It's because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It's at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him.
Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).
I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic.
Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.
my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is
there’s also this at the top of the thread:
I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.
turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent
musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed
remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads
the incredible power of paul graham’s Lisp mastery
in general, how do you feel like lobste.rs and the orange site compare? the one time I gave lobsters a fair shake it felt like HN but more so, but that might have just been a bad day for the site. looking at your top score list (great work by the way), it looks like lobsters might attract a slightly more technical crowd? but the orange site is largely marketing folks and middle managers masquerading as engineers, so the bar isn’t too high
I did some looking around lobsters.
From a front page post:
top comment:
Same poster goes on regular multiparagraph culture war rants to the point that the other users refer to them by name.
It seems like more of the same BS. Angry nerds waxing poetically about shit that doesn't matter.
HN and Lobste.rs differ only in degree. It's basically the same audience, but the mods on lobste.rs have a different focus.
As soon as I saw that submission I knew someone would recpmmend 4chan, and it wasn't surprisnig it was that user. After a while you learn who the idiots are and either avoid interacting with them or ignore them. Overt racism, misogyny and homophobia usually get forceful pushback.
Is it really a missing stair if the guy is consistently highly upvoted. The 4chan recommendation is top comment as of right now.
How many upvotes are for "4chan is good actually" (pushed back against in the comments) and how much is it for spleen against mainstream social media, which face it, is upvote bait in the fediverse too?
I don't know, but I suspect it's a mix, with a majority a pining for the good old days of Real Forums and Usenet.