8 ms·

The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political cro

by kentonv 11d ago

The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. This may seem crazy to the hyper-political crowd but most people really do not see themselves as being part of this war where every single decision they make in their lives has to prioritize their side. When choosing a social network, probably the top priority for most people is where the people they want to talk to are. If CEO antics were the thing that mattered, I would certainly choose Bluesky over X. But the reality is the tech community -- at least, the part of it I want to interact with -- is mostly on X. Many of us tried to switch to Bluesky for a bit but ironically got pushed back to X due to Bluesky culture being hostile to tech and especially hostile to AI. I'd post the same non-political tech thing on X and Bluesky and get lots of interesting feedback on X while getting screamed at on Bluesky, so I stopped posting on Bluesky. Would love for this to change but it's a hard problem.

Tepix 11d ago
> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.
- kentonv 11d ago
  It's true that every now and then they do some sort of prompt engineering on Grok that turns it into mechahitler for a few hours, and it's quite weird and disturbing. Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer. Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general. Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back? Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
  - Tepix 10d ago
    > Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer. Exactly. This means he will change the model to fit his world view. Here's a study: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025334119 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
ThePinion 11d ago
When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate. Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
- kentonv 11d ago
  AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH. EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
- KerrAvon 11d ago
  [flagged]
  - spiderfarmer 11d ago
    [flagged]
  - kentonv 11d ago
    If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant. TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence. The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
- spiderfarmer 11d ago
  Elon was proven to manipulate and censor Twitter. So you should prefer neither.
  - 10d ago

by kentonv 11d ago

Tepix 11d ago

> The CEO's antics, no matter how disturbing, simply aren't most people's top concern when making a product choice. These people need to realize that what you see is what shapes your thinking and the social network's algorithm decides what you see and what you don't see. In the case of X, it's grok aka Mechahitler.

kentonv 11d ago
It's true that every now and then they do some sort of prompt engineering on Grok that turns it into mechahitler for a few hours, and it's quite weird and disturbing. Most of the time though, it's actually pretty reasonable. Many times I've seen right-wingers try to ask grok to confirm their beliefs, only to have it shoot them down. Pretty funny honestly. Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer. Wish we could find out what's actually going on there. Are they trying to bias Grok, but finding it's actually very hard to introduce subtle bias (as opposed to extreme, "mechahitler" bias)? That would be a fascinating and very positive result for LLMs in general. Or is it that, like, the Grok team is resisting Elon's attempts to introduce bias, and when they can't resist any more, they intentionally overdo it, which gives them an excuse to roll it back? Or is Elon's whole public persona a cynical performance intended to win power and political favors from Republican leadership while in private he actually isn't right-leaning at all and actually wants Grok to be a balanced truth machine for the good of humanity? lol, probably not, but it would explain a few things.
- Tepix 10d ago
  > Elon will often claim it's a bug in Grok when he doesn't like the answer. Exactly. This means he will change the model to fit his world view. Here's a study: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025334119 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025334119

ThePinion 11d ago

When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate. Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.

kentonv 11d ago
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH. EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
KerrAvon 11d ago
[flagged]
- spiderfarmer 11d ago
  [flagged]
- kentonv 11d ago
  If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant. TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence. The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
spiderfarmer 11d ago
Elon was proven to manipulate and censor Twitter. So you should prefer neither.
- 10d ago