Twitter is already a bit of a special case because porn is so accessible (although, you must opt in through the browser and cannot opt in through the app).
Discord works the same way I think, so I'm not sure Twitter is special in that regard (there exist a myriad of porn servers on discord, and the company is constantly getting in hot water because of its popularity among kids/teenagers).
It has a massive user base. And political connections. And lawsuit money. Apple (and Google) will absolutely treat these publishers differently than a random app developer.
You'd think Apple would go after the top-charting apps that are leveraging the scam companies (like Monopoly Go and Disney Solitaire) for actively engaging with scams like this to pump their own numbers up...
(https://old.reddit.com/r/FreeCash/comments/1i4132r/monopoly_... - like this. What the everloving hell? Straight up enticing users to shove themselves into a game, expose themselves to ads galore, and then keep goading them into blowing even more money in the partner app under the guise of 'real cash'.)
Maybe—I don't think anyone is choosing between the two based on access to grok of all things. I think it's simply treated as an extension of twitter, which will almost certainly never be forced out while it remains the premier app for diplomacy and AI porn.
Yeah, Apple doesn't care about losing money or pissing off a large user-base. They assume they have enough money and they'll always have the larger user-base.
We're talking about a news provider that is one of the 3 original broadcast systems licensed in the US (NBC, CBS, & ABC). They've been provided public journalism since the dawn of radio & TV. They've been offering access to all their articles on their news websites without a paywall since at least the 1990s.
It's just shocking when you see media company after media company go completely behind a paywall out of the blue when last week I was reading it with advertisements.
With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother.
Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?
I feel like your comment is evidence that you are insufficiently acquainted with various flavors of cult-like behavior and wingnuttery. There are in fact people who sincerely believe that you don't have to eat [1], who believe it so fervently that they risk and sometimes lose their lives for that belief.
Humans are social creatures. We are biologically inclined to follow charismatic leaders, even off a cliff. In most people, the susceptibility to suggestion is much stronger than the strength of their rational beliefs. Just look at American politics, for example.
All of this is to say that if Andreessen said, "I don't eat food," there would be a small but vocal group who would see that as validation of their beliefs; there would be a think-piece in the Atlantic about the history of breatharianism; Hacker News comments about what does "food" mean, really, etc. Yes, people would take it seriously. Just because he's rich and has therefore bought a loud megaphone.
Are you kidding? People would eat that up if he said that. Soylent would sell like crazy. You'd see protein smoothie shops pop up all over the bay area. For better or worse there is a subset of people who just lap up at whatever comes out of these people's mouth.
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