses others of the crime they themselves are actively committing

I believe the above is how sociopaths and psychopaths usually behave. No blame lies with them and always others.

Just walk away. And for news try https://www.world-newspapers.com/, to see what the rest of the world thinks, corporate owned American news is useless

It's an interesting site, but I don't have time to read all of them. How do I know which ones are the good ones?

It would be nice if there was a balanced UK centric news site, but they seem to be getting more polarised instead.

That's the problem with clicks and clickbait. The more shocking your news, the more clicks you are gonna get. And that's why you get The Guardian harping on about "Global Heating emergency" and the Daily Mail harping on about "Immigrant emergency". Where is the middle ground?

Riiiiight

What kind of poll? In this case "Poll" is a euphemism.

It's a 101% unbiased poll.

It's like asking members of the labour party if there should be a general election. Or asking board members / MPs asking themselves if they should have a huge payrise.

Also roughly a 1% turnout.

Making the usual assumptions about bot elimination and based on published user figures.

A general amnesty for everyone, no matter how terrible of stuff they were posting, yeah that'll go over well with Fortune 500 companies he needs to lure back. The only exceptions are for something that's "illegal" (and he can define that however he wants! Is "Hang Mike Pence" illegal or just free speech? Or is it legal until you are arrested and convicted for saying it, i.e. that the courts have to speak before he is willing to consider something illegal?

As for the out for "spam" that's pretty nice because he can claim "spam" for anything he doesn't like. Someone tweets something about a Tesla crashing, that's spam. Someone tweets something totally made up about a house member's spouse to distract from the political views of his attacker, that's free speech!

Stick a fork in it, without the ad revenue from big companies and with a lot of people leaving once the toxic stew from this move starts to really boil over Twitter is dead. The pillow guy's ads aren't going to make up the difference.

I wonder how much the tarnishing of his reputation will affect Tesla's sales in the future. If he gets half or even 2/3 of the country angry with him, that can't be good for Tesla's ability to sell cars in the future especially as there will be more and more competition in that market.

Tesla and Starlink sales involve a waiting list. People are already cancelling orders.

Musk has started a "don't pay suppliers" push. He wants to re-negotiate contracts while brandishing a stick marked "my other companies will not buy from you". This hits from multiple directions. Pissing off a large number of little guys is a very short term win but they can hit back by not buying products from any Musk companies and only supplying on a "payment in advance" basis. The conversation between Twitter and Amazon Web Services would be entertaining if it ever becomes public. I have no idea what will happen with Oracle as Larry invested $1B in Musk's Twitter purchase.

Musk's credit rating was on fire before this new initiative and this is just adding a Starship load of propellants on top. Tesla investors are a diverse bunch. I am sure the sane ones are thinking of ways to separate Tesla's image from Elon. I have noticed changes among formerly ardent supporters too. Johnna Crider is a major contributor to Teslarati. She used to end her articles with:

Disclosure: Johnna is a $TSLA shareholder and believes in Tesla’s mission.

That has gone and now we get: "Teslarati is now on TikTok."

This is a very interesting experiment, of the kind that should be observed from a safety distance. I'm glad I'm in a position where, if Twitter collapses, I won't be meaningfully impacted.

This is what it looks like.

I that that was a music app. Oh wait, that's Audacity.

Twitter isn't a government.

It's not but it can be regarded as a preview of a Muskian Martian government. If only he and his fanbois were already gone to the red hellhole...

So does this mean he will actually be allowing the piece of human detritus Alex Jones back on?

No, because he had a child die as well.

Yes, he did actually state that as a valud reason.

The man is showing his true colours (no stupid US Spellings here).

He wants Trump to return to Twitter. Trump can't because of a signed contract that promises him $200M when the company does its IPO. Truth Social may file for Chapter 7 well before that. Then Trumpo can return to the fold but the GQP is getting behind DeSantis for 2024.

Personally, I hope Twitter dies and Musk flies off to Mars never and comes back.

Downvote me all you like cultists. Elon is not the new messiah. The sooner you accept that the better.

IQ45's agreement with Truth means nothing to him and he would break it without hesitation if he felt like it. There are two reasons he is currently staying away: he does not want to be associated with Twitter's imminent failure and Musk endorsed DeSantis.

"He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy..."

"Elon is not the new messiah."

We know that but he pisses off all the right people nevertheless.

Don't tease me! Please, please happen!

1 - advertisers will not walk but run from this dumpster fire

2 - they're now in violation of US rules imposes earlier which will have consequences in the US

3 - the EU has hate speech rules which will apply

4 - my bet is on Apple being the first to ban the app from their app stores, with Google coming in a close second.

5 - freedom of speech? While banning every satirist and people making fun of you? Pull the other one. But we knew that from the start.

In any case, it is now clear that whatever prompted Must to eventually buy Twitter, it was not for a return on investment.

Personal guess: Twitter creates person echo chambers for its users. Musk started to believe his echo chamber was representative of the whole world. In the real world Musk fired anyone who disagreed with him so he got surrounded by a similar echo chamber of yes-men. He actually believed that bringing back the banished would result in resounding support.

When that support walked away, withdrew their advertising budget, posted satirical comments to get themselves banned or took the 3 month's redundancy money he and his yes-men needed a targets for a blamethrower. Hence the QAnon level conspiracy theories.

Personal guess: Musk never wanted twitter and was only trying to troll. When he was forced to either buy the company or give twitter a significant influx of cash in the form of a penalty, he opted to destroy the company even if it was going to cost him to do it. He's throwing his toys out of the pram.

> He's throwing his toys out of the pram.

That's what I think too. He might not be too bright, but he can't be that level of stupid either! Day after day he's progressively checking all the boxes of what one shouldn't do, not missing a single one. That can't be accidental, he clearly wants to scuttle Twitter, and do it fast.

Without maintenance and ad revenue Twitter is just an empty shell which only still stands because of inertia.