this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Go to any tech site, publication, podcast YouTuber, etc. All of them are talking about Twitter. Mainstream tech has agreed that Twitter / Facebook are tech.
Im not saying I agree. I'm not saying even that I care about these topics. I don't. I think Musk is an idiot and actively avoid news about his BS. But clearly a lot of people do care and a lot of people agree that Twitter is tech.
If this community wants to specify a definition of tech that differs from the mainstream, then they need to put it in the rules and accept that we need to control the acceptable conversation because certain members of the community are getting triggered by having to scroll past posts related to Musk or his properties.
This statement indicates that what is technology is decided by popular opinion, not by any inherent meaning in words. Certainly the meaning of words change with time and they have no inherent meaning, so in a very real sense, definitions are decided by popular vote. However, if Twitter is a tech company, then so is every newspaper, magazine, bank, credit card company, any business with a data base for inventory management. It's a useless definition. Let's go with the actual mainstream definition of a tech company, a company that develops, produces, licenses or sells technology or technology services, and Twitter doesn't do any of that. It sells ad space and subscriptions, the business model of a media company.
Friendo....
That's how language works. Language evolves and adapts over time via social pressure. Nobody uses words exactly as they are defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. Words are given meaning by people and inevitably those meanings shift and change as people use them in new and different ways.
Just because you adopted pedantry in order to push out topics you hate hearing about doesn't mean everyone else has to adopt your constructed definitions.
Yes, I've just said that languages evolve. I'm saying that "technology companies" has not yet and will not ever evolve to mean "companies that develop, produce, license or sell technology or technology services, and also Twitter". When Twitter starts getting involved in tech, it will be a tech company.
This argument is kind of saying "/c/technology should contain any topics which are interesting to people subscribed to /c/technology".
We're not a publication, podcast, or youtuber. This is a community aggregating posts about the topic of choice. We're not trying to gather up users by posting things that are interesting to our existing users.