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Comment by mayneack | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand all the comments promoting the openness of twitter/x. There's a ton of friction to interact with X without an account. Meanwhile, the alternatives mostly allow third party apps, cross posting, and logged out access.

I can follow mastodon and threads accounts on my bluesky timeline using one of many bridge services: https://fed.brid.gy/

I can merge mastodon, bluesky, nostr, and threads one timeline using one of many third party apps: https://openvibe.social/

I can unsubscribe from the default bluesky moderation service and choose one run by a third party: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

The only differentiator for X is the content, and that's an easy choice.

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When people say that X is "Open" they often mean "Open to people like me saying whatever I want." IMO It's often a wink and a nod, a dog whistle, not a serious argument. For all of the reasons you laid out, especially on a site like HN, it's hard (even being charitable) to assume that people mean "X is more open, as in accessible, free to use, etc".

What X has become is a place where you can pay to have your "views" promoted into other people's feeds, a place where bots run rampant, and a place where extremists can share their views without any fear of consequences.

Yet X is still way more diverse, whereas bluesky is mostly white, upper middle class westerners. It is funny to see the least diverse community I've come across pat themselves on the back for somehow being more tolerant. And also accuse users of other, more diverse platforms of "dog whistling".

I'm sure that a platform policed by said privileged groups is somehow better morally or something. Who was dogwhistling again?

If we're talking about diversity, X is mostly bots, so even less diverse than your characterization of Bluesky. You do make a valid point though, fortunately Bluesky is growing and X is not, especially where it counts with outlets like Nature Group, and companies like BMW.

Nor is Bluesky policed by privileged groups, and as a bonus you don't even have to pay for some silly checkmark. What could be more egalitarian than "Free"?

I mean, I completely agree with you when you say that bluesky has more potential. I want bluesky to be a better twitter (I just don't think that twitter was that great even before it became X).

But there's still a long way for it to reach out of the US and Europe. I don't know why, but X is extremely popular in places like the middle East (I was following the fall of Assad in real time), and even Asia, etc. It's something that doesn't even exist anywhere else.

Twitter used to be open, but being open doesn't make you a lot of money. Thanks to the upcoming AI industry running on (scraping) user generated content, being open costs more and cuts into profits. The service went downhill fast once they needed to make a healthy profit.

That's certainly a risk, and bluesky STILL has no user funding, sustainable or otherwise. But making your site a heavily walled garden is bad for any kind of open Internet.

Have any of the X changes been positive for the investment, though?

They all seem to have diminished audience, lessened influence, and resulted in less ad revenue. It's very clear that X has a far smaller burn rate than Twitter did, but it also seems to have lessened revenue, and it's really unclear that there's any profit at all.

Perhaps Elon Musk and the people who helped pony up the cash to buy Twitter were more concerned with something other than profit.

It's not a publicly traded company and hence Musk + his backers can do whatever they want. It's their toy and I'm not in the business of policing anything (within the law) they do with it.

It would be irksome if Musk went on lawsuit spree + PR campaign incessantly complaining that advertisers are 'killing free speech' by not advertising on the platform. Like some weird civic duty that publicly traded businesses with a fiduciary directive ought to have. But, let's be real, folks operating on Musk's level are too clever/business-savvy for anything that amateurish.

"used to be" being the operative part of that phrase. I see no reason to stick around because of a thing that is no longer true.

Twitter seemed to have some cool engineering going on but the number of developers always seemed kinda ridiculous, I suppose they added so many features the vast majority of users never used or needed. Most people I know used it just the same as when they signed up pre 2013 (maybe with the addition of lists).

It's open as in "diverse" imo. Blue sky is still mostly white, mostly western, mostly technical people. X on the other hand has so many different communities and is much more open for "average users". It's a similar problem on mastodon

I think that's probably right. The difference is the content. I don't fault people for preferring the X content. It's not even all nazis.

However, this is exactly the argument that people use to criticize bluesky. What is an echo chamber if not going to a place where you get the content you want. 99% of people who think they're taking a principled stand on moderation or openness in either direction are lying to themselves.

> There's a ton of friction to interact with X without an account.

Anyone else here remember when Twitter had RSS/Atom feeds for each account? You could read Twitter with a news aggregator.

> There's a ton of friction to interact with X without an account.

That's the case on Bluesky too: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/blob/355c50fc0f... https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/blob/355c50fc0f...

That only applies to Bluesky users who opt in, which in my experience is only a small minority of users. Bluesky also does not have a notion of a (fully) private profile, like Twitter/X does

Logged out, I can only see about 80% of tweets when I'm sent the link. I can see almost 0 profiles (only very large brands and verified?), can't search, can't see replies, etc.

I think bluesky only hides people who opt in to hiding their posts.

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