Will OremusAnyone who's spent time in smaller online forums has met a mod like Musk. You can tell it's gonna be a disaster from the moment they take over. Using their mod powers to settle personal scores, making up new rules to justify them, apologizing and reversing course, taking polls, offering to step down and then not doing it...
Darius Kazemi@willoremus I'm really hoping he speedruns lowtax
sec@darius @willoremus a pretty dark assessment considering how that ended š„¹ At least Lowtax left behind a rich legacy of internet lore.
john lehet@willoremus No, Iāve been online a long time, bunch of time on The WELL(since 2400 baud dialup in ā91), twitter, photography forums. Never seen anything like the man baby at Twitter
Rick O'Toole@willoremus All true with the exception of apologizing.
DevWouterHmm... n=1 take but I have spend plenty of time in online forums and most mods I have met are reasonable and well balanced people.
But then I also think that arguments should be about learning and not about winning.
Aviva Gary@willoremus about right
MrEric35@willoremus yup š
Rachel Metz@willoremus it's like a weird/sad bullying situation playing out on a global platform. but also... as @johnlehet points out, i, too have *never* seen anything like this in my decades spent online. maybe that's why the destruction of twitter feels so sad and personal.
Alistair Buxton@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
Andrew Lee, millionaire tech entrepreneur and free speech absolutist, took control of Freenode, an IRC network with 90k active users, in May 2021. He completely destroyed it in just six weeks with policies identical to Musk's.
All the existing staff immediately quit to start a new network, so Lee banned anyone talking about that new network.
The only one of Lee's mistakes that Musk hasn't yet made is accidentally deleting the user database.
@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
Like Musk, Lee's free speech policies were at first cautiously welcomed by some users. But also like Musk, even those users quickly turned against him as his rules became increasingly arbitrary and hypocritical.
@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
Some more things Musk and Lee both did:
* Bringing in their own team of sycophants to take over.
* Those teams accidentally breaking login services multiple times.
* Privately begging for help while publicly attacking the same people.
* Banning mention of *any* competing platform.
* Banning well-known users for spurious reasons.
* Unbanning well-known racists and trolls, and giving them elevated mod privileges.
* Driving away sponsors.
@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
They are also very similar in personality:
* Spending 90% of their day trolling people on the platform.
* Daily repeating qanon/gr/anti-vax/woke/cancel culture/other conspiracy theories.
* Claiming to be "neither left nor right" while explicitly supporting the most extreme wing of the GOP.
* Workplace harassment lawsuits from ex-staff of their other companies.
@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
In the end, the only part of Freenode that Lee owned was the domain name and trademark, and today that is all that is left of it. Everyone moved to libera.chat, run by the old staff on the old donated servers, and you can't tell the difference.
Andrew Lee also claims to be the rightful heir to the throne of a unified Korea. At the time I thought he was an Elon Musk wannabee, but now I realise Musk is just a richer version of the same character.
Jeff@willoremus tech never sleeps
ErinWeirdo@willoremus mall cop mods. I hate em.
TimmyOLeary@willoremus so true!
Christine (Bitsie)@willoremus Exactly! And anyone reading this who spent time during the 2010ās on MakeupAlley will know exactly what you mean.
Neil A. Evans@willoremus itās like being online back in the late 90s
Dan@willoremus And the end game is usually most of the users splintering to a new forum.
Jay 
@willoremus Every single person that's ever been on IRC for more than a few days will feel that same familiarity.
Isaac Rabinovitch@willoremus The worst mod I ever met did all that, and also edited peoples posts!
Chiari@willoremus except he bought it. Itās like āyou break it, you buy itā but in reverse.
Wayne the Linux Guy@willoremus So sad about Twitter...
Bombadil@willoremus maybe he should buy Reddit next
Michael@willoremus This is also classic abuser behavior.
Yowie@willoremus yup. I'm of the 1200 baud modem generation, and have seen this sort of implosion too many times - although to be fair, not for at least 10 years.
Regardless of what group / forum / server it was, the outcome was always the same: all the regular people who just wanted to hang out and chat about whatever it was that brought them together found another place to be an internet community, while the dictator and their flunkies became increasingly unhinged in what remained of the original forum.
However this is by far the biggest online hissyfit of the admin I've ever seen.
Norman@willoremus I mae this point last week. He finally went full mod on a psycho power trip that most of us have encountered. Doesn't usually end well
@willoremus sometimes the only solution is to migrate elsewhere. It was really the chefs kiss that he tried to ban THAT yesterday
Brian Grinter@willoremus although I've never seen a mod's mum get in the forum to defend their precious...
@bgrinter true. thatās a first for me as well.
šŗš¦ Sean Prophet āThat's why moderation has to be explicitly rules-based, consistently applied, and it has to be delegated to teams so that individuals don't create fiefdoms.
A great example of this would be, (shocking), the Twitter *trust and safety team* that he disbanded?
Fuck Elon 
@willoremus I see you have spent some time on reddit....
furranium@willoremus Oh indeedy. Resetting the Legend of the Red Dragon whenever some gets close to kicking their ass.
Gruss Gott@willoremus I have a recent example! A bit geeky FWIW:
I *was* a member of an auto forum where one poster was routinely posting a common misconception about how brakes work (bigger brakes stop a car faster than stock) so I posted politely why it's false along with the math & physics of it. I got insta-banned for spam. Mod has a viewpoint and bans anyone who doesn't share it.
Bianca@willoremus Muskās skill set didnāt transfer. No one wants to discuss it but his unmanaged bipolar disorder & Aspergerās are real barriers to grasping & managing a āsocialā media platform which requires an ability to understand & balance the needs of a diverse user base w competing interests & needs. Itās unfortunate his ppl didnāt help him either get out of the purchase or immediately appoint a publicly apolitical pro & a committee of seasoned pros to craft & manage healthy moderation policies.
@GoldenRuleLover interesting points. not gonna speculate on diagnoses. but i suspect āhis peopleā learned long ago not to question or challenge him or else they wouldnāt remain his people for long.
@willoremus FWIW Elon is the source for those diagnoses. I suspect that you are correct about him being surrounded by yes people. His motherās tweets in support of him demonstrate this.
@GoldenRuleLover fair point, he has been clear about his own asperger's diagnosis and afaik has said he "may" be bipolar. i just want to be wary of too directly attributing his actions to his neurodivergence or mental health conditions.
@willoremus Fair point. Sadly, I have a family member with both of those diagnoses and see how much they can impact mood, circular thinking, and impulse control. People with these challenges often have a difficult time accepting that they need regular meds and constant management.