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Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

What change "destroyed" it for you? Was it extending the tweet length limit? Opening up verification for individuals? Organization labels? Bringing back a "following" timeline?

From my POV, it's gotten objectively better at a rapid clip over the past 6 months and I've been seeing less off-topic stuff in my feed (which is basically anything not programming-related) or a few other accounts I follow.

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Over the last few days my feed have been full of actual, literal fascists and other people I have no interest in seeing anything from.

I spend less and less time on Twitter, and it's less and less enjoyable. Unless it changes drastically I won't still be there very long.

You can fix that by not clicking on things you don't like, because it shows you more of what you click. You can end up with a feed with fascists or communists or both because free speech applies to all. But again, you can choose what you want to see by training the algo or by using the feed of who you are following.

The problem with those assertions is that it didn't use to show me any of this content. It used to show me content I was reasonably happy with. Then the content showing up for me very rapidly changed towards including a huge amount of extreme right-wing content and bigotry over a period that I was hardly active, and only used the "Followers" tab and clicked on content I enjoyed from people who don't in any way fit the profile of the type of accounts I complained about earlier.

At best the quality of their recommendation system has dramatically declined. At worst they're intentionally favouring different stuff. In between there are slightly more palatable (than the worst case) options, such as that they're favouring overall popularity of content more over your individual preferences, but in any case all I know is that it's turned from a relatively pleasant experience to pushing content in my face that disgusts me.

I've also written recommendation systems. In fact, I've written one I used to run on top of Twitters API. And so I know from first-hand experience that it's trivial to get better quality recommendations more aligned with what I click on than what I'm currently getting. Something is seriously wrong, whether accidentally or intentionally.

Effectively taking away API access by charging a huge fee for it is what made me move on personally.

The complete destruction of content moderation and his personal beefs with users. He has been preaching "free speech" but he is enabling the worst people in the world while laying dishonest criticism on anyone he doesn't personally like.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...

Three of those four changes (tweet length, paid checks, timeline changes) have made Twitter substantially worse to use. Now every reasonably popular tweet's replies are drowning in irrelevant novel-length screeds and emoji-laden nonsense from paying users.

Also: long form videos, subscriptions, encrypted messaging.

Upcoming possibilities: video conferencing, micropayments á la WeChat.

I think the acquisition has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities and potential for a service that had become stale.

My feed is no longer related to my interests and I don’t know how to get it back on track. That and losing the confidence that the blue check posting is actually someone relevant. Really kills the enjoyment for me.

For me, it was killing the API access. The native client sucks.

From a product perspective it’s certainly better.

But his antics drove away a significant chunk of the user base I care about.

I get pushed openly Nazi content. Like Nazi symbology (the obvious ones, not the deep cut pseudo ambiguous ones) memes and art and quote accounts. I used to report but they get turned down or only suspended for some days.

I also now get pushed a lot of fight and public freak out videos specifically of black people with pages of replies talking about eugenics

The app pushes me back to “for you” repeatedly where this stuff mostly is, or I get a push notification, or it shows up in following feed sometimes for people I don’t follow

See Sam Harris’s interview about the issues with Musk that are directly done on Twitter by Musk himself.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRKaMHCD/

Sam Harris is a radical leftist.

He’s a liberal

>I've never been under any illusion that he is Orange Hitler.

>I supported censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story because it helped Biden

>I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden

>Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.

That's sounds like a radical leftist to me with a severe case of TDS.

Electoralism is liberalism

I hadn't realized how lost Sam had gotten until I saw his Triggernometry interview [0]. I had a lot of respect for him once but he's clearly lost the plot.

[0] https://youtu.be/DDqtFS_Pvcs

Courting actual Nazis, white supremacists, MAGA extremists and pushing them into prominence on feeds. And his constant need to feed his ego.

Can you provide examples of this? And I mean genuine extremists rather than just people you disagree with.

He brought back anyone previously banned for open naziism such as Andrew Anglin and more recently Patriotic Alternative. And some suspicious several “14 88” referencing tweets. There’s also the Nazi meme he posted. Then the Nazi with several huge Nazi tattoos that he defended as unlikely to be a Nazi. Or the groyper memeing. Then the Angelicism / Milady Maker memeing, an nft project made by crypto neonazis with anime swastika homepages

I checked just now and Andrew Anglin's account is suspended. I wasnt able to find a Patriotic Alternative account and when I searched on it, the overwhelming majority of the tweets were critical. And the content of the so-called nazi meme appears to have nothing to do with Nazism other than the shape of a helmet. It's actually about the speed of technology change. And from what I can tell Nick Fuentes/Groyper thing was on twitter for 24hrs before being suspended. So I dunno....it looks like you are providing a distorted view to support a narrative. If I wanted to I'm sure I could find all kinds of other hate content on the fringes that is equally nasty but sits outside the "narrative" we are constantly being force-fed.

you haven't looked much. those are also people who were let back and again suspended after obvious and newsworthy pressure from advertisers. lmk if you want more detail... or if you're unserious about this

I didn’t say he’s very effective so far at whatever he’s doing. He caves to pressure and material realities like anyone and covers ass

Sure if you have some links although Im assuming itll be some leftwing news outlets doing what you appear to be doing, which is dressing up supposition and hearsay as fact.

Generally for me I mostly ignore the media as I find its largely distortions and half-truths. Not to mention Twitter is increasingly their competitor so unlikely to be objective anyway.

I just go on what I see with my own eyes and it seems pretty clean to me.

All those were ones I saw first hand

ok my experience is very different. Here's a short video on this exact topic of an interview with Elon Musk and a BBC "journalist" (I use that label very loosely).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqJKAnN0-gM

Idk what you’re showing me, a bad interviewer Elon accepted and edited by Daily Caller. Goodbye

Just mentioning as your comments reminded me of the BBC guy.

I'm skeptical given how often I've seen people be accused of being nazis and upon investigating discovering to my disappointment some rather milktoast views that would have been mainstream in 1990.

Can you name an actual nazi he is courting?

It always makes me laugh how, for years, we mocked journalists because of their inflated blue check egos, and now every "free thinker" out there is eager to pay to be just like them. Verification is meaningless for most individuals since there's no real need to verify if @ronny2938742 is indeed Mr. Ron Whatever.

However, it's crucial to know if an account claiming to be a big company, government agency, journalist, politician, etc. is legitimate. Opening verification to subscribers is absolutely scammy, just a way to make a couple of bucks off the victims of culture war brainwashing.

Funny. I see it differently. I pay for the blue check because it adds legitimacy. If I'm replying and having conversations with people with similar blue checks then I know I'm talking to real humans not hiding behind fake usernames. Also, any threats or anything from bad actors could otherwise be tracked based on payment method.

When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames? What do you think underlies this feeling you seem to have?

EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.

> When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames?

On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.

At least in my circles blue check marks were mocked because they became a symbol of endorsement of certain viewpoints by Twitter rather than a symbol of verified identity.

And yet the process to grant bluecheck was to literally check personal id, and grant it to whoever had media presence. For years, you could request verification, send a couple of links citing you, provide a government-issued ID and that was it.

Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.

The accounts of companies, government agencies and people linked to those two have a different color of check or a special icon. This seems like an actual improvement on everyone being blue to me.

I acknowledge they're shipping changes to the frontend - some of which are not bad at all - but it sounds surreal to me that we keep talking about UI changes as if they were major features, and pretend twitter circles aren't broken, that notifications are as in near real time as they were, etc. There were major losses of service quality in basically everything backend related, and no amount of frontend tweaking can compensate that.

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