People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
Yeah, my experience of Twitter has improved dramatically since I deleted my account and disavowed it completely. I don't even visit the domain. If I need to visit a link, I'll change the domain to xcancel.com instead.
The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people.
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
I initially didn't abandon xitter, because I still had a bunch of accounts I followed and BlueBlocker blocked the worst accounts, however it got so bad this year that I stopped visiting at all and eventually installed the xcancel plugin
Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.
I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.
The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.
it has always been this way across every platform.
most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
There's a lot of negative about twitter here, especially related to timeline being shit.
I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things.
There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it really isn't as bad as people demonize it to be.
My issue is that you can't exclude yourself from the algorithm. You post something even tangentially political, it immediately pops up in the feeds of people that have no connections with you at all and have the extreme form of views opposite to yours. The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.
> The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
I disagree with your assessment. My twitter feed pre and post Elon’s takeover changes dramatically.
Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc
After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.
I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.
Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.
That's a fair perspective of before/after. And yea, possibly this was just me curating my feed to a point where it's kind/pleasant. It truly is though - mine is free from politics and dinguses, it's just design and ai people I follow.
My feed suddenly started showcasing far-right lunatics and grifters. It didn't settle down until I blocked them all - which was drastic, but did the job.
If you get hit by a car once, that doesn't mean you want to get hit by a car more times in the future.
What ends up happening with this algorithm is that the "for you" page is dominated by posts asking open-ended questions for engagement. You want to see game clips or screenshots, but every recommended post will ask "What game do you like the most?" or "What character of game X do you like that most?" A question that the author isn't really interested in knowing, asked only to farm engagement from passerby users.
I think that's a really ugly situation all around and a failure of how the system was designed. People should be able to just tell the algorithm what they want to see without secret trackers that promote perverse incentives.
Also, for twitter in particular, buying a subscription is pretty much buying ads on the For You page. Since users can choose to hide the blue checkmark that indicates they are paying for preferential treatment, that means, effectively, that those are promoted posts that aren't marked as "promoted" like normal ads would have to be. I think that's illegal.
Quite the opposite - the fact that the default assumption of "what you (will) engage with" is a radioactive dumpster fire that you need to fastidiously Mute / Block / Not Interested / Less Like This / Not Relevant through to eventually "train" the algorithm to give you a consistent window into "really isn't as bad X" - that's proof that the default/average content and experience is every bit as bad as people make it out to be.
And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).
Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".
I want to echo this point. My X feed is not full of politics either. It tends to just be a mix of stuff I engage with, and I tend to engage with stuff I find interesting or funny.
Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.
I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.
I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.
I'd like to address the YouTube claim-- I find it really quickly leaps from my algorithm into a terrible place, from innocent clicks. One of the more common examples of this in my experience is: I want a video demonstrating the form for a specific lift. I watch it. My feed is immediately 80% weight lifting content, much of which overlaps straight into toxic material I would never engage with. I run into this issue constantly, to the point where I often avoid clicking on things I am genuinely interested because I am worried it is too adjacent to something else that is adjacent to something toxic. When I give in and watch it, I often enjoy it but find afterwards that I was right and my feed has a load of objectionable material on it.
I’m on X only for my business (AI, tech, startups) and stick to only my Following feed. But the second I accidentally click on the “For You” tab it’s a complete, utter, bot primed shit show.
That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.
imho Nikita did a good job and I wish he stayed on.
Twitter is 100% better now than a year ago. For one, I haven't gotten a single bullshit click-farm fake-ass sock-puppet follower in months. Secondly, I see very few low-effort reply guys lately, human or otherwise.
Are you paying? I see an endless stream of AI or bot-like posts in the replies of basically every tweet I see with any traction, but i'm not a paying user so I may have the bad version of the platform.
Same. I just skip verified posts because the ones at the top are LLM replies. Unless I'm missing something, that should be easy to detect. Instead I've got ghost banned for a week+ now, no reason given and no way to appeal. X now is the place if you want to check for yourself the dead internet theory.
That's been my experience too. I left twitter a few years ago, but when I created a new account (only following AI and startups and people MAKING things, and movie and show clip accounts), it's been so awesome to keep track of all the stuff going on.
I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.
If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.
His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.
His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.
He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.
Please don't use personal epithets against people here. Sure, critique people's actions. But the guidelines ask us to be kind and to avoid name-calling. Personal meanness is not the energy we want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
The town square concept has never made sense. The idea that you have a place where everybody goes and scream at each others insults non stop is completely insane in the real world
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
Daytime television was intermediated by tv producers.
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
It's not even about wrong-think. So many people I know just drifted away--or cut contact and nothing equivalent replaced it. It was a fairly important type of social media to me and many of the the people I knew/know but it really isn't anymore.
In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
Assertions that Twitter/X was surely going to shut down after the Elon Musk acquisition were wishful thinking on the part of two groups of people:
1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)
2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.
He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
Isn’t the whole point that they don’t want you to use the website - they want you to install the app. Why would they make the website an enjoyable experience?
It's wild to me how many replies are like this. I like X. HN, on the other hand is miserable, with censorship through down votes of unorthodox thinkers (PG would be completely down voted if he were to post here anonymously).
Turns out that even with the limited self-curation power X gives you it's not too hard to customize an experience you'll mostly enjoy; some people enjoy being miserable though. A large fraction of my "For you" feed is just neat artwork/fan artwork, which is peaceful. HN gets in "moods" with what gets to the top and I end up ignoring it for a while. Maybe one of these days I'll try one of the wrappers around HN that try to let you self-curate more. But despite that, for topics I do feel like engaging with, HN still wins by many miles. The "censorship" here is also very light-handed, whether from the staff or from fellow users; downvotes signal to authors that maybe their point of view is unwelcome and they'll be less inclined to post similarly, but they aren't outright removed even if downvoted/flagged to death. I've always had showdead on. I can also easily find stuff that's many years old, and read discussions from many years back that aren't full of "[deleted]" or other nonsense. (I got in the habit with old twitter to automate saving copies of images I've "liked", just like I save copies of videos on youtube I put in a "likes" playlist, because I hate it when things disappear out from under me.)
I have been disappointed that "Not interested" seems to have very little influence over anything on X, it does add some friction on shaping the experience to be what you make it. I pretty much never used the block (or mute) function pre-X, and now I've used it so much. Not just for the never-ending bots or blue-check click farmers either, sometimes it's just "that was such a stupid comment about Y; I'd prefer to deprioritize showing things related to Y, but at least by blocking I can ensure I won't see further remarks about Y from this person, or further dumb remarks from this person about some future Z". I have a little Tampermonkey script for HN that gives me similar functionality, "blocking" (more precisely muting) by username those I've decided I'd just rather not see comments from again for a variety of reasons. I never needed/wanted it before [insert date] but the HN decline has been real. (It just replaces the comment content with an "[unblock]" clickable, so it's cheap for me to give them an nth-chance to see some particular comment, and re-block if as usual it was also undesirable.) Staying out of certain HN threads entirely is the best self-curation one can do anyway, there are topics that just don't get reasonably discussed here yet keep being brought up.
Now THAT is an improved web experience!
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
Really not what Twitter used to be about.
It is possible he's done a good job at the micro level, but at the macro level the platform is a cesspool.
Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.
I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.
The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.
most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things.
There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it really isn't as bad as people demonize it to be.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.
Isn't the same true of hackernews though?
Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc
After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.
I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.
Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.
If you get hit by a car once, that doesn't mean you want to get hit by a car more times in the future.
What ends up happening with this algorithm is that the "for you" page is dominated by posts asking open-ended questions for engagement. You want to see game clips or screenshots, but every recommended post will ask "What game do you like the most?" or "What character of game X do you like that most?" A question that the author isn't really interested in knowing, asked only to farm engagement from passerby users.
I think that's a really ugly situation all around and a failure of how the system was designed. People should be able to just tell the algorithm what they want to see without secret trackers that promote perverse incentives.
Also, for twitter in particular, buying a subscription is pretty much buying ads on the For You page. Since users can choose to hide the blue checkmark that indicates they are paying for preferential treatment, that means, effectively, that those are promoted posts that aren't marked as "promoted" like normal ads would have to be. I think that's illegal.
And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).
Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".
Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.
I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.
I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.
That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.
Shows how valuable the Play Store is to them
Twitter is 100% better now than a year ago. For one, I haven't gotten a single bullshit click-farm fake-ass sock-puppet follower in months. Secondly, I see very few low-effort reply guys lately, human or otherwise.
Not exactly sure how that changed anything but I see a lot less bot slop now.
The biggest complaint I've heard is about the owner and how he's using X as a megaphone.
If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.
His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.
His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.
He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.
A little cocky.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
That's not great. That's hideous.
Onlyfans was included under "almost every single aspect of the internet".
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
If the town itself is an aids-ridden, nazi infested bunch of child-porn-creating yobs.
They can keep that town and its square. I'd nuke it from orbit, only way to be sure.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214903
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)
2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.
1. 10 points, 15 comments
2. 9 points, 17 comments
3. 44 points, 84 comments
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
(471 points, 512 comments)
Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.
It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.
>There are rumors
Interesting methodology you use to make concrete assertions.
AI, database tech, etc I find I read about it on X much earlier and the comments are a lot less negative.
X is what you make it. It will feed you with more of what you read and interact with.
I have been disappointed that "Not interested" seems to have very little influence over anything on X, it does add some friction on shaping the experience to be what you make it. I pretty much never used the block (or mute) function pre-X, and now I've used it so much. Not just for the never-ending bots or blue-check click farmers either, sometimes it's just "that was such a stupid comment about Y; I'd prefer to deprioritize showing things related to Y, but at least by blocking I can ensure I won't see further remarks about Y from this person, or further dumb remarks from this person about some future Z". I have a little Tampermonkey script for HN that gives me similar functionality, "blocking" (more precisely muting) by username those I've decided I'd just rather not see comments from again for a variety of reasons. I never needed/wanted it before [insert date] but the HN decline has been real. (It just replaces the comment content with an "[unblock]" clickable, so it's cheap for me to give them an nth-chance to see some particular comment, and re-block if as usual it was also undesirable.) Staying out of certain HN threads entirely is the best self-curation one can do anyway, there are topics that just don't get reasonably discussed here yet keep being brought up.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html