If Your New People Are on X, Maybe Your New People Suck

I’ve long liked Federico Viticci’s MacStories, although I’ve drifted away from it as it’s gotten more focused on AI lately. (Note: this is what writers call “foreshadowing”.) I’ve been listening to the Connected podcast he co-hosts since before it was called Connected. Federico is a man of strong opinions and, from all appearances, strong principles. In 2024, for instance, he and MacStories managing editor John Voorhees strongly called for AI regulation, writing,

The trouble with the companies developing LLMs is that instead of offering a fair trade to publishers and other creators and respecting their wishes about whether their content is crawled, they just took it, and in some cases, brazenly lied to everyone along the way. The breadth of offenders is staggering. This isn’t just a startup problem. In fact, a wide swath of the tech industry, including behemoths like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, have joined OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, to ingest the intellectual property of publishers without their consent, and then used that property to build their own commercial products. None of them paid any regard to the Robots Exclusion Protocol. Instead, some offered a way for publishers to opt out of their crawling activities, but only after they’d already taken the entire corpus of the Internet like a thief offering a shopkeeper a lock after emptying their storefront.

And, admirably, they led the charge off Twitter, leaving in December 2022:

We’re not closing down our Twitter accounts (yet), but as you may have noticed, they haven’t been active lately and won’t be going forward. That’s because we’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with the direction the company is heading. If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you know what I mean.

Yes, Federico! I know exactly what you mean, and good on you for taking a stand. In 2025, they took an even more sharply-worded stand against Meta’s hate-friendly moderation policy revision, choosing to leave all their platforms, writing, “Technology should bring people together not divide and dehumanize them, which is why we’re finished with Threads and Instagram.”

In my own goodbye-Twitter post, I wrote,

New Twitter will be hostile to anyone queer, or non-white, or slightly to the left of Ronald Reagan. You may be a creator who wants to stay on Twitter to reach your audience, but the audience there will inevitably tilt toward the anti-woke, All Lives Matter, gender critical, Just Asking Questions crowd. If they’re your audience, congratulations, I guess.

And report after report after report shows this to be true. While it’s certainly not true that Twitter/X is only right-wing trolls and grifters, it is absolutely true that it is the preferred platform of right-wing trolls and grifters, with an algorithm tuned in such a way that it can demonstrably pull regular users toward the political right, either through rage-baiting or deliberately presenting a distorted view of The Consensus™. This is why it’s poisonous for journalists to make Twitter/X their primary platform; while Bluesky and Mastodon are both left-wing compared to Twitter/X, that’s because of conscious, active choices made by Twitter/X’s management, not choices made by those who run Bluesky (let alone the thousands who run individual Mastodon servers).

But now MacStories has come back to X, with Viticci posting to his personal account on August 17th, “Over the last two years, I’ve fundamentally changed as a creator. I’m still a writer and podcaster, but I guess I’m also a new kind of ‘builder’. Today, I need to find new readers, listeners, and developers, wherever they may be.” Editor John Voorhees also returned, even more explicitly citing AI as the reason: “A lot has happened at MacStories since I last posted here, including that we’ve begun building tools for readers and for ourselves with Codex and Claude Code. It’s a natural extension of our obsession with automation.” New posts on MacStories are being tweeted (Xed?) out again as well.

Niléane, a (former?) MacStories contributor, trans LGBTQ+ activist, and co-host of a podcast published by MacStories, is understandably furious:

Federico has decided to fully return MacStories to X without telling anyone involved with the site whatsoever (apart from John Voorhees). No post on the site, no text message, nothing in Slack, nothing in the newsletter either, so nothing for their Club MacStories members who also had to find out elsewhere.

The Bluesky and Mastodon crowds treat Generative AI with a fair amount of skepticism—not exclusively the “burn it with fire” attitude of many artists and writers, but misgivings about its utility, ethics, and legality are common enough there that users won’t greet a stream of “cool things you can do with AI” with wild enthusiasm. Twitter/X users, conversely, are collectively far more into AI, along with being far more into alt-right influencers, conspiracy theories, and strange grifts. I’m not saying generative AI is wholly of a piece with the latter three, but I am, perhaps, tapping my chin and making a rude hmmm! noise.

MacStories undoubtedly conceives of their return to Twitter/X as an apolitical outreach to AI fans. But the bar that hung the big FASCISTS WELCOME banner out a few years ago hasn’t changed management; the banner is now a permanent sign. So it’s not unreasonable to assume that most AI supporters on X are, at the least, comfortable with soaking in an authoritarian-flavored social media stew. It would, if anything, be unreasonable to assume otherwise. MacStories will indeed get new readers, and those readers will bring new preferences about what they do and don’t want to see: more AI, less woke. A very specific brand of “no politics.”

And I don’t doubt Viticci and Voorhees will tell themselves that being there doesn’t mean they won’t stick to their principles, and that they’re not going to bend to please the anti-woke crowd. The problem is that by choosing to return to X, they already have.