I am puzzled, not at EFF - this decision seems congruent with their ideals - no, I'm puzzled at the amount of comments on here that care so deeply about them staying on X, so much to garner 1000+ comments! So many people here seem to be taking this move as an offense at themselves. Why do people care so much about a private social media site?
Maybe most people here are social platform agnostic and thus EFF's limply constructed reasoning does not make make much sense for a brand trying to maximise their audience. Unless EFF are not platform agnostic and hold some view of the kinds of social platforms they are on. Then this EFF action makes sense.
It's also puzzling that a lot of the comments are repeating the exact same talking points.
- "what is the marginal cost of posting on X, it costs 0$!", which is obviously false. From a labor cost pov, but also because twitter charges for engagement.
I think it has been proven again and again that these "engagement numbers" are a mix of bots, social media company itself trying to inflate the numbers, and real engagement. Unless there is an impartial third party, these numbers are there to attract advertisers. In this situation, I would trust the source themselves, i.e. account holders.
When they supported the legislation called "Net Neutrality" which attempted to supplant the concept of actual net neutrality with some quasi government control of the internet. It would've enabled massive censorship on the internet, something that we've seen is a very very bad thing.
I can attest to this. I gave away my Sony WH-1000MX and my €80 Soundcore earbuds stopped charging. Headphone emergency! I got myself €30 AKG USB-c IEMs off a local shop. The sound quality is far, far superior to even the €350 wireless Sony headphones. I'm not even an audiophile, it's just noticably better. I had forgotten all the little details from the music I regularly listned to.
With your popular wireless headphones, you're really paying for the computer with ANC (and branding, packaging, depending on which version of the series the latest model is on).
The wired IEMs don't have an ANC but I realised I don't need it as often as I thought. I'm certainly going to look for Wired over-the-ear ANC cans next, but honestly I'm not sure if I need them.
This gave me a physical flinch. Perhaps this is unfounded, but all this makes me think of is this becoming the norm, millions of people doing this, and us cooking our planet out much faster than predicted.
