Since we're doing PSAs, isn't it also now just a completely broken platform on mobile for everyone who isn't logged in?
> Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another shot.
This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error, does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb oversight in the funnel
I set up a URL redirect rule in Edge/Brave/Chrome with the extension URL Auto Redirector (previously used Redirector but it was removed, there are other alternatives available for Firefox I'm sure). I also found a similar front end for Instagram but just added a rule yesterday so haven't tested it extensively yet.
I avoid most Twitter/X content after I deleted my account but it's helpful when it gets linked in HN.
For twitter at least, that would have to be done manually. It still shows a timeline for grey checkmark (government) accounts, and a "best of" type page for all other accounts.
Most sites serve a special version of the page to visitors with "googlebot" in their UA string and/or coming from an IP range google controls with more SEO'd contents too.
That would be equivalent to demonetizing the entire web. Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality. As the old adage goes, "when you're getting something for free, you're the product being sold." Only sites making money by, shall we say, "indirect" means would be able to survive. A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.
I think I should at least be able to see even a subset of the content that caused the item to be returned in the search result, though. If I try to navigate away or see more content, sure, make me log in. But, if I search something, click on a Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin result, I should at least be able to see something.
The search --> visit --> immediate redirect to login results should be de-ranked.
“Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality” this doesn’t follow unless we assume the most extreme implementation, the openness of the content is just one factor of many that should count in the contents favor. Further it assumes the only non-shady way to monetize content is put it behind a login which is not true.
A site can be a billboard for a product or service, or provide a social hub, without participating in the surveillance adtech industry. There are plenty of hobby forums, like those for craft brewing, which get supported by brewery suppliers, for example. There are luthier communities which get supported by toolmakers and professionals, and so on. The implicit community networking, reviews by community members, and other interactions reward quality and honesty, and penalize the shady shit.
It's just not scalable into the exploitative cash cows that VCs drool over.
> Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality.
Quality has never been synonymous with monetization for as long as I can remember. The primary driver of low quality or harmful content is greed. Guess what fuels the most greed in modern society?
> A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.
Are you suggesting that including Twitter in search results would mitigate propaganda?
A search engine which prioritizes free content, reviewed intelligently, is curation, and not Goodharted gotcha games. If you can crawl the web and index sites with human level content curation, with a reasonably performant scaffolding, you can prevent SEO style exploitation, and use natural language rules like "does this content contain text attempting to game the ranking of a site or violate policy XYZ?"
Most AIs use bing and google, so the best you can get is a curated list from the already censored and politically filtered results from those sources, funneling commercial traffic toward the highest paying adtech customers - it's just refined, ultra-pure SEO results, unless they use their own index and crawler.
I'd almost rather have a naive raw index that can be interacted with, but custom indices, like xAI and Kagi, are definitely superior to Google and Bing. Google's a dumpster fire and Bing's a tawdry knockoff, and they're both interested in gaming the surveillance data and extracting as much money as possible from their adtech customers.
Paying for a service incentivizes the quality of that service. If that service is honest curation of and effective web search with custom indices and crawlers, then the free and paid distinction don't matter - the highest quality based on the curation criteria is what gets a site surfaced. I want my search engine to return McMaster Carr over Temu or Amazon, or a local flower shop over some corporate slop. Google doesn't get paid by meeting my expectations, it gets paid by exploiting my attention and extracting fractions of profit from commercial interactions, and makes more money by pushing me into business with companies that I'd otherwise want nothing to do with.
Demonetizing the entire web - dismantling the surveillance adtech regime - sounds like an absolute utopic victory to me.
Because people can get a login. If the best quality result is behind a login and a paywall, I still want it to be the first result. Only quality should decide ranking.
Openness and accessibility should absolutely be factors in ranking, otherwise where does it end? I dk what twitter requires these days, maybe an email, password and a couple more fields, what if a site starts doing id verification? What if accounts require a subscription? What if all the best content on the first page of your search results is behind a paywall with 3 easy payments of $299
It ends with you paying for information. If I need some information and it is only available behind a paywall, then I'll pay for it or I didn't need it anyway.
Google is doing the correct thing in not discriminating against content which is paid or behind login walls. Some of the most important content are on social media, and most of them only serve logged in users.
If you want to decide yourself how search results are presented to you, you should try Kagi for a search engine.
Unless you mean as a tie-breaker in the niche case of equally-relevant results, then you're making the claim that it's better to see less relevant (or nonrelevant) results just because they have some other quality beyond relevance.
remember when part of the commentary was "ha! twitter fired one bajllion people and it's still operating fine". I keep seeing errors, much more than in the flying whale era, just now they appear to be in the frontend.
This is not true, this change is a recent phenomenon, I believe it came into effect sometime around 2021-2023 (maybe earlier even). I believe it changed when OpenAI showed the value of data.
Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to create an account, or log in.
No, it was a test by some misguided PM who was looking at her signups metric and not much else. It rolled out, everyone hated it, it got rolled back after some senior people complained. When Elon took over they turned the feature back on and then evidently rewrote it to be even more annoying and we have what is in place today. Source: my comments against it are probably in Slack somewhere if Elon is still paying for that
That’s roughly when I stopped opening Twitter links, I still sometimes see posts from that platform, but mostly just as screenshots and with the discussions elsewhere. I don’t care for their dark patterns.
People already knew the value of data long before LLMs were popularised and web scraping has been a thing since the very beginnings of the web.
Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.
Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the same dark patterns you described too.
> You're getting downvoted for stating falsehoods.
I'm getting downvoted because people are either to young to remember the web in the 00s, or just misremembering what the web was like.
> The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon.
I gave examples of big platforms that weren't accessible without a login. And modern platforms were also heading this way long before LLMs existed.
Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem. LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before. And before then, it was just people leeching off other people's work. This is a tale as old as the web. And I remember it well, having been both a web developer and user of the web since 1994.
Lets also not forget all the attempts that Microsoft took to try and control the internet and how AOL had their own walled gardens too. Yahoo had a plethora of cool features, most of which weren't available without a Yahoo account. And so on and so forth.
Walled gardens are not a recent phenomenon.
> In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in.
You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)
I know people want to blame AI for everything that goes wrong these days be that simply isn't the reason that platforms lock down. They do it because thats how you make money. You either:
1. lock down and charge people for access
or
2. lock down and sell your user data
(or, depressingly too often, both)
Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.
What AI has changed is the increase in invasive bot detection on sites that don't monetise anonymous access.
> Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem.
Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose.
> LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before.
LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data. When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.
> You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)
It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature. Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.
> Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.
Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data. This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.
> Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose.
Exactly. LLMs aren't the cause of that change.
> LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data.
Clearly I know that. My point wasn't that LLMs are literally scraping the sites but instead making the differentiation between scraping that happened before LLMs and scraping that happened after.
> When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.
Actually, that's not always true. Search engines have included snippets from sites for years and that's also been a well-discussed point of contention.
Then there's also Google's attempt to switch people to AMP to further lock people into Google's walled garden. I accept this isn't quite the same thing but it's still an example of how search engines fight to prevent people from leaving their ecosystem.
Some sites, like MSN, literally host news articles from others sites on their own site too. I'm sure Microsoft has an agreement to do this, but it's yet another example of how companies try to lock visitors into their own site.
I accept the AMP and MSN examples are tangential, but they do still illustrate the same point I'm making about how it's not a new thing for platforms to use dark patterns to keep people from navigating away from their platform. This isn't something new that's happened in the last couple of years.
> It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature
Would you rather I just said you were citing falsehoods like you accused me of?
Also I'm not talking about a different feature. I'm talking about the exact same stuff I was talking about from my original comment in this thread.
> Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.
So you agree that platforms have locked content down and this isn't a recent phenomenon then ;)
Making the distinction between profile data and public comments is a little strained when it's clear that Facebook has invested heavily into their walled garden and the vast majority of content on Facebook has always been hidden behind that walled garden.
> Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data.
Smaller sites make money from ads. But we were talking about big platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sites that make money from ads are just making small change compared to platforms.
> This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.
This I do agree with. But that wasn't the statement that was originally made. Those sites will remain open or shutdown entirely. They're not going to go private ala Twitter and Instagram. Their business model is entirely different -- often intentionally not run as a business in the first place. Sometimes just passion projects with no ads and/or run at a loss.
The part I was disagreeing with was that the dark patterns seen in Instagram et al are a result of the rise of LLMs. That simply isn't true.
Also Facebook feeds weren’t even a feature back before Twitter was around. Zuckerberg added it to compete with Twitter. So you couldn’t even access “public feeds” in the mid-00s because no such thing existed.
Following an Insta link gives me a dismissible login modal, but still shows the linked page when dismissed. Following any link becomes login only unless you right click to open link in new. Now it does the same previous behavior. I don’t use Insta, only when every now and then someone sends me a link with what looks like might be some other interesting post, but the game becomes boring and and I just close the tab
Sorry, are you actually five years old? Until just a few years ago Twitter was entirely open. You could view any and all public tweets, replies, threads. All exactly like you were logged in. Their APIs were open and you could literally plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users on the actual planet in real time into your own application.
Actually, you definitely could not plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users in real time into your own application (without huge cost). You only would ever see a subset of tweets via twitters API's and search results, if you wanted the full thing you had to pay for 'the firehose' which was very expensive.
This openness is part of the reason governments (local, state, federal, sovereign) started using it for official comms. Seems rather shortsighted in retrospect, but it was a useful tool for a short period of time.
No, I'm with GP: Most of the time I'd just get errors and retries that don't work, even years before Elon. I also never had an account there and assumed it had something to do with that.
The APIs definitly used to be open enough that you could hit a "Generate token", hit one endpoint with cURL and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on, no reviews or validation at all, all you needed was an account + token.
I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another).
At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too.
Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
And if you click on an account you just get top posts of all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's impossible to even find the context while being logged off.
> Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover.
(And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether)
Both are correct, at least according to my memory: you used to be able to read tweets without an account, but that stopped, and it stopped before Musk took over.
There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time.
Obviously wrong. The typical user-hostile thing isn't this dumb, you'd see a teaser that's probably vaguely sexual and get some "sign up for the full experience" prodding. Literally any 2-person startup that's a week old would do better than this at being thirsty and awful
Twitter never worked on my on desktop without account since Elon took over. It came down to security settings not allowing 3rd party cookies. If you allow it, it loads up.
It's been broken for anyone not logged in since Elon turned a bunch of servers off. It costs too much to make Twitter freely available. If users who weren't logged in could see the site it would crash constantly.
Nobody wants a damn web view. If I'm clicking off to a link, I may want to click to another app and back in and still be where it was... If it's in a webview that's gone as soon as I click out. Yes, you can open in Chrome or whatever, open in a browser, but that's a pain in the ass to do an the time. I hate web views, in all forms.
OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance).
FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
That's right. Several times they sneakily reverted my preference, and I reset it. The most recent time I went to do that again and learned it's no longer possible.
> This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users.
My wife just didn't know what a web view was (she still doesn't), but she prefers using the browser after I showed her how to "escape" Facebook's web view and open pages in Safari where the content blocker and ad blocker extensions could do their work. You probably have a point about preloading pages, but until content and ad blockers start working in all web views, then I agree with the person you're replying to: nobody wants a damn web view.
FWIW apps can use a SafariWebView IIRC to basically pass off a link to a separate Safari instance that can use autofill, content blockers, Javascript JIT, etc. but which the app doesn't have access to.
Meanwhile a WebView will show whatever HTML you throw at it, but it won't do any of that other fun stuff because the app that created it can access and manipulate the content (e.g. stealing your passwords) and the OS doesn't know if content filtering is relevant in that webview (since it's just the "show some HTML in a browser-type view" control and maybe it's important to see everything as-is). Being able to access the WebView also means the app can watch where you browse, what URLs, etc. so it can see what you're looking at even once you leave the page it opened to.
So yeah, apps can have a user-friendly experience; Telegram for the longest time used a SafariWebView so that everything was nice and neat. Then they decided to change their UI to a regular WebView and suddenly everything was full of trash again and I had to set it to "open in Safari" instead.
Well, Twitter/X gets this wrong too. Pretty often jumps away from what you're viewing, especially on the nav-in to a thread or nav-out from a thread actions.
Something I see relatives do sometimes is they get a link to a facebook event over meta's messenger, and then they click the link and it opens in messenger's web view, which inexplicably isn't signed into facebook, so they can't view the event, and they don't understand why, as they are signed into facebook in their web browser.
They're also often very confused why they can't find links they've opened in web views in their browser's tabs or history.
In-app webviews are a usability disaster for normal users, I need to help a relative out of one at least once every few weeks.
The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone linked...
> The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
I think you misunderstood. The problem wasn't/isn't that sites were mobile sized on mobile devices. The problem was/is sites that optimize for mobile, and look terrible or are hard to use on a desktop or laptop screen.
That's just asinine. Just because any user would like fast navigation doesn't mean privacy only matters if you know what a violation it is to ping every server in sight on user's device, with absolutely no way to prevent it.
I dont know if this is in the same vein, but I want to complain about how websites handle pdfs.
Slack, Teams, confluence, jira, etc all open a pdf in a in-browser preview thing. Then if you try scrolling, it makes the PAGE contents bigger, but does NOT zoom into the pdf.
Who thought of this? Who thought it was a good idea?
Seriously. I have a featureful PDF viewer I am intimately familiar with. I want it to be the default for all PDFs, ever. This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.
Not sure how bad it is these days, but Adobe Reader used to open pretty slowly (and if you had Adobe Acrobat open your PDFs by default, it was even slower), so an in-browser PDF viewer was appreciated for that purpose.
Also, it can be useful to keep the PDF in the context of the app you opened it in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a window manager that surfaces the fact that, for example, one macOS Preview window was opened from the browser, another from Slack, another from Finder, etc. Compare to iOS, where opening a PDF viewer from an app will result in a button at the top-left corner to go back to the app you opened it from.
> This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.
The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.
I agree website viewers are pointless. But most of the time I actually like the browser viewer better, if it opens links directly, than offline viewers. Because I regard PDFs as websites (similar to jpeg files), and I normally don't want to accumulate them in my download folder.
I agree though that the browser viewers are often too bare-bones.
>The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.
Which tend to be, imo, even worse! I think I'd rather have a toner container explode on me than try to suffer through the experience of using Aconex's PDF utility ever again.
This sounds more like however your OS handles opening the PDF mimetype(xdg-open,open,Invoke-Item) I'm assuming you're on windows. I think often times browsers will just be set to the default for previewing a PDF unless set otherwise. This is all just conjecture though as I don't use any of the tools you listed above and I'm not absolutely certain of how Windows/MacOS handles PDFs by default.
Twitter's handling of opening links in its own webview is a bit different, unless Slack, Teams, Confluence, Jira all open these browser instances within some sort of webview wrapper as well(I wouldn't think so). So its a little bit different
No, what they are talking about is that you click on a link to see a PDF in these web apps, and instead of serving up the PDF document itself, they serve up a page in their web app that embeds a PDF viewer.
I assume they are trying to be "helpful" but 99% of the time the user's browser can render the PDF more conveniently than the app's embedded viewer (not breaking scrolling and zooming etc.)
Similarly... I _really_ dislike clicking a link in Safari on iOS and it opening an App instead of going to the web page. I have the YouTube app installed and use it on occasion, but its really jarring when I click an organic search result in Duck and get launched into an app that may not have the same privacy settings my browser is setup with.
Ironically, I have the opposite complaint with YouTube, particularly with these new Twitter web views. It takes 3 “navigations” now to get to the iOS YouTube app: one to open the Twitter web view, one to open that URL in Safari, then one to open at YouTube video in the native app.
The "open in YouTube" button just does nothing in the (iOS) webview, for whatever reason. So, in order to get a working open-in-app button, you have to open the webpage in your browser. Not sure if intentional or a bug.
I end up just using YouTube through the browser and only installing the app when I need to download videos, e.g. for a plane trip, and then uninstalling it after I land.
I clicked a link in IG once and and it opened via a webveiw. it was one of those "give us your email for a discount" popups so I put in "mark@aol.com" and at a later date, IG asked if I wanted to associate that email with my account (or something along those lines). I tend to take the extra step to "open in native browser" whenever webveiws popup
In the settings you can configure to open in the configured external browser. I recently switched phones, so had to adjust several apps for this. It's a pain and would be nice if it was a global setting to always open links in the browser.
I’m just happy they got rid of the system web view and replaced it with the one which they can inject their own JavaScript into. Bonus points that it covers the thing I want to read and I can’t turn it off. Truly, a masterpiece of engineering from the guy whose entire schtick was coming up with was to boost engagement from kids.
I stopped using Twitter somewhere around the time of Musk takeover. Only used it for event coverage live during events for which I found it genuinely useful at some point and of course doomscrolling. Can't say I miss it. Its like nothing changed in my life. I also managed to miss the LGBT exodus after Musk policy changes and learned about it later at a random FOSDEM talk. Global "social" feeds do everything in their power to steal attention and having it all back is great for sanity.
Meta note: it's worth listening to this historical 'space' in full (well, the first ~1h while Elon's on). The meta-pattern becomes obvious: people (esp nay-sayers) are outraged about ~20 different issues, X since addressed most of them, but the outrage-mob moved on to new issues, X will address them, and so on.
The point: the ragey mob is never satified, X moves very quickly (partly due to it's willingness to try things, and occasionally fail in the short term) but this strategy is long-term optimal.
Depending on the metric (e.g. MAU, DAU, web impressions etc) X is generally down about 3-20% since Elon's takeover. Seems fair to say X is a 'break even' investment at best.
It will be extremely interesting to re-visit this thread in 10 years. X is currently a gateway for promoting Grok (with 11-figure DAU potential), and X is acquiring financial licences in US states, with a view to becoming an 'everything app' (something which the East seems to have - in the forms of wechat, Grab - but the West weirdly doesn't). If X can be the West's first 'everything app'.. trillion+ dollar valuation isn't out of the question.
They're also doing something very scammy with ads - if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it, whereas it's much less sensitive on ordinary posts and behaves like any other app. This is clearly to increase click-through artificially.
Ads and “scammy” tactics were always like bread and butter. The whole point of industry is to just increase the numbers using whatever means possible except for what the industry deems unquestionably unacceptable, after all. So, naturally, there’s this incentive of making the paid-for action as low effort as tolerable (preferably under the guise of “improvement” to prolong the status quo) and make money while that window of opportunity is still open. Sad but true.
As long as pay-per-click exists it’ll always be like that. Minimally necessary action will be probed, negative feedback (“won’t buy this on principle/will bug others to raise awareness on ethical concerns”) eventually making the industry raise the bar higher.
Beats outright malware (auto-installing IE toolbars, yay!) and popup/popunders on a click anywhere eras of the past, but despite any possible illusions, the bar isn’t particularly high still (modern web is still nauseously popup-ridden), when viewed through the modern first-world optics.
Not that I like anything about this - just an observation.
> if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it,
They did it for Android, too. Just the other day, I tried to view replies for an ad, and thought I'd accidentally clicked the ad multiple times before realizing that the replies indicator and even the timestamp (which is the normal "just go to the tweet" valve) were behaving the same as an ad click.
Edit: Re-reading your comment, not sure if that was exactly what you meant, or if you just meant that it'll e.g. open the ad if you try to scroll on it.
On a related topic, I've been following with some amusement the outrage on Reddit/r/Grok because Grok will no longer make porn. Apparently Grok was trained on all the NSFW material on X and Twitter before it intentionally so Grok could have a "spicy" mode. And spicy it was. Some of the stuff it made was really good and people loved it. But (allegedly) Musk changed his mind to go after enterprise and government accounts so spicy mode was killed and now there a lot of angry users complaining on Reddit.
My interest is this: It appears that it's not possible to over-ride the training effectively since NSFW material bleeds into normal image requests. Musk had this problem before trying to over-ride Grok's training, so at one point said he would have to retrain Grok. It's interesting to me that LLMs can't be steered effectively, which makes me wonder if they can ever really be aligned ("safe")
Why do so many supposedly smart humans think that we can make an artificial mind that is capable of AGI (or even something close to it), but from a completely detached evolutionary history and biological needs, and somehow force it to "align" to our human/biological/societal priorities?
Have none of these people ever had or been a teenager? At least teens have some overlapping biological requirements with non-teens that will force some amount of alignment.
I think the more general issue with all AI and "safe" is that AI 'learned' what it knows from human content ... and we object to the content we as humans created.
The training data was considered good by Musk to start with, so he could have spicy mode, but he changed his mind and now Grok is considered poisoned with porn. My question is, can that be fixed or does he have to start over again?
There was research on LLMs training and distillation that if two models have a similar architecture (probably the case for Xai) the "master" model will distill knowledge to the model even if its not in the distillation data. So they probably need to train a new model from scratch.
(sorry i don't remember the name but there was an example with a model liking howl to showcase this)
If true, bad news for Elon Musk and xAI because they have to start over. He's already indicated this in regards to Wikipedia. He wants to train on Grokepedia and not Wikipedia. Removing NSFW material gives him another reason.
I've been a long-time Twitter user. I don't hate Elon, so when he bought it I was cautiously optimistic.
I deactivated last week. The platform is bad and getting worse. It's scammy and spammy. Everything is designed around garbage engagement, so that the X team can brag about how good the product is doing.
I follow a couple of writers on X through Nitter on a desktop browser. These writers inevitably draw bot comments whenever they touch on something relevant to some or another powerful country’s politics. For me, it’s easy to verify that these commentators (who often have convincing-sounding fake names and photos) are bots by simply ctrl-clicking on the commenters’ usernames and, in the tab that immediately opens, seeing at a glance that they post weird single-issue material at an unusually sporadic pace, and often in tellingly flawed English.
Do I suspect correctly that in the way most people consume X, though the official website or an app, this is not so transparent? Whether because opening new views is so slow on a phone screen, or because the official interfaces probably intersperse content with advertisements and other visual crap? I don’t think state actors would be so active in trying to manipulate discourse if the platform hadn’t degraded to a point where their activity isn’t obvious to most users.
“Bots” is a cover term for both purely automated scripts, and for human posters who are using some kind of tools to post more efficiently in order to manipulate discourse.
In this case, it’s obvious that a lot of Russian state-actor employees, for instance, are not passing their writing through an LLM, but rather are just quickly vomiting out a comment in their imperfect English. Exposés of Russian troll factories show that a lot of these employees are young university-educated people who only want the money, and don’t have strong feelings for the propaganda they are posting, so they half-arse it.
When I left about a year ago the whole feed was entirely just bot slop from verified accounts. It was impossible to tune or subscribe your way in to a good feed. I imagine it's so much worse now with all the AI generated content.
Only last week is shocking to me. People were saying this about twitter for like 10+ years as soon as it was commercialized and was no longer just user content.
Words have meaning. He said he does not hate him. That does not mean he likes him. Hate is a very strong emotion. Dislike is a much less stronger emotion. That is not all the same.
(I also don't hate Elon, but I still don't like him or consider doing buisness with him in any way)
USAID was a highly effective and efficient operation. Musk dismembered it, leading to untold misery, death, and the spread of infectious diseases. I think this is reason enough to hate Musk.
Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while he also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
The race to the highest body count looks like Elon in first, RFK jr. second, and Stephen Miller a distant third but looking like he'll finish strong once the camps are fully operating.
I would argue without Musk and his Twitter/richest man of the world power, Trump would have never been elected in the first place, which would have prevented this and a lot of other bad things. Still, I don't hate him. (Hate is not a condition I think is healthy or constructive or something I should explain myself not feeling it)
I mean his personal lack of ethics, bigotries, greed, and ignorance is what directly made twitter what it is today. Maybe you should dislike him and hold him in low opinion.
I think its entirely reasonable that an algorithm shows you things that you engaged with. It would be weird if it didn't promoted stuff I didn't engage w/.
garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not engage with the content. And for some people it is quite difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is trending so might be i should show this to more people. So this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is loosing battle in the sea of bots :)
A better term might be antagonism. X seemed to switch to a system of rewarding views as a method of engagement far above all else, which led to people (generally and deliberately) ramping up the extremeness of their hot takes in a bid to get as much attention as possible.
A parallel term is "hate click", where there's a headline that's so stupid or off that you click it just to see what the hell they were talking about.
An example of this vile genre was someone tweeting about how:
"Teachers make plenty of money, and I think they should provide school supplies to their students out of their own pocket instead of making hard-working parents pay for them."
It was a message _designed_ to get people to yell at them, and for all of that, it wasn't any of the really hot-button stuff around politics, race, or any of the other divisive things that drive antagonistic engagement.
Twitter could have (and previously did) reward all sorts of other types of engagement, but the shift to rewarding divisiveness was just at another level.
I find it so sad that Twitter still gets traffic at all. Even if we put aside the super shady content on this platform (free speech, lol), the app, either on the web or mobile, has a sub-par user experience.
I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.
Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.
There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.
And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem.
Most embeds I see on Discord are Bluesky. Bluesky seems to have taken over for social media links on sports subreddits. It saw a huge spike during the last game of the World Series.
Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base there after the election spike that it's still growing toward the peak after dropping to a little less than half.
The fact that the left defined Joe Rogan as right-wing for not adhering to very specific far-left tenets (e.g. de-platforming personas non grata and cooperating with cancel culture) only served to push him and his listeners rightward, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You're right. Change the words "they were pushed" to "they chose". There's your agency.
> How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?
You assume that "having principles" means having your principles, and that for someone to disagree must mean they are unprincipled and simply chasing money/audience/fame. This kind of attitude comes across as incredibly arrogant and un-self-aware, and people/voters en masse want nothing to do with it.
The reality is that many millions of people are principled, and they simply have different principles.
For example, "opposing views should be aired and discussed" is a principle widely held by many millions of voters that the left has had an incredibly hard time understanding, respecting, and digesting.
I suspect the people that really think that are a small minority. "The South was right, black people are subhuman and needed to be taken care of by slave owners" is not going to be a popular discussion topic, for example. Or suggesting that Hitler was right about how people should be treated in Europe.
For a communicator, no audience means you lose everything. Why would he, or for that matter, anyone do that?
Look at JK Rowling. Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left.
Say Rogan sticks to his guns. He would face similar, never-ending attacks, no left-leaning figure could attend his podcast without becoming guilty by association, so he'd end up interviewing basically the same people as he does now, only he wouldn't cater to some people that, given somewhat recent events, would most probably celebrate him getting murdered.
I reckon we shouldn't take away the agency away from the adults who made purity testing a common practice, given the utter disaster we are experiencing as a consequence.
> Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left.
This framing is laying on the narrative a little bit thick don't you think? It makes it seem like she's hated for being wealthy, when it is actually because she has been funding hate groups and calling for trans people to be physically attacked.
The "standing up for women" rhetoric is a little bit hollow in the face of her non-existent feminism when the subject isn't physically attacking trans women, she didn't make a single comment during the recent uptick in abortion debates taking place in the UK for example.
You are just proving my point. Statements like this show that it's worthless to engage.
Can you provide any source for her "calling for trans people to be physically attacked"? Because you seem fixated on it, and I've just spent the last 15 minutes looking for one, and I can't find it.
What I can find is her spending so much goddamned money on philanthropy that she stops being a billionaire, while not dodging a dime of taxes precisely because she considers it her obligation. A fortune amassed in what is probably the most ethic way possible, through exploitation of nobody, writing books.
Related to this I can find the foundation of the Volant Charitable Trust, "a grant-making trust to support charitable causes in Scotland, helping vulnerable groups with an emphasis on women, children and young people."
I can also find a comment of "every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them".
And that's the point. You want to paint her as some lunatic who would like to hunt trans people down for sport, when it's crystal clear that she has the "radical" (standard 2018 radical leftist) notion that trans women are not the same thing as biological women and that the definition of women shouldn't be changed to appease to them.
But again. It's not worth it to engage, because we both know I can spend 20+ minutes working on this reply and you are not going to change your stance. An apostate is worse than a heathen, which is why people complain about Rowling rather than anyone who is actually right wing. Because you are scared that if you defended her, you would face the same judgement. Making the world a worse place through and through.
I posted that earlier without checking and recalled wrongly, rather than calling for people to physically assault she instead called for her following to take photographs of trans women in public toilets and disseminate those photos to the public[1].
That was my bad, I knew that she had done something abhorrent and indefensible but it was 5 months ago and I'd forgotten which kind of hatred she had been producing specifically. I'll cite the source first next time.
1: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPG5DlIFIz/ -- I don't have a twitter account to forward the original, but there are news stories about this from the time if you're unsatisfied with that link.
It's not "my views," it's "my political allegiances." There's a difference.
Deciding what political party to vote for is entirely a matter of picking a team, which is entirely dependent on who is on that team. Of course it's "everyone else's fault" whose team you decide to pick. That is literally the game. People are picking representatives. Deciding what representatives to pick is 100% a case of who those representatives are, how they act, and what they believe.
If one team antagonizes you and attempts to harm you, and you therefore decide to vote for the other team, not only is that so reasonable as to be completely unsurprising, but it's also quite justifiable to say, "This is their fault."
Somehow people have forgotten that politics is about garnering willing votes, not smugly browbeating and shaming people about our superior morals and ethics.
I suspect our politics are just too different for my attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky.
You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls").
If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.
i consider myself left-wing and found it very toxic. the ubiquitous blocking features are also a pretty big negative as i found myself blocked by a considerable portion of the site simply for following people in AI
site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos
Honestly, getting on those blocklists is a benefit in and of itself, it means anyone who is radical enough to follow blocklists that block people just because of whom they follow won’t cross your path.
There is an extremely toxic component to Bluesky’s user base, unfortunately, with the many attacks on the CEO for not banning Jesse Singal being testament to that. But for what it’s worth in the circles I’ve cultivated there I now see very little of those toxic people, and I don’t see any support for their behaviour. So I hope in time a more open culture will win out.
It's also dropping like a stone, which is why they are resorting to these tricks to inflate one of the few metrics that can be observed from outside (how much traffic they send to other sites).
Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation.
Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes, if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.
> Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming that everyone is using that same site is silly. It doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other people are using other sites.
> But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.
I would Press X to Doubt (perhaps ironically, for this X...). Searching around, it seems like Bluesky has about a tenth as many total users as X has active users, but it's definitely growing at a faster rate, and X might be declining in active users.
Anecdotally, lots of people I noticed leaving for Bluesky very loudly and publicly quietly returned to posting on X after a while.
My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder.
Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.
What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda
If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you
Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back)
X will tell you to invest in <Scam>
X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire.
People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate.
X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.
About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above.
So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form.
(And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)
There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky, but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons.
BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my feed enough that I don't usually see it.
They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better off not using either, but I still find myself going back to Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about Reddit, honestly.
The problem (if you want to call it that) with following a person on sites like Bluesky or X is that people aren't machines and won't stay "on topic" regarding the reason you followed them in the first place. You might follow them for software dev, biking, birding, or whatever, but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.
IMO, Reddit/HN-esque sites are better for following topics, and Bluesky/X/Mastodon are better for following people. Maybe hashtags are a good middleground but I don't have enough experience using those sites to say.
(Disclaimer: I don't use any social media except for HN.)
> but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.
Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting).
Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick.
I don't think you're being confrontational, and I don't think it's a problem either to be honest. My point was more that, try as one might, you can't build the ultimate curated list of non-political follows because somebody will eventually write something that you consider political. It can't be avoided, which I think is what you're saying too.
I personally think that people try too hard to avoid politics and shame those who "make things political" – especially in tech. We live in an inherently political world, and our industry is increasingly political as it's co-opted by political figures and even dictators across the world. Trying to avoid talking about it is like stuffing our fingers in our ears and pretending reality isn't real, imo.
I'd love to give it another try and be proven wrong. At the beginning it felt like "old Twitter", before it became mainstream, because it was almost entirely software engineers who had left Twitter. After Trump took office it felt like a constant deluge of hand-wringing and people shaking their fists at clouds, and it was tough to immerse myself in it.
If someone is feeding you ragebait on Bluesky you should just unsubscribe. The feed is what you make it. Twitter can be kind of like this too, but the trolls haunt the replies on there whereas people can shut trolls out of their replies on Bluesky. That's the big difference, is someone comes into a thread just to stir shit the original poster can shut them down.
The danger that this creates an echo chamber has to be weighed against allowing trolls to run unchecked, or worse be like Twitter where these people get promoted to the top because ragebait generates big engagement numbers.
Ultimately, the entire social media world needs to admit that maximizing engagement is a bad idea. They have to somehow convince the advertisers that having their product next to content designed entirely to enrage the reader is not good.
> Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless.
The problem with that attitude is that eventually democracy itself suffers, when people don't care no more. The word "democracy" itself points that out - "demos" means "the people".
I think what's disappointing is that so many people that I've followed for years now routinely engage in daily political slapfights, or at least retweet ragebait. In the blogging era, it would have been really weird for a software engineer to sit down and write several paragraphs about their political views, but the friction of hitting "repost" is so comparatively low that everyone does it. Myself included, honestly, although I've been trying not to.
I don't have any problem with people having and voicing thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations about politics, especially with people with whom they disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of what's happening on social media, but that's a different topic.)
I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow topics, not people, and there isn't a great way to do that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber. And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated the site is at this point.
To follow topics on Bluesky, add feeds for those topics.
The "Following" tab is literally that - chronologically ordered posts and replies from accounts you follow. The "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" tabs give you algorithm-sourced stuff that is somewhat connected to who you follow.
When I click on the tab for the Game Dev feed, I see nothing but posts about game dev. When I click on the Astronomy feed, I only see telescopes and pictures taken with telescopes.
The reality is that microblogging, whether it be on X or bluesky or mastadon or even facebook posts, will ALWAYS be lower signal, lower value than real, curated or effort filled content.
I like John Green a lot, including his vlogs that are just him speaking about stuff he doesn't know for half an hour, but I still do not go read what he posts on Bluesky, because it's as low quality, low signal, low intent, and low effort as comments here on HN.
It's just not useful. It's not a good use of my time to read random tweets from people.
When I first got a twitter account in like 2010, I very very instantly recognized it was not for me. If something is important, someone will take the effort to make an actual piece of real content about it, like a blog or video or essay or book. Hell, even a thorough reddit post is better than microblogging.
If it's not worth going through that effort to get the message out to people, why should I consider that a valuable message?
It's emblematic of the past 20 years of social development in my opinion. If the only thing stopping you from getting the word about something super duper important is that writing a page essay is too hard, nobody really needs to care about that, because writing an essay is so easy we make children do it
It's all noise. The signal doesn't go on twitter, it goes on real platforms where you might make money from good signal, or like, a freaking scientific paper, or the front page of a news org.
Earlier, I would have agreed that microblogging pales next to long-form blogging. But then so much long-form blogging moved to Substack that has an overall culture as full of pathologies as microblogging: post regularly even if you don't have anything new to say, hustle a brand that can be monetized, accept a comments section with a broken UI full of people shamelessly trying to hustle their own brand. People doing long-form video content will often speak openly about how they feel forced to change their content in order to avoid being punished by the YouTube algorithm.
Personally, I'm pessimistic that there are many remaining sources of substantial discourse and discussion at all. I just pirate a lot more university-press books from Anna's Archive.
I noticed the same thing with Angela Collier. I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training.
That's just what it's meant for, low effort swipes, shitposting, retweets out of context etc.
It is notable that in order to actually accomplish their "We want a platform where a celebrity says something and you instantly get that something", Twitter had to do a lot of work and pain curating who "celebrities" are. The alternative is everyone getting a waterfall of shit, because the vast majority of people do not have PR agencies between them and their tweet button, and do not have anything important or meaningful to say that is better said fast and short than long and naunced. The entire point of microblogging is to eschew nuance.
That's absurd full stop.
Why would you ever want to know whatever low effort comment sparked thanksgiving dinner arguments at other people's thanksgivings?
> I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training.
Please tell me which of "Water fluoridation is a well understood treatment, and people who are telling you it's bad for you are just lying", "<Knitting trivia>" or "Target is doing poorly as a business right now" or "ICE doing gestapo things" is "unsubtle", or why any of that should be "subtle", which is a strange choice of word.
The app consistently shows me things that I want to see from the social circle around the people I follow and the topics they talk about. Alternative platforms like Threads are worse at this; the platform I hear the most about, Bluesky, brags about not having this. Maybe the Twitter experience varies by which topics you are interested in, you might get served more slop the more mainstream topics you follow. But the reason I have not quit due to unusability is because there isn't any unusability.
I like the new Twitter stance on speech and some of the new features, problem is the UI is super annoying. It was actually kinda bad before too, but it got way worse.
That isn't true. I signed up for a fresh account for a project I was working on. Despite following no-one and not having interacted with anything, all I was pushed were racists, bigots, and extremist political content.
While this is an interesting data point, the main thing it tells us is that when the algorithm has no information about your preferences, that it skews racist.
This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences.
Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the algorithm.
The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed?
Or you can just leave the platform. We don’t always need to interrogate the exact reasons why something happens, we can just see it, document it, then go elsewhere.
Even if you believe that Musk and team don’t “touch the scales” of the algorithm, the inevitable consequence of the decision to prioritize comments of people willing to pay for blue checks, is to discourage users not in that segment from engagement at all levels.
The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to weight the input to the algorithm away from “what does an average user pay attention to” and more towards “what does a paying user pay attention to.”
Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO short-sighted, business goal. What it is not is a way to create a fair and impartial “mirror” as you have described.
I created an account, picked "pets" as my interest. I was suggested several pet-related accounts to follow, and followed none.
I went to the home page and "for you" was populated about 80% from known right accounts and angry right-flavored screeds from people I didn't recognize.
The other 20% was just a smattering of random, normal stuff. None of it about pets.
I think it's good advice, the main difference is that Bsky encourages you to do that by giving you the possibility to customize your feeds (and set whatever as the default). You can have a combination of personal lists and custom algorithmic feeds (your own or someone else's).
Even ignoring musk's takeover, I think it's a better model that reduces doomscrolling, ragebait and generally low quality interactions.
If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as the best worst option.
Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash.
You can take your analogy further. The buffet noticed you pausing on unhealthy food, and begins replacing all the healthy options with unhealthy options. People shame your criticisms and note you could easily put blinders on and intentionally look longer at healthy options anytime you accidentally glance at an unhealthy one. the alternative would be an absolute repression of free speech after all.
A whole lot of machine learning practitioners use X. Makes it difficult to avoid if you're interested in the news. It's definitely a network effect issue.
Browsers have been doing this forever: you make a request to a server (A) that you choose to interact with, and it could respond with various things (a redirect, a page with a meta refresh, a page with a frame / iframe, etc.) that result in your browser automatically making a request (and rendering the resulting page response) to some other server (B) that could get you in trouble.
However, in this classic scenario, when A starts sending you to B, you stop trusting A. This is simple when A's behavior is entirely determined by A's owner. What if it's determined by other users (not just A's owner)? Typically, A would be careful to not serve a redirect (etc.) based on user input, as that would be considered an "open redirect" vulnerability (with an exception for link shorteners, I guess). Interesting how the webview preloading that we're discussing now commits essentially this same offense.
The new behavior is much better from a user perspective. When you tap on a post, it'll start loading the link in the background so once you are done reading the post the link will load immediately and the post will shelve on the bottom of the screen. It is very fluid, especially with blog posts / news articles.
It'd be an interesting way to count how many impressions your tweets get: add a URL to every tweet, put a tracking "pixel" in the webpage (assuming the webview loads all assets; if not, then just add the "pixel' URL to the tweet..
deleted my account a few weeks ago and it actually feels like my health has improved because i'm no longer constantly bombarded with ragebait and doomerism
i hope they keep ruining the experience of using it some more
A crazy ass billionaire trying to develop an "everything" app seems like a pretty damn good reason to run the other direction. I wouldn't want anyone controlling an app like that, much less Elon fucking Musk.
the same story applies to Wechat. Pony Ma was crazy rich for QQ and games already, he created another Wechat. Lots of ppl tried to boycott it, but network effect forced everyone to use it.
Yeah it's so fascinating that people want an open internet rather than a small group of billionaires and big tech companies controlling everything. Truly bizarre.
> “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.
> The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
> “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.” The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.
> Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.
Yes - it wasn't with respect to Trump. It was silencing negative stories about Biden and his son that was the proximate issue, and the general silencing of mostly Republican voices by mostly Democrat voices (though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent[0].
> > The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
the webview messes up tokens and passwords managers so I don't see this happening. The US is too culturally different to have mega apps. In Asia their supermarkets also have a lot of information in the menu for example.
The App Store moved the clusters of icons to the home screen, but the messages and wallet app are right next to each other, and tightly integrated. You get to re-arrange and hide most icons, at least.
The UI looks different (information density etc.) but in the end it's still a collection of external applications neatly wrapped inside a platform with strong walls and a strict gatekeeper, with a basic suite available by default. In China, you could ditch most of iOS if you could trick a phone into launching directly into WeChat.
In January the (now former) CEO announced the X Money payment platform will debut "later this year". "Yaccarino says the Visa partnership is the “first of many big announcements” that will be made about X Money this year." https://www.theverge.com/news/599137/x-money-payments-servic... I don't remember any other big announcements.
Who in their right mind would give X/Elon money or even enable photos or contacts access on their phone. At some point is just another money laundering thing for our (least) favourite billionaire.
Totally. Mini apps and mini-app stores are already developing in crypto (Farcaster, World,..) and the approach may well become the primary way to deploy advanced and secure apps going forward.
This seems like a fairly reasonable UX improvement. Unless I'm missing anything, it doesn't seem like this has nefarious intent, it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see the content as quickly as possible.
---
It's astonishing how quickly discussion disintegrates when Musk is mentioned on HN. He really is such a divisive figure, with incredibly polarised language both in support and against him.
Normal reasoned arguments are just absent here. Sometimes when two people disagree, they can still have a nuanced conversation/argument about it. But not about Musk.
There are some opinions in this thread that I vehemently disagree with, but it's not worth escalating by adding my opinion to the pile.
It reminds me of that phenomenon where you read the newspaper and notice an article in your domain of expertise and it's riddled with errors! Then you turn the page, read an article about something else, and completely trust it. You somehow didn't transfer the knowledge that the newspaper is inaccurate to the new domain.
It makes me wonder what other discussions on HN (and elsewhere) are completely devoid of nuance and reason, but I just don't notice it.
Preloading links is often avoided because it creates a wide range of issues. Using up newspapers free stories a month on articles users never see etc. Speed just isn’t that useful by comparison.
Incompetence is obviously still a possibility, but the likely intent overcoming such issues is to make X seem to generate more traffic and thus appear to be more relevant.
Even so, Chrome has preloading turned on by default with an option for "extended preloading" which is even more aggressive. There may be some downsides, but I don't think what X is doing here is unreasonable. Speed makes a huge difference in UX.
>it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see the content as quickly as possible.
Yes and many people think that is outweighed by all the other issues raised in the larger thread here. That's "nuance and reason". Pretending it isn't there is not "nuance and reason".
So my worries are that someone is going to click a link in Twitter and then enter their username and password into a news website. When this happens you need to trust the app developers.
> It's intriguing how normal reasoned arguments are just absent here
No 'reasoned arguments' were provided in your take. I'll give you one against this though -- it's all fun and games until you end up on a list because of Musk's UX.
When you're either unwilling or incapable of understanding other people's perspectives it is indeed very difficult.
Try this: steelman the argument that what Musk did all those months ago wasn't a "literal Hitler salute". If you can do that, I suspect you'll find it a lot easier to have nuanced discussions about that topic (and possibly others) going forward.
Looool is that all your argument? "Everyone hates this one simple trick against nazi: try to forget that they do nazi things, and boom!, you're no longer scared of actual nazis"
Speaking of nuance, I find it rather unintuitive how it often seems like it's harder for people to have a nuanced opinion of other people than to have a nuanced opinion about a policy or software feature or specific situation.
You'd think given how complicated and faceted people are it would be especially easy to find both good and bad things to say about them, but online at least it almost seems to be the opposite: there's even less nuance when discussing people than there is discussing other topics. (Case in point.)
I'm not required to find the good in a person like Musk. I'm allowed to look at the many shitty things he's done and terrible opinions he expresses and say "that is a shit man, and I do not like him or trust him."
He has probably done something for someone somewhere that wasn't terrible. Does it counterbalance the rest? Not really!
There's that (possibly apocryphal) saying, "and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel." Just because a nazi has a redeeming quality somewhere does not undo them being a nazi.
You're not required to do anything. Consider though that if you refuse to see the good in people you disagree with, you have little room to complain when they refuse to see the good in you.
There's a lot of overlap between those two groups. Half of the country voted for Trump in the last election, a few of them are probably your neighbors. They control the presidency and a majority in the house and senate. You better hope they don't all decide they feel the same way about you that you apparently do about them.
The largest share of the eligible voting population was the 'did not vote' group.
I'm OK with calling fascists what they are. I'm also OK with recognizing a neighbor who has been consumed by fascist propaganda.
The fascist is not one that can be negotiated with. As Sartre said:
"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."
I can negotiate with the propaganda poisoned neighbor. There is no negotiating with the people who are running the fascist show. Giving a fascist the benefit of the doubt is playing into their strategy.
Since this got so much attention, I feel the need to add that the CEO of Substack is now saying that even accounting for fake views, their traffic from X has gone up substantially.
This reinforces why I never use the social media apps and only the web versions. Very few apps avoid the invasive engagement-maximization that browsers make a bit more difficult.
X is an authoritarian platform designed for freedomless speech.
People, including myself, were booted out for giving opinions that did not align with their corrupt values. Even post-Elon, after appealing decision, some of us still haven't been let back in.
Reddit does something similar in some way but not like this.
I often save links to posts from Reddit in my Obsidian note app. Just copying the link marks it that you shared the link and artificially increases stats in that manner.
How does displaying the webview increase the traffic? Is it because when you scroll through the site, even if you have not openeded the link, it gets opened in the background and counts a visit?
Again, anyone still using Twitter should know they are contributing to the richest man in the world actively pushing to disrupt the core fabric of our society.
I don’t have the same take, but the algorithm and site is so broken, the patterns so dark, that I’m down to maybe 5 minutes of X a week at best.
Everything is posted to get views, even from the more quality people. It’s ironic that I hear about “brainrot” the most on X, but it’s full of brainrot masquerading as valuable information.
They are all like this to a degree because controversy creates engagement. If a platform is not making you money, is not making you smarter, and not helping you form IRL connections, then I highly recommend disabling it.
Disagree, albeit with a /s. We should continue attaching increasingly more corrupted cores to the Wheatley-GLaDOS. Twitter as it is an artery IV port to inject defeatism and derangement into that group of people. Eventually the controlling core will come off and all will return to normal someday.
I fully agree with your stance on Elon but I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit. I've tried Bluesky and although I am very left-leaning on sociocultural topics I just find them too... annoying over there. (I'm closer to neoliberal on economic topics and that's also a bit of an issue there. And I like AI and they pretty much all deeply hate AI.)
> I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit
Like what precisely? Infosec twitter is gone, science twitter is long dead. Visiting my timeline in non-algorithmic mode yields a post from months ago. In algo mode it's just ads and rage-bait.
Simon Willison is on Bluesky, and I'm going to go out on a relatively safe limb and suggest that if you check out what he reposts, who he follows, etc., you will find people who do not deeply hate AI. I do think Bluesky, in general, is a lot like the Twitter of, say, 15 years ago, where the quality of one's feed is very much dependent on how aggressively one curates it -- although I wish they would finally add a feature for selectively turning off reposts user by user.
(It is absolutely true that a lot of creators hate AI, although I would argue that they have fair reasons to do so given the way AI is frequently presented / talked about / used. I find it unfortunate that everything remotely related to machine learning has now been rebranded as "AI", which leads people to reflexively dunk on tools that really aren't that much like the AI they have in their heads, but it's not their fault.)
It might be a 'cold start' problem that I had on Twitter a while ago as well. It takes a bit of time for communities to form, or for you do start interacting with people who are interesting and in the same circles, but also sharing cool stuff.
It is a journey, I still miss so many people from Twitter and it took me/us years of building a specific community, which is now mostly gone, but I do see signs of that appearing on Bluesky.
He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all to stay on X.
Literal moon shots, while he contributes meaningfully to worsening conditions on Earth. His dismantling of USAID will have a more consequential effect than 90% of his fever dreams ever will.
Not only that, but his @grok bot is now completely unhinged too (the public version) spewing an even more polarized version of his exact views without any ability to consider new information:
those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of us are holding our breath on that one.
This is the problem with the dialogue around Musk. He's not 99% vaporware, he's 80-90% vaporware. That's problem enough.
In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his personal brand. This is not going to end well.
Going to the moon was, at the very least, demonstrated as technologically possible in the 1960s, and you can literally go watch a Starship launch if you want. I have a very hard time putting it in the same "entirely prospective" category as androids, self-driving taxis, and Mars bases.
> Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware.
Absolutely laughable motivated reasoning. Hate the guy if you must, but claiming one of the most impactful business leaders in American history is "99% vaporware" makes you look silly.
Is the implication here that the core fabric of our society isn't otherwise being disrupted, or that this particular disruption should be viewed as exceptionally egregious?
First rule of Twitter is avoid the algorithm at all costs. The trolls have long since figured it out and now if the algorithm is involved you are going to see white supremacist talking points nonstop.
Second rule of Twitter is why are you on Twitter, it's a full on Nazi bar now.
The "following" feed that mostly shows you content from people you have explicitly followed is better, although the site really likes to swap back to the algorithmic "for you" feed whenever you aren't paying attention. However, even the following feed will still have the troll responses on most posts. You really can't avoid them on Twitter.
I just tried to find AI starter packs on BlueSky and confirmed that BlueSky is openly hostile to AI. I understand the reasons, it's just not where I'm at. I'll try Threads and see what happens.
Thank you. I did follow one of those using the same search without the quotes and followed. And your second one now. I'm also cleaning up my X site to get rid of anything not AI so I can do a fair comparison.
Bluesky has lots of artists, authors, journalists, etc... who see AI as a direct threat to human creativity. Not that the AI will replace the creativity, but that it can generate slop that looks "good enough" and doesn't demand a living wage or healthcare benefits. Many of these creative types have little trust that corporate management won't try to replace them just to save a buck.
I'm sympathetic to their arguments but that doesn't lesson my need to understand AI if I'm going to help them with their concerns. Ignoring it is not an effective strategy.
It's still the platform where things happen. Even if I'm no longer fundraising there's still a strong, interesting investor community. When founders join an app or companies go to brag about their engineering prowess they still use X. Most people just don't care about Elon enough to leave or not join
Another example and incentive not to use apps and to be held hostage, when an equivalent web service is available. On Android, just use Hermit or some similar app to sandbox a webview of their webpage.
What bugs me is the sheer number of people, and organisations, who still link to images and video or '1/20' long screeds on twitter, while the next article on their own site is bitching about how bad twatter/owner/politics etc is. Seriously if a site, blog, forum etc you know ever links to twitter then just stop interaction with them, they're lazy mofos need to do their own groundwork.
X has everything, and you can pick what you follow (there's a "For You" tab, but also a strictly chronological following tab). I like it for variety of political views (e.g. super-lefty @caitoz, super-righty @L0m3z), following interesting LLM stuff (@elder_plinius is a great follow), lots of devs (e.g. carmack...), art accounts (@yumenohajime, @neurocolor), nutrition/health stuff, so much good stuff!
Day One Twitter user; built the very first API app and the first Android client. Launching a "competitor" next month - Keep an eye on https://flipso.com
Since we're doing PSAs, isn't it also now just a completely broken platform on mobile for everyone who isn't logged in?
> Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another shot.
This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error, does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb oversight in the funnel
I set up a URL redirect rule in Edge/Brave/Chrome with the extension URL Auto Redirector (previously used Redirector but it was removed, there are other alternatives available for Firefox I'm sure). I also found a similar front end for Instagram but just added a rule yesterday so haven't tested it extensively yet.
I avoid most Twitter/X content after I deleted my account but it's helpful when it gets linked in HN.
URL Auto Redirector:https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector...
For Kagi users - it's also possible to redirect it in Kagi with redirect rules in search settings:
Thanks for sharing! I continue using Redirector [0] on Firefox for other stuff but it didn't occur to me to set one for Twitter.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
I created this plug-in for firefox...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-cont...
Not being updated any more, but might be useful to someone.
Thanks. You only need this single regex for instagram:
Serious question: Why doesn't Google de-rank content that requires a login? I remember they used to claim they did but they clearly do not anymore.
For twitter at least, that would have to be done manually. It still shows a timeline for grey checkmark (government) accounts, and a "best of" type page for all other accounts.
Most sites serve a special version of the page to visitors with "googlebot" in their UA string and/or coming from an IP range google controls with more SEO'd contents too.
That would be equivalent to demonetizing the entire web. Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality. As the old adage goes, "when you're getting something for free, you're the product being sold." Only sites making money by, shall we say, "indirect" means would be able to survive. A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.
I think I should at least be able to see even a subset of the content that caused the item to be returned in the search result, though. If I try to navigate away or see more content, sure, make me log in. But, if I search something, click on a Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin result, I should at least be able to see something.
The search --> visit --> immediate redirect to login results should be de-ranked.
“Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality” this doesn’t follow unless we assume the most extreme implementation, the openness of the content is just one factor of many that should count in the contents favor. Further it assumes the only non-shady way to monetize content is put it behind a login which is not true.
A site can be a billboard for a product or service, or provide a social hub, without participating in the surveillance adtech industry. There are plenty of hobby forums, like those for craft brewing, which get supported by brewery suppliers, for example. There are luthier communities which get supported by toolmakers and professionals, and so on. The implicit community networking, reviews by community members, and other interactions reward quality and honesty, and penalize the shady shit.
It's just not scalable into the exploitative cash cows that VCs drool over.
> Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality.
Quality has never been synonymous with monetization for as long as I can remember. The primary driver of low quality or harmful content is greed. Guess what fuels the most greed in modern society?
> A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.
Are you suggesting that including Twitter in search results would mitigate propaganda?
>>> nothing but a propaganda engine
And that's different from Google, how?
A search engine which prioritizes free content, reviewed intelligently, is curation, and not Goodharted gotcha games. If you can crawl the web and index sites with human level content curation, with a reasonably performant scaffolding, you can prevent SEO style exploitation, and use natural language rules like "does this content contain text attempting to game the ranking of a site or violate policy XYZ?"
Most AIs use bing and google, so the best you can get is a curated list from the already censored and politically filtered results from those sources, funneling commercial traffic toward the highest paying adtech customers - it's just refined, ultra-pure SEO results, unless they use their own index and crawler.
I'd almost rather have a naive raw index that can be interacted with, but custom indices, like xAI and Kagi, are definitely superior to Google and Bing. Google's a dumpster fire and Bing's a tawdry knockoff, and they're both interested in gaming the surveillance data and extracting as much money as possible from their adtech customers.
Paying for a service incentivizes the quality of that service. If that service is honest curation of and effective web search with custom indices and crawlers, then the free and paid distinction don't matter - the highest quality based on the curation criteria is what gets a site surfaced. I want my search engine to return McMaster Carr over Temu or Amazon, or a local flower shop over some corporate slop. Google doesn't get paid by meeting my expectations, it gets paid by exploiting my attention and extracting fractions of profit from commercial interactions, and makes more money by pushing me into business with companies that I'd otherwise want nothing to do with.
Demonetizing the entire web - dismantling the surveillance adtech regime - sounds like an absolute utopic victory to me.
Because Google wants the web to be broken like that, they're also part of the design team of tech behemoths that made the internet shitty und no fun.
They have had ways of letting people who give Googlebot access to content that requires login for a long time. A decade?
Because people can get a login. If the best quality result is behind a login and a paywall, I still want it to be the first result. Only quality should decide ranking.
Please do tell how to get an X account? It instantly locked my account after registration and I have several friends have the same issue.
I would much prefer if Google just stopped showing inaccessible information completely.
I have no idea, I've never used X or Twitter. But apparently millions do, so it is not inaccessible.
Well I sure don't
Openness and accessibility should absolutely be factors in ranking, otherwise where does it end? I dk what twitter requires these days, maybe an email, password and a couple more fields, what if a site starts doing id verification? What if accounts require a subscription? What if all the best content on the first page of your search results is behind a paywall with 3 easy payments of $299
It ends with you paying for information. If I need some information and it is only available behind a paywall, then I'll pay for it or I didn't need it anyway.
Google is doing the correct thing in not discriminating against content which is paid or behind login walls. Some of the most important content are on social media, and most of them only serve logged in users.
If you want to decide yourself how search results are presented to you, you should try Kagi for a search engine.
You haven’t made a case for why free content should be more important than relevance.
If the search engine orders by relevance, than I can make the decision for myself of where to trade-off with paywalls.
I don’t want a search engine to make the decision for me because it cannot: what if the only answer to my question is behind a paywall?
“ You haven’t made a case for why free content should be more important than relevance.”
I didn’t make that claim, i am contesting the claim “Only relevance should decide ranking”. I am arguing ease of accessibility should be a factor.
Unless you mean as a tie-breaker in the niche case of equally-relevant results, then you're making the claim that it's better to see less relevant (or nonrelevant) results just because they have some other quality beyond relevance.
No, it's also completely broken on desktop. Still have one or two friends who insist on sending twitter links. I don't click.
I have no idea why people still think it's a viable platform.
remember when part of the commentary was "ha! twitter fired one bajllion people and it's still operating fine". I keep seeing errors, much more than in the flying whale era, just now they appear to be in the frontend.
Well, wasn't that sentiment a response to those arguing that the site would cease to function or be outlawed in several countries?
I don't?
I remember that, people were convinced that twitter had a load of woke lib employees or something
> flying whale era
Is that the same as the fail whale era?
Always been like that. Twitter, Instagram, ... None of those platforms have usable UX if you're not logged in.
This is not true, this change is a recent phenomenon, I believe it came into effect sometime around 2021-2023 (maybe earlier even). I believe it changed when OpenAI showed the value of data.
Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to create an account, or log in.
Instagram's been a pita to use without a login for years, they've recently got even worse though.
This is my recollection as well when they all realized they were feeding the bots that the free use became broken
My recollection is that this happened pretty much immediately after Twitter became X.
No, it was a test by some misguided PM who was looking at her signups metric and not much else. It rolled out, everyone hated it, it got rolled back after some senior people complained. When Elon took over they turned the feature back on and then evidently rewrote it to be even more annoying and we have what is in place today. Source: my comments against it are probably in Slack somewhere if Elon is still paying for that
That’s roughly when I stopped opening Twitter links, I still sometimes see posts from that platform, but mostly just as screenshots and with the discussions elsewhere. I don’t care for their dark patterns.
People already knew the value of data long before LLMs were popularised and web scraping has been a thing since the very beginnings of the web.
Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.
Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the same dark patterns you described too.
Getting down voted for stating a fact. Just goes to show how short some people’s memories are.
You're getting downvoted for stating falsehoods.
> Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.
The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon.
> Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform.
In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in.
> You're getting downvoted for stating falsehoods.
I'm getting downvoted because people are either to young to remember the web in the 00s, or just misremembering what the web was like.
> The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon.
I gave examples of big platforms that weren't accessible without a login. And modern platforms were also heading this way long before LLMs existed.
Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem. LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before. And before then, it was just people leeching off other people's work. This is a tale as old as the web. And I remember it well, having been both a web developer and user of the web since 1994.
Lets also not forget all the attempts that Microsoft took to try and control the internet and how AOL had their own walled gardens too. Yahoo had a plethora of cool features, most of which weren't available without a Yahoo account. And so on and so forth.
Walled gardens are not a recent phenomenon.
> In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in.
You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)
For example this archived page from Facebook. Notice how there's no way to advance without signing up? https://web.archive.org/web/20070630190243/https://register....
---
I know people want to blame AI for everything that goes wrong these days be that simply isn't the reason that platforms lock down. They do it because thats how you make money. You either:
1. lock down and charge people for access
or
2. lock down and sell your user data
(or, depressingly too often, both)
Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.
What AI has changed is the increase in invasive bot detection on sites that don't monetise anonymous access.
> Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem.
Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose.
> LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before.
LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data. When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.
> You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)
It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature. Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.
> Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.
Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data. This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.
> Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose.
Exactly. LLMs aren't the cause of that change.
> LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data.
Clearly I know that. My point wasn't that LLMs are literally scraping the sites but instead making the differentiation between scraping that happened before LLMs and scraping that happened after.
> When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.
Actually, that's not always true. Search engines have included snippets from sites for years and that's also been a well-discussed point of contention.
Then there's also Google's attempt to switch people to AMP to further lock people into Google's walled garden. I accept this isn't quite the same thing but it's still an example of how search engines fight to prevent people from leaving their ecosystem.
Some sites, like MSN, literally host news articles from others sites on their own site too. I'm sure Microsoft has an agreement to do this, but it's yet another example of how companies try to lock visitors into their own site.
I accept the AMP and MSN examples are tangential, but they do still illustrate the same point I'm making about how it's not a new thing for platforms to use dark patterns to keep people from navigating away from their platform. This isn't something new that's happened in the last couple of years.
> It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature
Would you rather I just said you were citing falsehoods like you accused me of?
Also I'm not talking about a different feature. I'm talking about the exact same stuff I was talking about from my original comment in this thread.
> Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.
So you agree that platforms have locked content down and this isn't a recent phenomenon then ;)
Making the distinction between profile data and public comments is a little strained when it's clear that Facebook has invested heavily into their walled garden and the vast majority of content on Facebook has always been hidden behind that walled garden.
> Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data.
Smaller sites make money from ads. But we were talking about big platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sites that make money from ads are just making small change compared to platforms.
> This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.
This I do agree with. But that wasn't the statement that was originally made. Those sites will remain open or shutdown entirely. They're not going to go private ala Twitter and Instagram. Their business model is entirely different -- often intentionally not run as a business in the first place. Sometimes just passion projects with no ads and/or run at a loss.
The part I was disagreeing with was that the dark patterns seen in Instagram et al are a result of the rise of LLMs. That simply isn't true.
Also Facebook feeds weren’t even a feature back before Twitter was around. Zuckerberg added it to compete with Twitter. So you couldn’t even access “public feeds” in the mid-00s because no such thing existed.
Instagram has always redirected me to a login page. Twitter only did after Elon and his friends went batshit ruining the website.
Following an Insta link gives me a dismissible login modal, but still shows the linked page when dismissed. Following any link becomes login only unless you right click to open link in new. Now it does the same previous behavior. I don’t use Insta, only when every now and then someone sends me a link with what looks like might be some other interesting post, but the game becomes boring and and I just close the tab
Best comment.
False. You used to be able to read Twitter fine without being logged in
When was that? Already pre-Elon it was terrible.
Sorry, are you actually five years old? Until just a few years ago Twitter was entirely open. You could view any and all public tweets, replies, threads. All exactly like you were logged in. Their APIs were open and you could literally plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users on the actual planet in real time into your own application.
Actually, you definitely could not plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users in real time into your own application (without huge cost). You only would ever see a subset of tweets via twitters API's and search results, if you wanted the full thing you had to pay for 'the firehose' which was very expensive.
This openness is part of the reason governments (local, state, federal, sovereign) started using it for official comms. Seems rather shortsighted in retrospect, but it was a useful tool for a short period of time.
No, I'm with GP: Most of the time I'd just get errors and retries that don't work, even years before Elon. I also never had an account there and assumed it had something to do with that.
Some years ago you could even subscribe to an RSS feed for each user.
From UI perspective you are right, but not for APIs.
The APIs definitly used to be open enough that you could hit a "Generate token", hit one endpoint with cURL and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on, no reviews or validation at all, all you needed was an account + token.
I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another).
At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too.
> and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on
The complete firehose was expensive and paid-only.
You could get a sampling of Tweets at a lower rate through the API. It wasn’t the complete firehose, though.
That sample was complete though as long as there wasn't too many tweets. I.e, as long as your query was specific enough, you _did_ get all tweets.
Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
And if you click on an account you just get top posts of all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's impossible to even find the context while being logged off.
Here's me complaining[1] about the login walls way back in 2021, this was before the Elon takeover.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365
Edit: Some more posts -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
That's a completely unrelated issue. Once someone sent you a link to a tweet, you could read it.
Is it unrelated? From the parent comment:
> Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover.
(And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether)
Both are correct, at least according to my memory: you used to be able to read tweets without an account, but that stopped, and it stopped before Musk took over.
There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time.
Interesting; if you'd have asked me when Elon took over I'd have said something around 2020-2022. Probably why everyone assumes it's a result of him
Instagram explicitly tells you need to be logged in. Twitter/X just appears to be broken
Obviously wrong. The typical user-hostile thing isn't this dumb, you'd see a teaser that's probably vaguely sexual and get some "sign up for the full experience" prodding. Literally any 2-person startup that's a week old would do better than this at being thirsty and awful
Twitter never worked on my on desktop without account since Elon took over. It came down to security settings not allowing 3rd party cookies. If you allow it, it loads up.
change the url to xcancel.com
or nitter.net
This past week I rarely see quoted tweets now in the main timeline, it just says not available. So something about viewing RT is broken.
> just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any)
What if those errors are trying to tell you to install one?
It's been broken for anyone not logged in since Elon turned a bunch of servers off. It costs too much to make Twitter freely available. If users who weren't logged in could see the site it would crash constantly.
Not really sure how that's possibly true considering CDN caching exists
same with Instagram
Another PSA. RSS is still very good.
Nobody wants a damn web view. If I'm clicking off to a link, I may want to click to another app and back in and still be where it was... If it's in a webview that's gone as soon as I click out. Yes, you can open in Chrome or whatever, open in a browser, but that's a pain in the ass to do an the time. I hate web views, in all forms.
>Nobody wants a damn web view.
OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance).
FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
It's not just HackerNews. I can remember when Facebook rolled out their "in-app browser", and a huge amount of content appeared on how to disable it.
That was partly due to websites being broken. You can still find some old discussions on Stack Overflow about features of their websites not working correctly in it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000708/file-upload-con...
Checking in - it's not possible to disable from the app anymore, is it? The preference setting is still there, but ignored, afaict.
Correct, it's ignored. I find it strange that the EU isn't looking into it.
I'm not sure the setting is even there in the FB app anymore.
That's right. Several times they sneakily reverted my preference, and I reset it. The most recent time I went to do that again and learned it's no longer possible.
You still have the fb app? You know the spied everything you browsed, right?
And if they didn't, it was not for lack of trying... What does it take for people to delete this shit?
> You know the spied everything you browsed, right?
I remember that this "became news" some time ago, but it's always pretty obvious the moment it loads.
App presenting an SFSafariViewController? "Convenience" that's intended to keep users in the app.
App presenting a WKWebView? Assume it's loaded with spyware scripts.
no no, not in the fb app, in the mobile browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
TBF it's "only" sites with a meta pixel, and on Android. But in my book this does not matter, it shows their intentions
Ohhh yes I remember that one. Diabolically clever.
I'm sure there's also no user-controlled firewall to stop it on Android either.
> This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users.
My wife just didn't know what a web view was (she still doesn't), but she prefers using the browser after I showed her how to "escape" Facebook's web view and open pages in Safari where the content blocker and ad blocker extensions could do their work. You probably have a point about preloading pages, but until content and ad blockers start working in all web views, then I agree with the person you're replying to: nobody wants a damn web view.
FWIW apps can use a SafariWebView IIRC to basically pass off a link to a separate Safari instance that can use autofill, content blockers, Javascript JIT, etc. but which the app doesn't have access to.
Meanwhile a WebView will show whatever HTML you throw at it, but it won't do any of that other fun stuff because the app that created it can access and manipulate the content (e.g. stealing your passwords) and the OS doesn't know if content filtering is relevant in that webview (since it's just the "show some HTML in a browser-type view" control and maybe it's important to see everything as-is). Being able to access the WebView also means the app can watch where you browse, what URLs, etc. so it can see what you're looking at even once you leave the page it opened to.
So yeah, apps can have a user-friendly experience; Telegram for the longest time used a SafariWebView so that everything was nice and neat. Then they decided to change their UI to a regular WebView and suddenly everything was full of trash again and I had to set it to "open in Safari" instead.
> Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people.
The back button supplied by the OS is perfectly capable of this (at least on Android I have witnessed this)
Well, Twitter/X gets this wrong too. Pretty often jumps away from what you're viewing, especially on the nav-in to a thread or nav-out from a thread actions.
Seems like something they broke themselves, then.
Something I see relatives do sometimes is they get a link to a facebook event over meta's messenger, and then they click the link and it opens in messenger's web view, which inexplicably isn't signed into facebook, so they can't view the event, and they don't understand why, as they are signed into facebook in their web browser.
They're also often very confused why they can't find links they've opened in web views in their browser's tabs or history.
In-app webviews are a usability disaster for normal users, I need to help a relative out of one at least once every few weeks.
The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone linked...
> The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
I think you misunderstood. The problem wasn't/isn't that sites were mobile sized on mobile devices. The problem was/is sites that optimize for mobile, and look terrible or are hard to use on a desktop or laptop screen.
That's just asinine. Just because any user would like fast navigation doesn't mean privacy only matters if you know what a violation it is to ping every server in sight on user's device, with absolutely no way to prevent it.
I dont know if this is in the same vein, but I want to complain about how websites handle pdfs.
Slack, Teams, confluence, jira, etc all open a pdf in a in-browser preview thing. Then if you try scrolling, it makes the PAGE contents bigger, but does NOT zoom into the pdf.
Who thought of this? Who thought it was a good idea?
Never have I wanted to open a preview of the pdf.
Seriously. I have a featureful PDF viewer I am intimately familiar with. I want it to be the default for all PDFs, ever. This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.
Not sure how bad it is these days, but Adobe Reader used to open pretty slowly (and if you had Adobe Acrobat open your PDFs by default, it was even slower), so an in-browser PDF viewer was appreciated for that purpose.
Also, it can be useful to keep the PDF in the context of the app you opened it in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a window manager that surfaces the fact that, for example, one macOS Preview window was opened from the browser, another from Slack, another from Finder, etc. Compare to iOS, where opening a PDF viewer from an app will result in a button at the top-left corner to go back to the app you opened it from.
> This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.
The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.
I agree website viewers are pointless. But most of the time I actually like the browser viewer better, if it opens links directly, than offline viewers. Because I regard PDFs as websites (similar to jpeg files), and I normally don't want to accumulate them in my download folder.
I agree though that the browser viewers are often too bare-bones.
>The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.
Which tend to be, imo, even worse! I think I'd rather have a toner container explode on me than try to suffer through the experience of using Aconex's PDF utility ever again.
This sounds more like however your OS handles opening the PDF mimetype(xdg-open,open,Invoke-Item) I'm assuming you're on windows. I think often times browsers will just be set to the default for previewing a PDF unless set otherwise. This is all just conjecture though as I don't use any of the tools you listed above and I'm not absolutely certain of how Windows/MacOS handles PDFs by default.
Twitter's handling of opening links in its own webview is a bit different, unless Slack, Teams, Confluence, Jira all open these browser instances within some sort of webview wrapper as well(I wouldn't think so). So its a little bit different
No, what they are talking about is that you click on a link to see a PDF in these web apps, and instead of serving up the PDF document itself, they serve up a page in their web app that embeds a PDF viewer.
I assume they are trying to be "helpful" but 99% of the time the user's browser can render the PDF more conveniently than the app's embedded viewer (not breaking scrolling and zooming etc.)
Similarly... I _really_ dislike clicking a link in Safari on iOS and it opening an App instead of going to the web page. I have the YouTube app installed and use it on occasion, but its really jarring when I click an organic search result in Duck and get launched into an app that may not have the same privacy settings my browser is setup with.
Ironically, I have the opposite complaint with YouTube, particularly with these new Twitter web views. It takes 3 “navigations” now to get to the iOS YouTube app: one to open the Twitter web view, one to open that URL in Safari, then one to open at YouTube video in the native app.
Isn't that because they ask you to sign in if you're not leaking enough information?
The "open in YouTube" button just does nothing in the (iOS) webview, for whatever reason. So, in order to get a working open-in-app button, you have to open the webpage in your browser. Not sure if intentional or a bug.
Pro tip, links clicked in private mode will always ask you before opening the app, so you can say no.
I end up just using YouTube through the browser and only installing the app when I need to download videos, e.g. for a plane trip, and then uninstalling it after I land.
Brave prompts you before doing that. Then you can long press to new tab.
I clicked a link in IG once and and it opened via a webveiw. it was one of those "give us your email for a discount" popups so I put in "mark@aol.com" and at a later date, IG asked if I wanted to associate that email with my account (or something along those lines). I tend to take the extra step to "open in native browser" whenever webveiws popup
I remember how tiktok basically injected a keylogger into any site they opened in a webview https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/technology/tiktok-browser...
I didn't think IG does something similarly shady
That's the point of a webview - to continue tracking users while "off" your app.
In the settings you can configure to open in the configured external browser. I recently switched phones, so had to adjust several apps for this. It's a pain and would be nice if it was a global setting to always open links in the browser.
Why would the web view be gone after you've multi tasked? On my phone the web view stays open inside the parent app.
idk but I’ve definitely experienced this. Presumably it’s a bug.
You know what to do..... ')
I’m just happy they got rid of the system web view and replaced it with the one which they can inject their own JavaScript into. Bonus points that it covers the thing I want to read and I can’t turn it off. Truly, a masterpiece of engineering from the guy whose entire schtick was coming up with was to boost engagement from kids.
I stopped using Twitter somewhere around the time of Musk takeover. Only used it for event coverage live during events for which I found it genuinely useful at some point and of course doomscrolling. Can't say I miss it. Its like nothing changed in my life. I also managed to miss the LGBT exodus after Musk policy changes and learned about it later at a random FOSDEM talk. Global "social" feeds do everything in their power to steal attention and having it all back is great for sanity.
A lot of teachers also stopped using it around the same time. This was unfortunate as it was an amazing source for project ideas for students.
Banning PG was a mistake [0]
> [George Hotz] I'm upset when I see PG get banned for mentioning mastodon
> [Elon] yeah, that was a mistake
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=42m14s
Meta note: it's worth listening to this historical 'space' in full (well, the first ~1h while Elon's on). The meta-pattern becomes obvious: people (esp nay-sayers) are outraged about ~20 different issues, X since addressed most of them, but the outrage-mob moved on to new issues, X will address them, and so on.
The point: the ragey mob is never satified, X moves very quickly (partly due to it's willingness to try things, and occasionally fail in the short term) but this strategy is long-term optimal.
counter point: x active usage is down. the “ragey mob” were engaged users who have since left, along with the user growth and MAU.
Depending on the metric (e.g. MAU, DAU, web impressions etc) X is generally down about 3-20% since Elon's takeover. Seems fair to say X is a 'break even' investment at best.
It will be extremely interesting to re-visit this thread in 10 years. X is currently a gateway for promoting Grok (with 11-figure DAU potential), and X is acquiring financial licences in US states, with a view to becoming an 'everything app' (something which the East seems to have - in the forms of wechat, Grab - but the West weirdly doesn't). If X can be the West's first 'everything app'.. trillion+ dollar valuation isn't out of the question.
How exciting…
They're also doing something very scammy with ads - if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it, whereas it's much less sensitive on ordinary posts and behaves like any other app. This is clearly to increase click-through artificially.
Ads and “scammy” tactics were always like bread and butter. The whole point of industry is to just increase the numbers using whatever means possible except for what the industry deems unquestionably unacceptable, after all. So, naturally, there’s this incentive of making the paid-for action as low effort as tolerable (preferably under the guise of “improvement” to prolong the status quo) and make money while that window of opportunity is still open. Sad but true.
As long as pay-per-click exists it’ll always be like that. Minimally necessary action will be probed, negative feedback (“won’t buy this on principle/will bug others to raise awareness on ethical concerns”) eventually making the industry raise the bar higher.
Beats outright malware (auto-installing IE toolbars, yay!) and popup/popunders on a click anywhere eras of the past, but despite any possible illusions, the bar isn’t particularly high still (modern web is still nauseously popup-ridden), when viewed through the modern first-world optics.
Not that I like anything about this - just an observation.
> if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it,
They did it for Android, too. Just the other day, I tried to view replies for an ad, and thought I'd accidentally clicked the ad multiple times before realizing that the replies indicator and even the timestamp (which is the normal "just go to the tweet" valve) were behaving the same as an ad click.
Edit: Re-reading your comment, not sure if that was exactly what you meant, or if you just meant that it'll e.g. open the ad if you try to scroll on it.
Instagram does that too, I never accidentally like any post when scrolling, but I accidentally like ads every day.
I noticed that too, it's so annoying.
The Tumblr app does this and it’s infuriating
On a related topic, I've been following with some amusement the outrage on Reddit/r/Grok because Grok will no longer make porn. Apparently Grok was trained on all the NSFW material on X and Twitter before it intentionally so Grok could have a "spicy" mode. And spicy it was. Some of the stuff it made was really good and people loved it. But (allegedly) Musk changed his mind to go after enterprise and government accounts so spicy mode was killed and now there a lot of angry users complaining on Reddit.
My interest is this: It appears that it's not possible to over-ride the training effectively since NSFW material bleeds into normal image requests. Musk had this problem before trying to over-ride Grok's training, so at one point said he would have to retrain Grok. It's interesting to me that LLMs can't be steered effectively, which makes me wonder if they can ever really be aligned ("safe")
Why do so many supposedly smart humans think that we can make an artificial mind that is capable of AGI (or even something close to it), but from a completely detached evolutionary history and biological needs, and somehow force it to "align" to our human/biological/societal priorities?
Have none of these people ever had or been a teenager? At least teens have some overlapping biological requirements with non-teens that will force some amount of alignment.
I think the assumption is that without emotions there is no agression or evil intent
When I think of the closest analogue I can, emotionless humans, the picture is generally sociopaths, and the "non-aligned."
I think the assumption you mention is, frankly, sociopathic.
I think the more general issue with all AI and "safe" is that AI 'learned' what it knows from human content ... and we object to the content we as humans created.
Hard to avoid that problem.
> Hard to avoid that problem.
Agree. Even the Christian Bible has horrific content that in some communities would require trigger warnings
I mean isn't this just considered data poisoning?
The training data was considered good by Musk to start with, so he could have spicy mode, but he changed his mind and now Grok is considered poisoned with porn. My question is, can that be fixed or does he have to start over again?
There was research on LLMs training and distillation that if two models have a similar architecture (probably the case for Xai) the "master" model will distill knowledge to the model even if its not in the distillation data. So they probably need to train a new model from scratch.
(sorry i don't remember the name but there was an example with a model liking howl to showcase this)
Subliminal learning: https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/
If true, bad news for Elon Musk and xAI because they have to start over. He's already indicated this in regards to Wikipedia. He wants to train on Grokepedia and not Wikipedia. Removing NSFW material gives him another reason.
I've been a long-time Twitter user. I don't hate Elon, so when he bought it I was cautiously optimistic.
I deactivated last week. The platform is bad and getting worse. It's scammy and spammy. Everything is designed around garbage engagement, so that the X team can brag about how good the product is doing.
I follow a couple of writers on X through Nitter on a desktop browser. These writers inevitably draw bot comments whenever they touch on something relevant to some or another powerful country’s politics. For me, it’s easy to verify that these commentators (who often have convincing-sounding fake names and photos) are bots by simply ctrl-clicking on the commenters’ usernames and, in the tab that immediately opens, seeing at a glance that they post weird single-issue material at an unusually sporadic pace, and often in tellingly flawed English.
Do I suspect correctly that in the way most people consume X, though the official website or an app, this is not so transparent? Whether because opening new views is so slow on a phone screen, or because the official interfaces probably intersperse content with advertisements and other visual crap? I don’t think state actors would be so active in trying to manipulate discourse if the platform hadn’t degraded to a point where their activity isn’t obvious to most users.
Why do bots have flawed english? Seems like with LLMs being a thing they would not.
“Bots” is a cover term for both purely automated scripts, and for human posters who are using some kind of tools to post more efficiently in order to manipulate discourse.
In this case, it’s obvious that a lot of Russian state-actor employees, for instance, are not passing their writing through an LLM, but rather are just quickly vomiting out a comment in their imperfect English. Exposés of Russian troll factories show that a lot of these employees are young university-educated people who only want the money, and don’t have strong feelings for the propaganda they are posting, so they half-arse it.
They're not necessarily bots in the sense of automated accounts but the older troll farms with a bunch of people just clicking away.
It's a full PvP server now. Old Social media outrage algos + paying people for posts further broke it
When I left about a year ago the whole feed was entirely just bot slop from verified accounts. It was impossible to tune or subscribe your way in to a good feed. I imagine it's so much worse now with all the AI generated content.
I just use the "Following" tab (and not the "For you" tab).
I prefer the X now. Unlimited stream of unhinged, unfiltered thought stream from strangers straight into my feed.
A small percentage might even be actual humans!
Is this … sarcasm?
I like it about the same. Maybe a tad more because some people I like are no longer banned or feel the need to censor.
I'm weird though. I like 4chan and find most social media today is too intolerant and authoritarian for my tastes.
Excuse me for thinking you a hypocrite. X.com is about as authoritarian as it gets. They have banned so many people.
Just an example ..
https://fortune.com/2024/09/25/twitter-x-account-suspensions...
Maybe GP genuinely enjoys madness.
If you grew up with image boards in their heyday (pre-2004) then X could feel a bit nostalgic.
However the word filters (to suppress messages) does dampen it a bit.
I mean, is 4chan better than those image boards? or worse? how about 8chan
i mean have you seen Fox News?
Only last week is shocking to me. People were saying this about twitter for like 10+ years as soon as it was commercialized and was no longer just user content.
I am honestly curious what Elon would need to do for you to dislike him. That ship sailed for me long ago
Words have meaning. He said he does not hate him. That does not mean he likes him. Hate is a very strong emotion. Dislike is a much less stronger emotion. That is not all the same.
(I also don't hate Elon, but I still don't like him or consider doing buisness with him in any way)
USAID was a highly effective and efficient operation. Musk dismembered it, leading to untold misery, death, and the spread of infectious diseases. I think this is reason enough to hate Musk.
Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while he also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...
The race to the highest body count looks like Elon in first, RFK jr. second, and Stephen Miller a distant third but looking like he'll finish strong once the camps are fully operating.
I would argue without Musk and his Twitter/richest man of the world power, Trump would have never been elected in the first place, which would have prevented this and a lot of other bad things. Still, I don't hate him. (Hate is not a condition I think is healthy or constructive or something I should explain myself not feeling it)
> Hate is not a condition I think is healthy or constructive
I agree with you on this. Strong emotions impede our ability to be creative and problem-solve.
/Raises hand Sam Altman hater over here.
I mean his personal lack of ethics, bigotries, greed, and ignorance is what directly made twitter what it is today. Maybe you should dislike him and hold him in low opinion.
What is garbage engagement?
I think its entirely reasonable that an algorithm shows you things that you engaged with. It would be weird if it didn't promoted stuff I didn't engage w/.
garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not engage with the content. And for some people it is quite difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is trending so might be i should show this to more people. So this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is loosing battle in the sea of bots :)
Person A: Says something exceptionally inflammatory and provably false
Person B-Z: That's a horrible thing to say, why are you like this?
Algorithm: Wow, this post must be awesome, I should show it to more people!
and the sad part is that this is by design. no one who runs the algorithm cares why yo engage with content. engagement = good = money
A better term might be antagonism. X seemed to switch to a system of rewarding views as a method of engagement far above all else, which led to people (generally and deliberately) ramping up the extremeness of their hot takes in a bid to get as much attention as possible.
A parallel term is "hate click", where there's a headline that's so stupid or off that you click it just to see what the hell they were talking about.
An example of this vile genre was someone tweeting about how:
"Teachers make plenty of money, and I think they should provide school supplies to their students out of their own pocket instead of making hard-working parents pay for them."
It was a message _designed_ to get people to yell at them, and for all of that, it wasn't any of the really hot-button stuff around politics, race, or any of the other divisive things that drive antagonistic engagement.
Twitter could have (and previously did) reward all sorts of other types of engagement, but the shift to rewarding divisiveness was just at another level.
I find it so sad that Twitter still gets traffic at all. Even if we put aside the super shady content on this platform (free speech, lol), the app, either on the web or mobile, has a sub-par user experience.
I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.
X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective.
Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.
Who is using Bluesky in the US?
Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I am.... For what it's worth.
There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.
And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem.
Believe me, you can live without Twitter.
I've never received a x.com link from a friend. Maybe we run in different circles with different people.
Most embeds I see on Discord are Bluesky. Bluesky seems to have taken over for social media links on sports subreddits. It saw a huge spike during the last game of the World Series.
https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/
Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base there after the election spike that it's still growing toward the peak after dropping to a little less than half.
> Who is using Bluesky in the US?
A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness).
> Is it just my friends?
If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
Mentions of Joe Rogan like this set off alarm bells for me. It's never good faith comments
The fact that the left defined Joe Rogan as right-wing for not adhering to very specific far-left tenets (e.g. de-platforming personas non grata and cooperating with cancel culture) only served to push him and his listeners rightward, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>only served to push him and his listeners rightward
Kind of takes the agency away from full-grown adults, doesn't it?
How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?
You're right. Change the words "they were pushed" to "they chose". There's your agency.
> How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?
You assume that "having principles" means having your principles, and that for someone to disagree must mean they are unprincipled and simply chasing money/audience/fame. This kind of attitude comes across as incredibly arrogant and un-self-aware, and people/voters en masse want nothing to do with it.
The reality is that many millions of people are principled, and they simply have different principles.
For example, "opposing views should be aired and discussed" is a principle widely held by many millions of voters that the left has had an incredibly hard time understanding, respecting, and digesting.
I suspect the people that really think that are a small minority. "The South was right, black people are subhuman and needed to be taken care of by slave owners" is not going to be a popular discussion topic, for example. Or suggesting that Hitler was right about how people should be treated in Europe.
For a communicator, no audience means you lose everything. Why would he, or for that matter, anyone do that?
Look at JK Rowling. Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left.
Say Rogan sticks to his guns. He would face similar, never-ending attacks, no left-leaning figure could attend his podcast without becoming guilty by association, so he'd end up interviewing basically the same people as he does now, only he wouldn't cater to some people that, given somewhat recent events, would most probably celebrate him getting murdered.
I reckon we shouldn't take away the agency away from the adults who made purity testing a common practice, given the utter disaster we are experiencing as a consequence.
> Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left.
This framing is laying on the narrative a little bit thick don't you think? It makes it seem like she's hated for being wealthy, when it is actually because she has been funding hate groups and calling for trans people to be physically attacked.
The "standing up for women" rhetoric is a little bit hollow in the face of her non-existent feminism when the subject isn't physically attacking trans women, she didn't make a single comment during the recent uptick in abortion debates taking place in the UK for example.
> she has been funding hate groups and calling for trans people to be physically attacked
She has done neither of these things you claim. Please refrain from spreading misinformation.
Time for you to post sources
You are just proving my point. Statements like this show that it's worthless to engage.
Can you provide any source for her "calling for trans people to be physically attacked"? Because you seem fixated on it, and I've just spent the last 15 minutes looking for one, and I can't find it.
What I can find is her spending so much goddamned money on philanthropy that she stops being a billionaire, while not dodging a dime of taxes precisely because she considers it her obligation. A fortune amassed in what is probably the most ethic way possible, through exploitation of nobody, writing books.
Related to this I can find the foundation of the Volant Charitable Trust, "a grant-making trust to support charitable causes in Scotland, helping vulnerable groups with an emphasis on women, children and young people."
I can also find a comment of "every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them".
And that's the point. You want to paint her as some lunatic who would like to hunt trans people down for sport, when it's crystal clear that she has the "radical" (standard 2018 radical leftist) notion that trans women are not the same thing as biological women and that the definition of women shouldn't be changed to appease to them.
But again. It's not worth it to engage, because we both know I can spend 20+ minutes working on this reply and you are not going to change your stance. An apostate is worse than a heathen, which is why people complain about Rowling rather than anyone who is actually right wing. Because you are scared that if you defended her, you would face the same judgement. Making the world a worse place through and through.
I posted that earlier without checking and recalled wrongly, rather than calling for people to physically assault she instead called for her following to take photographs of trans women in public toilets and disseminate those photos to the public[1].
That was my bad, I knew that she had done something abhorrent and indefensible but it was 5 months ago and I'd forgotten which kind of hatred she had been producing specifically. I'll cite the source first next time.
1: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPG5DlIFIz/ -- I don't have a twitter account to forward the original, but there are news stories about this from the time if you're unsatisfied with that link.
I mean it honestly when I say thanks for the correction.
“My views are everyone else’s fault” is such a prevalent and baffling claim these last few years. If you have a belief, own it.
It's not "my views," it's "my political allegiances." There's a difference.
Deciding what political party to vote for is entirely a matter of picking a team, which is entirely dependent on who is on that team. Of course it's "everyone else's fault" whose team you decide to pick. That is literally the game. People are picking representatives. Deciding what representatives to pick is 100% a case of who those representatives are, how they act, and what they believe.
If one team antagonizes you and attempts to harm you, and you therefore decide to vote for the other team, not only is that so reasonable as to be completely unsurprising, but it's also quite justifiable to say, "This is their fault."
Somehow people have forgotten that politics is about garnering willing votes, not smugly browbeating and shaming people about our superior morals and ethics.
I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a year ago.
It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
I suspect our politics are just too different for my attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky.
You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls").
If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.
i consider myself left-wing and found it very toxic. the ubiquitous blocking features are also a pretty big negative as i found myself blocked by a considerable portion of the site simply for following people in AI
site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos
Honestly, getting on those blocklists is a benefit in and of itself, it means anyone who is radical enough to follow blocklists that block people just because of whom they follow won’t cross your path.
There is an extremely toxic component to Bluesky’s user base, unfortunately, with the many attacks on the CEO for not banning Jesse Singal being testament to that. But for what it’s worth in the circles I’ve cultivated there I now see very little of those toxic people, and I don’t see any support for their behaviour. So I hope in time a more open culture will win out.
>If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
I reckon there's more of a correlation between this type of statement and being a Bluesky user than being right-wing and using X.
I mean X userbase is enormous compared to that of Bluesky, you can't be serious.
It's also dropping like a stone, which is why they are resorting to these tricks to inflate one of the few metrics that can be observed from outside (how much traffic they send to other sites).
Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation.
I consider myself left-wing, but bluesky is pretty casually toxic in a way that turns me off.
Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed.
There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.
> Who is using Bluesky in the US?
Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes, if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.
> Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming that everyone is using that same site is silly. It doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other people are using other sites.
> But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.
I would Press X to Doubt (perhaps ironically, for this X...). Searching around, it seems like Bluesky has about a tenth as many total users as X has active users, but it's definitely growing at a faster rate, and X might be declining in active users.
Anecdotally, lots of people I noticed leaving for Bluesky very loudly and publicly quietly returned to posting on X after a while.
it's completely false for the ML technical discussion i'm interested in. here's a random topic, for instance:
https://bsky.app/search?q=%22induced+operator+norm%22 https://x.com/search?q=%22induced%20operator%20norm%22&src=t...
bluesky is mostly populated by fringe elements and that's putting it nicely
My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder.
Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government.
https://social.overheid.nl/directory has a list of government services, municipalities, and other stuff.
https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions
https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service
Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.
But X doesn't have a lock on live information.
What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda
If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you
Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back)
X will tell you to invest in <Scam>
X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire.
People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate.
X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.
It certainly doesn't.
About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above.
So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form.
(And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)
It's network effect, same as Facebook
There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky, but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons.
BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my feed enough that I don't usually see it.
They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better off not using either, but I still find myself going back to Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about Reddit, honestly.
Interesting, BlueSky's non-algorithmic feed makes it really easy to avoid political ragebait and focus on tech accounts imo
Really depends on who you're following
The problem (if you want to call it that) with following a person on sites like Bluesky or X is that people aren't machines and won't stay "on topic" regarding the reason you followed them in the first place. You might follow them for software dev, biking, birding, or whatever, but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.
IMO, Reddit/HN-esque sites are better for following topics, and Bluesky/X/Mastodon are better for following people. Maybe hashtags are a good middleground but I don't have enough experience using those sites to say.
(Disclaimer: I don't use any social media except for HN.)
> but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.
Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting).
Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick.
I don't think you're being confrontational, and I don't think it's a problem either to be honest. My point was more that, try as one might, you can't build the ultimate curated list of non-political follows because somebody will eventually write something that you consider political. It can't be avoided, which I think is what you're saying too.
I personally think that people try too hard to avoid politics and shame those who "make things political" – especially in tech. We live in an inherently political world, and our industry is increasingly political as it's co-opted by political figures and even dictators across the world. Trying to avoid talking about it is like stuffing our fingers in our ears and pretending reality isn't real, imo.
I'd love to give it another try and be proven wrong. At the beginning it felt like "old Twitter", before it became mainstream, because it was almost entirely software engineers who had left Twitter. After Trump took office it felt like a constant deluge of hand-wringing and people shaking their fists at clouds, and it was tough to immerse myself in it.
Make sure you stick to your "Following" feed and not "Discover" or even the feed dedicated to what your friends are into
If someone is feeding you ragebait on Bluesky you should just unsubscribe. The feed is what you make it. Twitter can be kind of like this too, but the trolls haunt the replies on there whereas people can shut trolls out of their replies on Bluesky. That's the big difference, is someone comes into a thread just to stir shit the original poster can shut them down.
The danger that this creates an echo chamber has to be weighed against allowing trolls to run unchecked, or worse be like Twitter where these people get promoted to the top because ragebait generates big engagement numbers.
Ultimately, the entire social media world needs to admit that maximizing engagement is a bad idea. They have to somehow convince the advertisers that having their product next to content designed entirely to enrage the reader is not good.
I would try again, but not use discover, and aggressively mute/block.
Yep. I ruthlessly anyone who induces the slightest negative emotion in me, be it annoyance, fear, anger etc. You are what you consume.
I check the mainstream headlines once a day, kind of like checking the weather. There may be something I need to know. But then I move on.
Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless.
> Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless.
The problem with that attitude is that eventually democracy itself suffers, when people don't care no more. The word "democracy" itself points that out - "demos" means "the people".
I think what's disappointing is that so many people that I've followed for years now routinely engage in daily political slapfights, or at least retweet ragebait. In the blogging era, it would have been really weird for a software engineer to sit down and write several paragraphs about their political views, but the friction of hitting "repost" is so comparatively low that everyone does it. Myself included, honestly, although I've been trying not to.
I don't have any problem with people having and voicing thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations about politics, especially with people with whom they disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of what's happening on social media, but that's a different topic.)
I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow topics, not people, and there isn't a great way to do that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber. And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated the site is at this point.
To follow topics on Bluesky, add feeds for those topics.
The "Following" tab is literally that - chronologically ordered posts and replies from accounts you follow. The "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" tabs give you algorithm-sourced stuff that is somewhat connected to who you follow.
When I click on the tab for the Game Dev feed, I see nothing but posts about game dev. When I click on the Astronomy feed, I only see telescopes and pictures taken with telescopes.
The reality is that microblogging, whether it be on X or bluesky or mastadon or even facebook posts, will ALWAYS be lower signal, lower value than real, curated or effort filled content.
I like John Green a lot, including his vlogs that are just him speaking about stuff he doesn't know for half an hour, but I still do not go read what he posts on Bluesky, because it's as low quality, low signal, low intent, and low effort as comments here on HN.
It's just not useful. It's not a good use of my time to read random tweets from people.
When I first got a twitter account in like 2010, I very very instantly recognized it was not for me. If something is important, someone will take the effort to make an actual piece of real content about it, like a blog or video or essay or book. Hell, even a thorough reddit post is better than microblogging.
If it's not worth going through that effort to get the message out to people, why should I consider that a valuable message?
It's emblematic of the past 20 years of social development in my opinion. If the only thing stopping you from getting the word about something super duper important is that writing a page essay is too hard, nobody really needs to care about that, because writing an essay is so easy we make children do it
It's all noise. The signal doesn't go on twitter, it goes on real platforms where you might make money from good signal, or like, a freaking scientific paper, or the front page of a news org.
Earlier, I would have agreed that microblogging pales next to long-form blogging. But then so much long-form blogging moved to Substack that has an overall culture as full of pathologies as microblogging: post regularly even if you don't have anything new to say, hustle a brand that can be monetized, accept a comments section with a broken UI full of people shamelessly trying to hustle their own brand. People doing long-form video content will often speak openly about how they feel forced to change their content in order to avoid being punished by the YouTube algorithm.
Personally, I'm pessimistic that there are many remaining sources of substantial discourse and discussion at all. I just pirate a lot more university-press books from Anna's Archive.
I noticed the same thing with Angela Collier. I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training.
It's because it's a microblogging platform.
That's just what it's meant for, low effort swipes, shitposting, retweets out of context etc.
It is notable that in order to actually accomplish their "We want a platform where a celebrity says something and you instantly get that something", Twitter had to do a lot of work and pain curating who "celebrities" are. The alternative is everyone getting a waterfall of shit, because the vast majority of people do not have PR agencies between them and their tweet button, and do not have anything important or meaningful to say that is better said fast and short than long and naunced. The entire point of microblogging is to eschew nuance.
That's absurd full stop.
Why would you ever want to know whatever low effort comment sparked thanksgiving dinner arguments at other people's thanksgivings?
> I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training.
Please tell me which of "Water fluoridation is a well understood treatment, and people who are telling you it's bad for you are just lying", "<Knitting trivia>" or "Target is doing poorly as a business right now" or "ICE doing gestapo things" is "unsubtle", or why any of that should be "subtle", which is a strange choice of word.
I have a great user experience on it.
Here's what I do:
I follow people who are consistently interesting and don't post too much.
Then I only use "Following". "For You" is an algorithmic attention vortex for the proles.
The app consistently shows me things that I want to see from the social circle around the people I follow and the topics they talk about. Alternative platforms like Threads are worse at this; the platform I hear the most about, Bluesky, brags about not having this. Maybe the Twitter experience varies by which topics you are interested in, you might get served more slop the more mainstream topics you follow. But the reason I have not quit due to unusability is because there isn't any unusability.
BlueSky brags about not having what, exactly? Nazis?
Charitably, I assume they mean it brags about not having an algorithmic feed.
Bluesky does actually have an algorithmic feed ("Discover"), but it isn't the default.
It's good people like you who consider free speech some laughing matter don't lead the conversation.
I don't even want to think how dim the situation would be without him having taken over.
Oh god are we still pretending X is a free speech platform.
If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell you.
Seems to me to be more possible than on a manually curated platform where any whiff of a differing opinion gets downvoted, [dead] and [flagged].
Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened.
I like the new Twitter stance on speech and some of the new features, problem is the UI is super annoying. It was actually kinda bad before too, but it got way worse.
You like the X.com stance where it bans speech from liberals and leftists?
Who did they ban? Old one was https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banne... plus the New York Post for the laptop thing
The algorithm is a mirror: it show more of what you interact with. You see “shady content” because you pay attention to it.
But you can also follow people and read only what they write, reply to them, and write yourself.
That isn't true. I signed up for a fresh account for a project I was working on. Despite following no-one and not having interacted with anything, all I was pushed were racists, bigots, and extremist political content.
Oh, and the owner's account.
While this is an interesting data point, the main thing it tells us is that when the algorithm has no information about your preferences, that it skews racist.
This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences.
Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the algorithm.
The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed?
Or you can just leave the platform. We don’t always need to interrogate the exact reasons why something happens, we can just see it, document it, then go elsewhere.
> This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences.
... of people actively using Twitter, yes. Which is precisely the point.
Even if you believe that Musk and team don’t “touch the scales” of the algorithm, the inevitable consequence of the decision to prioritize comments of people willing to pay for blue checks, is to discourage users not in that segment from engagement at all levels.
The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to weight the input to the algorithm away from “what does an average user pay attention to” and more towards “what does a paying user pay attention to.”
Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO short-sighted, business goal. What it is not is a way to create a fair and impartial “mirror” as you have described.
Open a private tab, navigate to x.com. All you see are heinous neonazis casually discussing the jewish question and fantasizing about race wars.
If you do that all you get is a login wall. Have you actually done this or is this what you imagine it to be?
Well, I can confirm that this is the case with a brand new account.
I created an account, picked "pets" as my interest. I was suggested several pet-related accounts to follow, and followed none.
I went to the home page and "for you" was populated about 80% from known right accounts and angry right-flavored screeds from people I didn't recognize.
The other 20% was just a smattering of random, normal stuff. None of it about pets.
The discussion over X is always the same:
"It's gone to hell"
"No, it just reflects your tastes"
"That's objectively false: create a new account and see what happens."
"..."
The same can be said of bluesky. In fact I think that you've said it yourself and recommended that people stick to manually curated follows!
I think it's good advice, the main difference is that Bsky encourages you to do that by giving you the possibility to customize your feeds (and set whatever as the default). You can have a combination of personal lists and custom algorithmic feeds (your own or someone else's).
Even ignoring musk's takeover, I think it's a better model that reduces doomscrolling, ragebait and generally low quality interactions.
uh, where...?
I find this a bit disingenuous.
If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as the best worst option.
Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash.
You can take your analogy further. The buffet noticed you pausing on unhealthy food, and begins replacing all the healthy options with unhealthy options. People shame your criticisms and note you could easily put blinders on and intentionally look longer at healthy options anytime you accidentally glance at an unhealthy one. the alternative would be an absolute repression of free speech after all.
A whole lot of machine learning practitioners use X. Makes it difficult to avoid if you're interested in the news. It's definitely a network effect issue.
You might find this useful: https://news.smol.ai/
What about links to malware or other illegal content that will be downloaded without me clicking on it...?
Is it only in the app, or also with the browser?
Crazy.
> also with the browser
Browsers have been doing this forever: you make a request to a server (A) that you choose to interact with, and it could respond with various things (a redirect, a page with a meta refresh, a page with a frame / iframe, etc.) that result in your browser automatically making a request (and rendering the resulting page response) to some other server (B) that could get you in trouble.
However, in this classic scenario, when A starts sending you to B, you stop trusting A. This is simple when A's behavior is entirely determined by A's owner. What if it's determined by other users (not just A's owner)? Typically, A would be careful to not serve a redirect (etc.) based on user input, as that would be considered an "open redirect" vulnerability (with an exception for link shorteners, I guess). Interesting how the webview preloading that we're discussing now commits essentially this same offense.
You don't get it. It's worth it for the sake of UX.
/s
The new behavior is much better from a user perspective. When you tap on a post, it'll start loading the link in the background so once you are done reading the post the link will load immediately and the post will shelve on the bottom of the screen. It is very fluid, especially with blog posts / news articles.
Does this mean an attacker can turn any impression into any GET request?
It'd be an interesting way to count how many impressions your tweets get: add a URL to every tweet, put a tracking "pixel" in the webpage (assuming the webview loads all assets; if not, then just add the "pixel' URL to the tweet..
There's an impression counter on every tweet, visible to everyone
All ad networks also claim the ad you pay them to show got n impressions, according to their calculations, here's the bill...
Make the pixel a zip bomb for lols
Advertising landing page full of CPI ads?
Not sure how much of an attack that is. FWIW the preloading is nice as a user.
Is the request coming from the user's IP or via a Twitter proxy?
As a plain webview would mean that you can grab everyone's details.
deleted my account a few weeks ago and it actually feels like my health has improved because i'm no longer constantly bombarded with ragebait and doomerism
i hope they keep ruining the experience of using it some more
> Update 2: even correcting for the fake views, traffic to Substack links from X is up substantially. (full post reads, signups, etc. also track.)
Real traffic is estimated at 3-4x higher than before, after correcting for the preloading.
https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985852384531394916
That's precisely what Wechat is doing. Most chinese "mega apps" do this.
Elon absolutely on his track to copy this important feature [1]
The webview works as a traffic faucet. Elon can turn it on or off for every third-party site, you know, for "Internet safety".
My take:
Next step is X.com proprietary APIs inside the Webview, like payment and everything.
The ultimate goal is a "mini-app" framework that use PWA-like techs to run everything based on the Webview and circumvent Appstore.
And last a phone that runs the "mini-app" framework because why not, as an "AI edge node" like Elon recently proposed.
[1]: https://x.com/danmurrays/status/1683446630245187584
If there was ever a good reason to stop using Twitter, this is it.
I don't think this would even make it into top 10 good reasons to stop using Twitter.
A crazy ass billionaire trying to develop an "everything" app seems like a pretty damn good reason to run the other direction. I wouldn't want anyone controlling an app like that, much less Elon fucking Musk.
the same story applies to Wechat. Pony Ma was crazy rich for QQ and games already, he created another Wechat. Lots of ppl tried to boycott it, but network effect forced everyone to use it.
I'm fascinated with the number of users of this site who seem disproportionately invested in getting people to stop using Twitter.
Yeah it's so fascinating that people want an open internet rather than a small group of billionaires and big tech companies controlling everything. Truly bizarre.
"open"?
That's an interesting word to describe a platform that was previously the undisputed playground of Feds and NGOs.
What does this mean?
Pre-2022, Twitter was subject to heavy editorial oversight from D.C. and northern VA.
Censorship and propaganda at breathtaking scale.
This is a good place to start: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/
I like how you complain about "propaganda at breathtaking scale" and you fell for the Twitter Files, which was... precisely that.
Please show your work.
Musk's own lawyers did the work for us.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyers/in...
> “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.
> The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
> “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.” The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.
> Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.
Don't worry, though. Under Musk's leadership, free speech is well protected. Just ask https://x.com/elonjet, which Musk specifically promised (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456) to protect! They would never ban a news story just because it was from a hack! (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...)
"Show you're work"
Does exactly that using Musk's own lawyers
"...Wait no you weren't suppose to actually do that..."
Yes - it wasn't with respect to Trump. It was silencing negative stories about Biden and his son that was the proximate issue, and the general silencing of mostly Republican voices by mostly Democrat voices (though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent[0].
[0] https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil...
Again:
> > The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
That was the case for the Biden laptop story, too. (And SCOTUS, thus far, seems to agree; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri)
Again: Musk's own lawyers argued in court that the Twitter Files don't actually show what Matt Taibbi claimed they do.
(Taibbi also publicly claims Musk is now censoring him. https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1758230628355485979)
> though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent
While I tend to doubt that assertion, "Left-wing terrorism outpaces far-right attacks for first time in 30 years" perhaps points to a reason for a difference if it exists. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/28/left-wing-terrorism-far-rig...
The current administration seems just fine with similar jawboning. https://www.theverge.com/policy/799473/facebook-meta-ice-jaw...
If that were the reason we'd see even 10% of the same fervor for cutting out AWS or Cloudflare but we don't
the webview messes up tokens and passwords managers so I don't see this happening. The US is too culturally different to have mega apps. In Asia their supermarkets also have a lot of information in the menu for example.
Replace "mega app" with "platform" and that's pretty much what Apple and Google are, Apple especially.
no I will not replace mega app with platform, WeChat app is totally different from the App Store.
In and Out has 5 menu items, similar to an app made in the USA, not too many features
A Chinese market can list 50 items similar to WeChat that has 50 different features.
The culture is reflected in the app design.
source: https://digitalcreative.cn/blog/how-china-ux-is-different
The App Store moved the clusters of icons to the home screen, but the messages and wallet app are right next to each other, and tightly integrated. You get to re-arrange and hide most icons, at least.
The UI looks different (information density etc.) but in the end it's still a collection of external applications neatly wrapped inside a platform with strong walls and a strict gatekeeper, with a basic suite available by default. In China, you could ditch most of iOS if you could trick a phone into launching directly into WeChat.
In January the (now former) CEO announced the X Money payment platform will debut "later this year". "Yaccarino says the Visa partnership is the “first of many big announcements” that will be made about X Money this year." https://www.theverge.com/news/599137/x-money-payments-servic... I don't remember any other big announcements.
Who in their right mind would give X/Elon money or even enable photos or contacts access on their phone. At some point is just another money laundering thing for our (least) favourite billionaire.
Totally. Mini apps and mini-app stores are already developing in crypto (Farcaster, World,..) and the approach may well become the primary way to deploy advanced and secure apps going forward.
This seems like a fairly reasonable UX improvement. Unless I'm missing anything, it doesn't seem like this has nefarious intent, it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see the content as quickly as possible.
---
It's astonishing how quickly discussion disintegrates when Musk is mentioned on HN. He really is such a divisive figure, with incredibly polarised language both in support and against him.
Normal reasoned arguments are just absent here. Sometimes when two people disagree, they can still have a nuanced conversation/argument about it. But not about Musk.
There are some opinions in this thread that I vehemently disagree with, but it's not worth escalating by adding my opinion to the pile.
It reminds me of that phenomenon where you read the newspaper and notice an article in your domain of expertise and it's riddled with errors! Then you turn the page, read an article about something else, and completely trust it. You somehow didn't transfer the knowledge that the newspaper is inaccurate to the new domain.
It makes me wonder what other discussions on HN (and elsewhere) are completely devoid of nuance and reason, but I just don't notice it.
Preloading links is often avoided because it creates a wide range of issues. Using up newspapers free stories a month on articles users never see etc. Speed just isn’t that useful by comparison.
Incompetence is obviously still a possibility, but the likely intent overcoming such issues is to make X seem to generate more traffic and thus appear to be more relevant.
Even so, Chrome has preloading turned on by default with an option for "extended preloading" which is even more aggressive. There may be some downsides, but I don't think what X is doing here is unreasonable. Speed makes a huge difference in UX.
>Using up newspapers free stories a month on articles users never see etc
Webviews are pretty quarantined from the main safari app. I don't think cookies persist, so I don't think this would be an issue.
I hadn't considered this.
>it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see the content as quickly as possible.
Yes and many people think that is outweighed by all the other issues raised in the larger thread here. That's "nuance and reason". Pretending it isn't there is not "nuance and reason".
Webviews have serious security issues, at least if you enter any data into them.
See this article from 2016: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/modernizing-oauth-inter...
So my worries are that someone is going to click a link in Twitter and then enter their username and password into a news website. When this happens you need to trust the app developers.
> It's intriguing how normal reasoned arguments are just absent here
No 'reasoned arguments' were provided in your take. I'll give you one against this though -- it's all fun and games until you end up on a list because of Musk's UX.
How are you supposed to have a "nuanced discussion" about a guy doing literal Hitler salutes in public?
When you're either unwilling or incapable of understanding other people's perspectives it is indeed very difficult.
Try this: steelman the argument that what Musk did all those months ago wasn't a "literal Hitler salute". If you can do that, I suspect you'll find it a lot easier to have nuanced discussions about that topic (and possibly others) going forward.
Or we could look at everything else he does, like advocate for the AFD in Germany.
And Reform UK in Great-Britain...
Looool is that all your argument? "Everyone hates this one simple trick against nazi: try to forget that they do nazi things, and boom!, you're no longer scared of actual nazis"
Fuck the salute. I can look at everything else he's done and still think he's a terrible individual that should not be given money or power.
Speaking of nuance, I find it rather unintuitive how it often seems like it's harder for people to have a nuanced opinion of other people than to have a nuanced opinion about a policy or software feature or specific situation.
You'd think given how complicated and faceted people are it would be especially easy to find both good and bad things to say about them, but online at least it almost seems to be the opposite: there's even less nuance when discussing people than there is discussing other topics. (Case in point.)
I'm not required to find the good in a person like Musk. I'm allowed to look at the many shitty things he's done and terrible opinions he expresses and say "that is a shit man, and I do not like him or trust him."
He has probably done something for someone somewhere that wasn't terrible. Does it counterbalance the rest? Not really!
There's that (possibly apocryphal) saying, "and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel." Just because a nazi has a redeeming quality somewhere does not undo them being a nazi.
You're not required to do anything. Consider though that if you refuse to see the good in people you disagree with, you have little room to complain when they refuse to see the good in you.
I'll happily do that for the guy who cuts me off in traffic.
One of the fascists that is destroying my country? Fuck no, no consideration for them.
There's a lot of overlap between those two groups. Half of the country voted for Trump in the last election, a few of them are probably your neighbors. They control the presidency and a majority in the house and senate. You better hope they don't all decide they feel the same way about you that you apparently do about them.
The largest share of the eligible voting population was the 'did not vote' group.
I'm OK with calling fascists what they are. I'm also OK with recognizing a neighbor who has been consumed by fascist propaganda.
The fascist is not one that can be negotiated with. As Sartre said:
"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."
I can negotiate with the propaganda poisoned neighbor. There is no negotiating with the people who are running the fascist show. Giving a fascist the benefit of the doubt is playing into their strategy.
Since this got so much attention, I feel the need to add that the CEO of Substack is now saying that even accounting for fake views, their traffic from X has gone up substantially.
Tweet with graph: https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985852384531394916
Here is more from an X developer: https://x.com/dinkin_flickaa/status/1985847269740990717
"Fix for false impressions going out in the next build"
EDIT: Ah your shared post seems like it accounts for that.
This link is all you need to know about the lack of free-speech Twitter has. https://themarkup.org/investigations/2023/09/15/twitter-is-s...
That's incredibly damning. The throttling of Substack writers is so cruel, especially considering how much these writers have contributed to Twitter.
If you link to a page with ads on it, will that webview load count as an ad impression?
This reinforces why I never use the social media apps and only the web versions. Very few apps avoid the invasive engagement-maximization that browsers make a bit more difficult.
It seems like they changed the strategy and enhanced UX. Feels like now there would a lot of worthless traffic in the web
I never use xitter by choice, but when I need to view a tweet/thread/profile I make sure the xcancel[0] browser extension is installed.
[0] https://xcancel.com/
X is an authoritarian platform designed for freedomless speech.
People, including myself, were booted out for giving opinions that did not align with their corrupt values. Even post-Elon, after appealing decision, some of us still haven't been let back in.
Which opinions were those again?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/x-purges-prominent-journalis...
Reddit does something similar in some way but not like this.
I often save links to posts from Reddit in my Obsidian note app. Just copying the link marks it that you shared the link and artificially increases stats in that manner.
How does displaying the webview increase the traffic? Is it because when you scroll through the site, even if you have not openeded the link, it gets opened in the background and counts a visit?
What evidence do you have that the webview "opens in the background"? I just tried it, and it definitely isn't preloaded when I click a link...
> since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other links/platforms
This is just so funny.
I’ve also noticed recently that when I click a Twitter link from Telegram, it hijacks the Telegram webview to open the tweet in Safari.
Wait, so it's all just pre-loading traffic? Ugh. Why would they do this? Speed? Confusion? Both?
seamless data harvesting hidden behind a feature, more cached urls for training data
so many people seem to be complaining that it got worse - duh? it was always shite platform guys c'mon :)
but indeed unfortunately there is not many other things doing real-time info better than X / Twitter
That explains the extra traffic I've been getting from Twitter.
Wait, so it's all just pre-loading traffic? Ugh.
Mobile users with data caps must be super happy.
> the in-app webview
What app are you talking about?
Again, anyone still using Twitter should know they are contributing to the richest man in the world actively pushing to disrupt the core fabric of our society.
I don’t have the same take, but the algorithm and site is so broken, the patterns so dark, that I’m down to maybe 5 minutes of X a week at best.
Everything is posted to get views, even from the more quality people. It’s ironic that I hear about “brainrot” the most on X, but it’s full of brainrot masquerading as valuable information.
They are all like this to a degree because controversy creates engagement. If a platform is not making you money, is not making you smarter, and not helping you form IRL connections, then I highly recommend disabling it.
You literally have people crying that their garbage content isn't getting enough views (and hence payout).
It's embarrassing, but that's what the entire site is.
Disagree, albeit with a /s. We should continue attaching increasingly more corrupted cores to the Wheatley-GLaDOS. Twitter as it is an artery IV port to inject defeatism and derangement into that group of people. Eventually the controlling core will come off and all will return to normal someday.
I fully agree with your stance on Elon but I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit. I've tried Bluesky and although I am very left-leaning on sociocultural topics I just find them too... annoying over there. (I'm closer to neoliberal on economic topics and that's also a bit of an issue there. And I like AI and they pretty much all deeply hate AI.)
> I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit
Like what precisely? Infosec twitter is gone, science twitter is long dead. Visiting my timeline in non-algorithmic mode yields a post from months ago. In algo mode it's just ads and rage-bait.
Simon Willison is on Bluesky, and I'm going to go out on a relatively safe limb and suggest that if you check out what he reposts, who he follows, etc., you will find people who do not deeply hate AI. I do think Bluesky, in general, is a lot like the Twitter of, say, 15 years ago, where the quality of one's feed is very much dependent on how aggressively one curates it -- although I wish they would finally add a feature for selectively turning off reposts user by user.
(It is absolutely true that a lot of creators hate AI, although I would argue that they have fair reasons to do so given the way AI is frequently presented / talked about / used. I find it unfortunate that everything remotely related to machine learning has now been rebranded as "AI", which leads people to reflexively dunk on tools that really aren't that much like the AI they have in their heads, but it's not their fault.)
It might be a 'cold start' problem that I had on Twitter a while ago as well. It takes a bit of time for communities to form, or for you do start interacting with people who are interesting and in the same circles, but also sharing cool stuff.
It is a journey, I still miss so many people from Twitter and it took me/us years of building a specific community, which is now mostly gone, but I do see signs of that appearing on Bluesky.
may I ask, any good follows?
Building rockets, moon bases, making fossil fuels less critical… yes, I agree
He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all to stay on X.
Literal moon shots, while he contributes meaningfully to worsening conditions on Earth. His dismantling of USAID will have a more consequential effect than 90% of his fever dreams ever will.
Not only that, but his @grok bot is now completely unhinged too (the public version) spewing an even more polarized version of his exact views without any ability to consider new information:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632336
Starship will never get to the moon.
those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of us are holding our breath on that one.
I have a bridge in downtown NYC, interested in buying?
https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4
What does he do except making fossil fuel MORE critical? What do you think rockets are powered with?
> making fossil fuels less critical
Tesla for years made billions by enabling others to pollute, and it still does so.
Every EV Musk sells enables more ICE cars to stay on the road.
If you want to drink the kool-aid thats fine, but the facts are not on your side.
Can you explain this a bit? How does Tesla enable ICE cars to stay on the road?
It's not 2014 anymore. Check his tweets, right wing slop occupies most of his brain these days.
What moon bases?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III
These don't exist.
They did say building, not built. Starship R&D work is… tough to deny.
Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware. Unless it actually exists, it's safe to assume that it never will.
I'm very much in the Musk hater category, but it really takes some doing to dismiss SpaceX as vaporware.
This is the problem with the dialogue around Musk. He's not 99% vaporware, he's 80-90% vaporware. That's problem enough.
In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his personal brand. This is not going to end well.
Going to the moon is very much vaporware. Maybe the penultimate example of it.
Going to the moon was, at the very least, demonstrated as technologically possible in the 1960s, and you can literally go watch a Starship launch if you want. I have a very hard time putting it in the same "entirely prospective" category as androids, self-driving taxis, and Mars bases.
The moon is orders of magnitude more difficult to land on than launching a LEO satellite.
And that'd be a great point if we didn't already do it six times with slide rules in the 1960s.
penultimate = second last
I'm sure Musk will have another scam soon enough!
Touche!
> Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware.
Absolutely laughable motivated reasoning. Hate the guy if you must, but claiming one of the most impactful business leaders in American history is "99% vaporware" makes you look silly.
Every shareholder meeting he announces something that never comes to fruition. He’s the vaporware king.
Yet
More Musk vaporware.
It's near the middle of Musk's pile of vaporware.
That was 5-10-15 years ago Elon.
Is the implication here that the core fabric of our society isn't otherwise being disrupted, or that this particular disruption should be viewed as exceptionally egregious?
YSK, it feels like the implication of the framing of your question is that you're suggesting it doesn't matter and nobody should care.
The disruption is egregious. It is notable and worth pushing back against, even if you don't view it as "exceptional".
I am concerned with attacks on freedom, dignity, culture and national character. King Elmo of Twitter is "bad", but mild.
The only way to win is to not play.
> now any time you open a tweet with a link, the in-app webview loads in the background
The what now? Is this also a feature of the actual website if I go there in a browser?
The UI/UX of Twitter has always been a dumpster fire. The non-sequential view that you get when accessing a page when not logged in is horrible.
I don’t know what everyone gets out of Twitter/X. I signed up recently to see what the fuss is about,
I think I selected science and music as starting interests. Within 10 minutes I was getting lots of right wing borderline Nazi bullshit.
Tries it all again in incognito mode. Roughly same thing. WTF
First rule of Twitter is avoid the algorithm at all costs. The trolls have long since figured it out and now if the algorithm is involved you are going to see white supremacist talking points nonstop.
Second rule of Twitter is why are you on Twitter, it's a full on Nazi bar now.
The "following" feed that mostly shows you content from people you have explicitly followed is better, although the site really likes to swap back to the algorithmic "for you" feed whenever you aren't paying attention. However, even the following feed will still have the troll responses on most posts. You really can't avoid them on Twitter.
> Second rule of Twitter is why are you on Twitter,
It was a short affair.
No longer on Twitter. I can't see how anyone would want to be. It's a veritable cesspool.
whaaat a surprise....
Nikita should be ashamed of how BAD the android X app is.
Why are you using twitter for anything at this stage?
It's still the most interesting platform for AI
I just tried to find AI starter packs on BlueSky and confirmed that BlueSky is openly hostile to AI. I understand the reasons, it's just not where I'm at. I'll try Threads and see what happens.
I can't vouch for these, but they seem like reasonable starting points. I searched for "AI starter pack" with the quotes.
https://bsky.app/starter-pack-short/LFAZcGE
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/maosbot.bsky.social/3l3ix4wi64...
Thank you. I did follow one of those using the same search without the quotes and followed. And your second one now. I'm also cleaning up my X site to get rid of anything not AI so I can do a fair comparison.
Bluesky has lots of artists, authors, journalists, etc... who see AI as a direct threat to human creativity. Not that the AI will replace the creativity, but that it can generate slop that looks "good enough" and doesn't demand a living wage or healthcare benefits. Many of these creative types have little trust that corporate management won't try to replace them just to save a buck.
I'm sympathetic to their arguments but that doesn't lesson my need to understand AI if I'm going to help them with their concerns. Ignoring it is not an effective strategy.
It's still the platform where things happen. Even if I'm no longer fundraising there's still a strong, interesting investor community. When founders join an app or companies go to brag about their engineering prowess they still use X. Most people just don't care about Elon enough to leave or not join
I block X and related domains at the router.
what do you recommend instead?
What's so hard about reading scientific papers?
You DO care about the actual, meaningful, quantifiable results, right, not just the vibes and trends and fashions?
Hackernews, Mastodon, Onlineplatforms of Newspapers or Magazines is what I use
Physical contact with Gramineae
Another example and incentive not to use apps and to be held hostage, when an equivalent web service is available. On Android, just use Hermit or some similar app to sandbox a webview of their webpage.
What bugs me is the sheer number of people, and organisations, who still link to images and video or '1/20' long screeds on twitter, while the next article on their own site is bitching about how bad twatter/owner/politics etc is. Seriously if a site, blog, forum etc you know ever links to twitter then just stop interaction with them, they're lazy mofos need to do their own groundwork.
Huge fan of X, but it's pissing in the face of your fans to tell such obvious lies.
> Huge fan of X
Why? It's a cesspool of hate. Even if you try to avoid the political nonsense Elon forces himself and his cronies into your recommendations.
X has everything, and you can pick what you follow (there's a "For You" tab, but also a strictly chronological following tab). I like it for variety of political views (e.g. super-lefty @caitoz, super-righty @L0m3z), following interesting LLM stuff (@elder_plinius is a great follow), lots of devs (e.g. carmack...), art accounts (@yumenohajime, @neurocolor), nutrition/health stuff, so much good stuff!
(The FYP, alas, sucks, and has since forever...)
But Elon Musk is a Nazi who goes around doing Hitler salutes. By using X you are implicitly endorsing and supporting this.
I understand the rationale and I am happy for the authors and I think the distribution will be way better.
As a user I like to get out as soon as I click because I can trace back the link and I can do clipping or bookmark in my browser.
Day One Twitter user; built the very first API app and the first Android client. Launching a "competitor" next month - Keep an eye on https://flipso.com