People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people.
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions.
I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.
if someone shares me a link to x.com, it is literally faster for me to edit the URL to xcancel, even on my phone which makes this awkward, and load that, than to wait for the original URL to load.
xcancel does not have a login barrier, nor all the popup messages.
The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though.
When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is frankly fine with me: it's a good reason to never visit a place that has become a cesspool of scams, porn, and white supremacist propaganda.
X has gone harder on login gating than the old Twitter they adopted for sure. Reddit also started going in this direction. Instagram has had it for a long time.
I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that.
Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).
It was a pretty shithouse experience as a non-logged-in user before Musk, but it's a worse experience now.
Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).
In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election because they noticed they speak in a void (journalists don't care about Bluesky) and also they all blocked each other in the purity battle.
They still hate Musk though.
Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.
> they all blocked each other in the purity battle
I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read before talking to me") is scary and genuinely interesting. For some people it almost seems like a full-time job.
We even see it in some other, non-political, social circles (knitting famously had a purity competition/obsession a while ago).
I'm still struggling to explain why this is such a focal point for some people. Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people?
Reddit is trying to push to it (if they don't already?), Pinterest does it, unfortunately user-generated content is worth more nowadays for user monetization, ads and preventing AI bot scraping. Can't fault them for it too much.
The whole experience is extremely frustrating. I quit x as it became unbearable bad and not functional. It's really a shame what Elon did to x but it's exactly what cancer billionaires do. Whoever says x is good is out of his mind.
I don't know how you wrote that with a straight face. The site is really bad now. Every time I log in I get a full screen upsell ad, most of the features don't work, people get banned at random (big scary "permanent ban, no recovery" then a silent restoration afterwards), there's CSAM all over the platform, and moderation of legitimate bad posts goes ignored.
Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job.
Setting aside any feelings about Musk, ad quality, or even product direction choices like locking down public access...
I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also presented as server errors and 404s for a while until the necessary error states were added, and it has had some spotty downtime. Most of these things are better now than a year ago, but not all, and that's only getting back towards what it was before.
The only notable feature addition I'm aware of is Grok, and again that's pretty debatable.
So I'm interested in what you think has improved. Maybe I'm missing things, but it's not my perception.
The new automatic translation is something that I would like to see all communities adopt. You can now follow folks who speak any language and each of you interact using your native language with no friction, just a tiny note of what language each message was translated from.
Improved how? You can now generate child porn in app? You can only pay for a decent experience but can't hide the badge of shame? Commenting, posting, even reading tweets vanishes for hours at a time with no acknowledgement or retrospective? To pay the worst people you've ever met to stir up farcical drama for pay?
Sure, the site is still working, but to call it improved is stretching the word to its breaking point
I’ve been caught in a bug the last month where every day, it will ask me to complete a captcha, it tells me my account is banned, I click a button and it says congrats, I’m unbanned now and the first five likes I click tell me about how I’m improving the timeline.
I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.
Yeah, my experience of Twitter has improved dramatically since I deleted my account and disavowed it completely. I don't even visit the domain. If I need to visit a link, I'll change the domain to xcancel.com instead.
I initially didn't abandon xitter, because I still had a bunch of accounts I followed and BlueBlocker blocked the worst accounts, however it got so bad this year that I stopped visiting at all and eventually installed the xcancel plugin
I love how I literally cannot sign up for a new account as of last month or two. Phone number required, and it won't even send the verification text if I try! Just lovely. Now if I want to create a news page dedicated to a project for people interested in updates to that specific project, I have to buy a fucking account second-hand. Pseudo-ID verification that still doesn't stop bots but does stop humans is such a dramatic improvement!
> People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+.
This feels like a blatantly unrealistic opinion to have, which goes completely against any observable evidence.
Without a login, you can barely click on any link without being spammed by login prompts. If you visit anyone's posts tab you are greeted with a comically bad collection of posts that only show stale years old tweets that follow no discernible pattern or logic. And you cannot sort by timestamp.
This is comically bad given Twitter's sales pitch of being a microblogging site that lives in the now.
The truth of the matter is that today's Twitter is a sad clone of the glory days Twitter. Lauding these developments as something praise worthy is perplexing.
What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.
There was a burst of improvements over the year after Musk bought it, then it stagnated. The Hasbara bots are drowning every conversation about any subject. I'm sick of hearing about Mamdani or roofs.
It's a far right cesspit run by the worlds most egotistical racist asshole, so if you think the experience has improved that says a lot about your character and political affiliation.
I’m not normally an accelerationist about stuff… but now when it comes to most social media, I’m kinda ok with the idea of it all burning to the ground.
I felt the same before then realized that what I missed was my youth. Plenty of time to kill. No real privacy need. Being a night owl with little hangover, etc. etc.
Not saying that's you. Just cannot help going down the memory lane.
I will give him credit for launching country-of-origin. I'm really curious if it's been effective at all for users to get signal. I don't use X anymore since Musk bought it but though it was an interesting choice.
Journalists are still on X; it's still relatively easy to get the scoop on stories (well beyond the AP!) without paying a dime. No other site on the internet can replace this confluence of information.
Twitter is eternal; musk & his worldview is temporary.
feel like its mostly sports journalists at least in the US. pro athletes and journalists need to gtfo. everyone i knew in real life used to be on twitter. theres like one dude left, and he's just there for basketball. total graveyard on a lot of fronts. even a lot of corporate accounts that really wanted to be in the know are just auto posting graveyards now
Breaking headline news that is inaccurate and then has no corrections issued(not even getting into how poor corrections are a week later on msm after they reported a false statement might be) are easier to get.
Speed and accuracy are directly opposed to each other when it comes to news reporting so the absolutes fastest “scoop” as you said, is giving up a lot on accurate reporting in exchange for getting the most eyeballs.
Absolutely agree. Went cold turkey after being a news junkie for decades, a year or so back. One of the best decisions in life for me, right next to quitting alcohol.
Just follow the people you care about, only use the "Following" tab, ignore the "For you" tab, block the ads - so you can still choose freely who manipulates you and how. At least X still gives you real control over a chronological timeline.
I'm on Mastodon, Bluesky, and X. Most of my network seems to have abandoned X at this point. Bluesky has the most of my old network. Some of those are also on Mastodon.
In terms of UX and algorithm, X has a one size fits all algorithm that seems to favor a lot of crap that I really don't care about. If I switch to the Following feed, it's a lot more similar to other networks. That crap isn't coming from my network. It's very polarizing and it's the reason people are voting with their feet. As a product, it has stagnated. Whatever this product lead was doing, I don't think it's made a difference.
Mastodon's algorithm is basically sorting by time; I actually appreciate that but it has its limitations. It means my feed is utterly dominated by a handful of prolific tooters which is causing a rather low signal to noise ratio.
Bluesky has the most promise in terms of filtering and having lists. And it's federated nature means there are a growing number of third party things being built on top. And I like that it has multiple feeds that filter the content in different ways. It's actually very close to what Twitter was before they started locking down their APIs, shutting down third party applications, etc. It's essentially a better Twitter. And the at protocol is interesting relative to Mastodon. Its take on federation is more about interoperability and less about everybody trying to run their own private servers. You can. But you don't have to. Like Mastodon, there are also a growing number of use cases that go beyond being a Twitter clone.
Tangled is a very interesting at proto based application that is still a bit immature. It's the first take on challenging Github as a social network for developers that I've seen that might actually work.
Quick Google search shows engagement is down. This post references registrations not engagement. I wonder how much this guy believes what he’s saying.
The flipping robots underneath this post which have nothing to do with his message demonstrates to me the ridiculousness of X, that is a reminder of the cess pit that these social media platforms have become.
Not to mention the crypto scams, sensationalised untrue “news” etc.
X has gotten significantly worse for me. For what it's worth, I am not super anti-Elon or super left-leaning, and I only say that because I'm sure a lot of people may think I'm biased because of some political leaning. I'm really not. The service has just gotten worse, and I feel like I see enough people saying it's gotten better for them and I don't know what to make of it (maybe I'm going through some sort of psychosis). Either way it has caused me to significantly slow down on posting.
- my feed is significantly more rage-baity both from bot accounts (to be expected) and personal accounts (assuming they get paid for engagement?)
- lots of AI slop reply comments which destroyed the fun of feeling like I'd get a real conversation under every post
- way more onlyfans / porn accounts self-promoting
- lots of genuine racism and way more gender war stuff than I remember
Makes sense. I don't know this guy meant well or not, but his goals and actions didn't seem well coordinated or aligned with neither of the platform inertia or his boss's vision(the latter of which being is to let impoverished Commonwealth spamhouses take it over).
one recent UX change that sucks is app reload always shoehorning you into the "for you" feed instead of your own timeline -- something that previously worked since the beginning
That has always been a recurring issue on Twitter's mobile app for the last decade. They are forever trying to balance the algo feed with the following feed. The clear separation between the two is the correct course IMO. I remember when old Twitter removed that option and tried to merge the two and it was far worse.
The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.
I haven't been following it closely, but Nikita posted recently that they were running experiments to de-monetize the top accounts found to be reposting spam content. I don't know where it went, but he did say that in the A/B test the people who were no longer seeing content from those accounts were showing better interest in the site.
Nikita publicly talked about wanting to go even further to kill those spammy foreign reposter accounts but X eventually pulled back at some point. Lots of the big X accounts complained and they came to some half-way middle ground where they released the country-of-origin feature + a more limited demonetization campaign. Which is still admittedly better than most social media companies have done about the issue. I guess those low quality reposters are just too popular among the public (Youtube shorts is notorious for this).
They would have to ban Elon from his own platform. I wonder why that didn't fly. Anyone who worked for that absolute pustule of a human will have to go somewhere else to earn respect, sorry.
Interestingly Nikita has made several negative comments about monetization, which have been publicly rebuffed by Musk, so they clearly had different visions for the company.
it has always been this way across every platform.
most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
Haha, he seemed to do a pretty good job in the end. I stopped posting on Twitter the week Charlie Kirk got shot because I didn't want to watch a guy shot and Twitter is less controlled about this stuff. I've since gone back to read because it's definitely a good source for AI news, which I am interested in. He was given a couple of bum deals haha. The link deboosting one is something he kept going around telling people they didn't have to do but Elon's decision there stuck and now everyone does the "link in comments" thing. Watching him go around saying "hey, btw you don't have to do that" to everyone prominent was quite amusing. Did he have a social media intern dedicated to doing just that?
imho Nikita did a good job and I wish he stayed on.
Twitter is 100% better now than a year ago. For one, I haven't gotten a single bullshit click-farm fake-ass sock-puppet follower in months. Secondly, I see very few low-effort reply guys lately, human or otherwise.
Are you paying? I see an endless stream of AI or bot-like posts in the replies of basically every tweet I see with any traction, but i'm not a paying user so I may have the bad version of the platform.
Same. I just skip verified posts because the ones at the top are LLM replies. Unless I'm missing something, that should be easy to detect. Instead I've got ghost banned for a week+ now, no reason given and no way to appeal. X now is the place if you want to check for yourself the dead internet theory.
That's been my experience too. I left twitter a few years ago, but when I created a new account (only following AI and startups and people MAKING things, and movie and show clip accounts), it's been so awesome to keep track of all the stuff going on.
Well the good reason, ostensibly, is that web versions develop a small user base and are not profitable.
Just a few years ago on Show HN it was a daily occurrence that somebody would post a web app and somebody else would complain it’s broken with JavaScript off.
I recently had my account hacked - it was a pure lurker account, I only scrolled elephant videos and such, and never posted or did reactions or anything.
Someone logged in to my account from a state I'd never logged in from before and posted a bunch of spam for an hour.
X perma banned my account. They told me I was banned for life, and any account I ever tried to make in the future would be banned. I appealed, explained that my account had obviously been hacked. It was denied.
So, ok.
I went and canceled all of my business subscriptions to Super Grok, and removed any business relationship I have with them. I've been banned for life, after all.
After a couple months, I have to say, it's been a total positive development. I miss the elephant videos, but I absolutely don't miss the constant background anxiety from political outrage/engagement farming. I liked grok, got some laughs from unhinged mode, but don't really notice not having it anymore, lots of good options out there. Hell, I get 90% of what I want (better search experience, summaries) from Kagi.
It's wild to think that people are going to be relying on X for financial stuff now.
Isn’t the whole point that they don’t want you to use the website - they want you to install the app. Why would they make the website an enjoyable experience?
It's wild to me how many replies are like this. I like X. HN, on the other hand is miserable, with censorship through down votes of unorthodox thinkers (PG would be completely down voted if he were to post here anonymously).
Turns out that even with the limited self-curation power X gives you it's not too hard to customize an experience you'll mostly enjoy; some people enjoy being miserable though. A large fraction of my "For you" feed is just neat artwork/fan artwork, which is peaceful. HN gets in "moods" with what gets to the top and I end up ignoring it for a while. Maybe one of these days I'll try one of the wrappers around HN that try to let you self-curate more. But despite that, for topics I do feel like engaging with, HN still wins by many miles. The "censorship" here is also very light-handed, whether from the staff or from fellow users; downvotes signal to authors that maybe their point of view is unwelcome and they'll be less inclined to post similarly, but they aren't outright removed even if downvoted/flagged to death. I've always had showdead on. I can also easily find stuff that's many years old, and read discussions from many years back that aren't full of "[deleted]" or other nonsense. (I got in the habit with old twitter to automate saving copies of images I've "liked", just like I save copies of videos on youtube I put in a "likes" playlist, because I hate it when things disappear out from under me.)
I have been disappointed that "Not interested" seems to have very little influence over anything on X, it does add some friction on shaping the experience to be what you make it. I pretty much never used the block (or mute) function pre-X, and now I've used it so much. Not just for the never-ending bots or blue-check click farmers either, sometimes it's just "that was such a stupid comment about Y; I'd prefer to deprioritize showing things related to Y, but at least by blocking I can ensure I won't see further remarks about Y from this person, or further dumb remarks from this person about some future Z". I have a little Tampermonkey script for HN that gives me similar functionality, "blocking" (more precisely muting) by username those I've decided I'd just rather not see comments from again for a variety of reasons. I never needed/wanted it before [insert date] but the HN decline has been real. (It just replaces the comment content with an "[unblock]" clickable, so it's cheap for me to give them an nth-chance to see some particular comment, and re-block if as usual it was also undesirable.) Staying out of certain HN threads entirely is the best self-curation one can do anyway, there are topics that just don't get reasonably discussed here yet keep being brought up.
I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.
If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.
His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.
His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.
He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.
Here's some fun stuff that this guy's boss has been posting recently:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
The fine folks working in the upper echelons of Twitter have been perfectly happy with their site turning into something indistinguishable from Stormfront over the last few years. May the taint from this repulsive project follow them around for the rest of their careers.
Please don't use personal epithets against people here. Sure, critique people's actions. But the guidelines ask us to be kind and to avoid name-calling. Personal meanness is not the energy we want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
The town square concept has never made sense. The idea that you have a place where everybody goes and scream at each others insults non stop is completely insane in the real world
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
Daytime television was intermediated by tv producers.
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
It's not even about wrong-think. So many people I know just drifted away--or cut contact and nothing equivalent replaced it. It was a fairly important type of social media to me and many of the the people I knew/know but it really isn't anymore.
I think your assumption that HN hates X "because of wrong-think" is clouding your judgement. There is a long list of reasons to hate X.
For example, paying users get top spot in replies to tweets, which instantly meant spam bots with paid accounts posting completely unrelated replies on anything popular while real users who aren't trying to make money off twitter disappear at the bottom.
This isn't even complicated 4D chess user interaction design. Anyone with 2 neurons to rub together could see the obvious and immediate effect of such policy. If it's dropping the ball with something so obvious, how can you trust it to handle any situation more complex?
I agree with the other commenters here - your assumption that all of us hate it for "wrong-think" is precluding your judgement here.
Twitter was also not a good social media, in my opinion. Jack Dorsey was a pretty clueless leader and ostensibly talentless businessman. The platform was mostly loved ironically by jaded millennials, and the entire thing became a laconic quip-off between minor celebrities and brand representatives. It set the stage for LinkedIn-tier corporate cringe content that became a tentpole of late Twitter and now X too. Celebrities fled the site for personal use and left it as a political shit-slinging platform for C-tier online influencer personalities to rile up their audiences. The universal appeal that made Twitter interesting for bored idiots was completely abandoned in favor of this new ragebait paradigm. Worse yet, X is just as debt-ridden as Twitter was, so Elon is walking around to political haymakers just like Chris Poole did when his forum was bleeding cash: https://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/epstein-met-4chans-founder...
People like you existed back in the Twitter days too, insisting that it was valuable to ignore the site politics, trending topics, livestreams, crypto/NFT features and focus on the minority of positive content on the site. Those people were frankly deluded back in 2016, and you're equally as deluded trying to convince people that a cash-poor federal honeypot is tolerable now because the Hawk Tuah girl uses it to interact with her audience. You're the target audience for this slop, and you bit it hook line and sinker like a Facebook mom.
In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
Assertions that Twitter/X was surely going to shut down after the Elon Musk acquisition were wishful thinking on the part of two groups of people:
1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)
2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.
Now, it needed to be folded into xAI to survive. Then that combined mass needed to be folded into SpaceX to survive. Then that combined mass needed to IPO to survive.
Sure, Elon can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Doesn't make it not a tank.
Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.
I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.
There was a time, maybe 15 years ago?, when a journalist "on the ground" of something happening would post it to Twitter within seconds of it happening; and it'd be picked up by major news cycles only next day or something.
It may have lasted for a couple of years, a few at most, and the news clearly adapted. We (the reader/consumer) adapted.
Check out how long it takes for someone to post on Twitter they are leaving OpenAI or google or (...) and for non-Twitter users to find that out. It's minutes at best. Seconds, usually.
That moat is dry and filled in and has been for a decade
The people who say censorship has ended under musk need to really check reality. Almost immediately after musk took over he suspended anyone remotely investigating or reporting on any company he was associated with. This has continued to this day except now anyone reporting on folks like catturd also get protected by musk et all.
Would also like to know what actual censorship folks complain about in the beforetimes, the twitter files were full of nothing, and if you complain about government takedown requests, trump round 1 had far more requests than under biden so uhh yeah.
There's a lot of negative about twitter here, especially related to timeline being shit.
I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things.
There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it really isn't as bad as people demonize it to be.
My issue is that you can't exclude yourself from the algorithm. You post something even tangentially political, it immediately pops up in the feeds of people that have no connections with you at all and have the extreme form of views opposite to yours. The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.
> The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
There may be a single feed, but it’s definitely a bunch of “disconnected communities”. That’s why half the people think HN is pro-AI and the other half thinks it’s anti-AI. Everyone gets the same feed but interact with different content on that feed and come to completely different conclusions.
Quite the opposite - the fact that the default assumption of "what you (will) engage with" is a radioactive dumpster fire that you need to fastidiously Mute / Block / Not Interested / Less Like This / Not Relevant through to eventually "train" the algorithm to give you a consistent window into "really isn't as bad X" - that's proof that the default/average content and experience is every bit as bad as people make it out to be.
And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).
Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".
I disagree with your assessment. My twitter feed pre and post Elon’s takeover changes dramatically.
Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc
After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.
I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.
Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.
That's a fair perspective of before/after. And yea, possibly this was just me curating my feed to a point where it's kind/pleasant. It truly is though - mine is free from politics and dinguses, it's just design and ai people I follow.
My feed suddenly started showcasing far-right lunatics and grifters. It didn't settle down until I blocked them all - which was drastic, but did the job.
If you get hit by a car once, that doesn't mean you want to get hit by a car more times in the future.
What ends up happening with this algorithm is that the "for you" page is dominated by posts asking open-ended questions for engagement. You want to see game clips or screenshots, but every recommended post will ask "What game do you like the most?" or "What character of game X do you like that most?" A question that the author isn't really interested in knowing, asked only to farm engagement from passerby users.
I think that's a really ugly situation all around and a failure of how the system was designed. People should be able to just tell the algorithm what they want to see without secret trackers that promote perverse incentives.
Also, for twitter in particular, buying a subscription is pretty much buying ads on the For You page. Since users can choose to hide the blue checkmark that indicates they are paying for preferential treatment, that means, effectively, that those are promoted posts that aren't marked as "promoted" like normal ads would have to be. I think that's illegal.
I want to echo this point. My X feed is not full of politics either. It tends to just be a mix of stuff I engage with, and I tend to engage with stuff I find interesting or funny.
Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.
I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.
I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.
I'd like to address the YouTube claim-- I find it really quickly leaps from my algorithm into a terrible place, from innocent clicks. One of the more common examples of this in my experience is: I want a video demonstrating the form for a specific lift. I watch it. My feed is immediately 80% weight lifting content, much of which overlaps straight into toxic material I would never engage with. I run into this issue constantly, to the point where I often avoid clicking on things I am genuinely interested because I am worried it is too adjacent to something else that is adjacent to something toxic. When I give in and watch it, I often enjoy it but find afterwards that I was right and my feed has a load of objectionable material on it.
I’m on X only for my business (AI, tech, startups) and stick to only my Following feed. But the second I accidentally click on the “For You” tab it’s a complete, utter, bot primed shit show.
That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.
X has been great lately for me, especially compared to any of the big alternatives. Things like having auto translation, community notes, a followers tab that actually works, and account location are all fantastic.
My experience with X is you get back exactly what you seek out and put into the platform. If you are engaging with toxic political nonsense, engaging with clickbait negativity, or try to farm engagement with hot takes that's the posts you get back. If instead you simply follow PEOPLE you find interesting, ignore the noise, block the really bad, within a week your feed is cleaned up and fun to go through.
Honestly those who are still crying about X and Elon are coming off like clingy ex-lovers who can't accept that the other side isn't thinking about them anymore. Move on if you don't like Elon or X, it's fine, be happy elsewhere... we don't need to listen to the belly aching.
X has the best tools for managing your feed of any social network. "Mute words" is a godsend and can practically eliminate any topic you hate (politics of course). The Following tab can give you the exact reverse chronological view of only your friends' posts that everyone claims they want. The "Not interested in this post" button works really well to modify the algorithm to your taste. You have the option to pay to completely remove ads. There's really no excuse to complain about the algorithmic feed these days IMO.
People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people.
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions.
I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.
Tearing something out only to re-build it a few months later is classic tech industry move fast and break things hubris.
Most things exist for a reason, and if you don’t know the reason that doesn’t mean it’s a bad reason - it just means you don’t know the whole story.
I wonder when the re-building part is going to start for all the stuff that DOGE tore out.
Not just when. Also if.
Chesterton’s login?
They started requiring log-ins when industrial level scraping for LLM data became a thing.
if someone shares me a link to x.com, it is literally faster for me to edit the URL to xcancel, even on my phone which makes this awkward, and load that, than to wait for the original URL to load.
xcancel does not have a login barrier, nor all the popup messages.
Of all the many ways to automate that redirect, https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ isn't bad.
and ( also reddit to old.reddit, various cdn image servers to deliver hi-res versions, etc )The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though.
When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is frankly fine with me: it's a good reason to never visit a place that has become a cesspool of scams, porn, and white supremacist propaganda.
X has gone harder on login gating than the old Twitter they adopted for sure. Reddit also started going in this direction. Instagram has had it for a long time.
I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that.
Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).
It was a pretty shithouse experience as a non-logged-in user before Musk, but it's a worse experience now.
Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).
Have you tried viewing Instagram or TikTok logged out? They all do this
Doesn't mean Twitter should've followed suit.
Bluesky doesn't.
I dropped X shortly after Elon took over. Around the time the neo-nazi spam increased. I also blocked it so I can't accidentally go to the site.
Nothing of value was lost.
Bluesky is like the early days of Twitter and I have a better control of my feeds.
[edit] I see the X bots are unhappy.
In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election because they noticed they speak in a void (journalists don't care about Bluesky) and also they all blocked each other in the purity battle.
They still hate Musk though.
Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.
> they all blocked each other in the purity battle
I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read before talking to me") is scary and genuinely interesting. For some people it almost seems like a full-time job.
We even see it in some other, non-political, social circles (knitting famously had a purity competition/obsession a while ago).
I'm still struggling to explain why this is such a focal point for some people. Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people?
> In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election
Do you have a citation on that?
Not on hand but you can observe it along the way, and sometimes they do a post or video to justify themselves, on X or BS.
People notice because some loud proponents of https://helloquittex.com/ came back, sometimes quietly.
Personally I think X & BS impact is over exaggerated anyway.
People are still allowed to share their experience and opinions without citations being a requirement.
I never said they weren't. Although if its a personal opinion, then it can't really be taken as fact.
The claim seemed off, so I was curious where it came from.
A google search, it's an alleged claim by Nate Silver posted on X from a year ago. Recent post from Nate is that X is rigged.
https://protos.com/nate-silver-says-x-is-rigged-musk-cries-b...
That seems to suggest that it's Far right.
All of your complaints are true of present-day Reddit.
It has become completely unusable.
In related news, I heard they’re locking down old.reddit.com now
I mean a lot of sites do it unfortunately.
Reddit is trying to push to it (if they don't already?), Pinterest does it, unfortunately user-generated content is worth more nowadays for user monetization, ads and preventing AI bot scraping. Can't fault them for it too much.
The whole experience is extremely frustrating. I quit x as it became unbearable bad and not functional. It's really a shame what Elon did to x but it's exactly what cancer billionaires do. Whoever says x is good is out of his mind.
I don't know how you wrote that with a straight face. The site is really bad now. Every time I log in I get a full screen upsell ad, most of the features don't work, people get banned at random (big scary "permanent ban, no recovery" then a silent restoration afterwards), there's CSAM all over the platform, and moderation of legitimate bad posts goes ignored.
Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job.
The upsell ads progressively getting more massive and desperate is pretty funny tho.
Setting aside any feelings about Musk, ad quality, or even product direction choices like locking down public access...
I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also presented as server errors and 404s for a while until the necessary error states were added, and it has had some spotty downtime. Most of these things are better now than a year ago, but not all, and that's only getting back towards what it was before.
The only notable feature addition I'm aware of is Grok, and again that's pretty debatable.
So I'm interested in what you think has improved. Maybe I'm missing things, but it's not my perception.
The new automatic translation is something that I would like to see all communities adopt. You can now follow folks who speak any language and each of you interact using your native language with no friction, just a tiny note of what language each message was translated from.
Youtube is annoying about it
"aaaaaaaahahahahahaha"
[translate to english]
That must be why xcancel exists, because it was such a pleasant experience.
Improved how? You can now generate child porn in app? You can only pay for a decent experience but can't hide the badge of shame? Commenting, posting, even reading tweets vanishes for hours at a time with no acknowledgement or retrospective? To pay the worst people you've ever met to stir up farcical drama for pay?
Sure, the site is still working, but to call it improved is stretching the word to its breaking point
According to Nikita, displaying country-of-origin on profiles was "one of the most impactful changes for X and the world."
Get this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.
I’ve been caught in a bug the last month where every day, it will ask me to complete a captcha, it tells me my account is banned, I click a button and it says congrats, I’m unbanned now and the first five likes I click tell me about how I’m improving the timeline.
I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.
Markedly not my experience at all, haha. I stopped using it.
Yeah, my experience of Twitter has improved dramatically since I deleted my account and disavowed it completely. I don't even visit the domain. If I need to visit a link, I'll change the domain to xcancel.com instead.
Now THAT is an improved web experience!
I initially didn't abandon xitter, because I still had a bunch of accounts I followed and BlueBlocker blocked the worst accounts, however it got so bad this year that I stopped visiting at all and eventually installed the xcancel plugin
I love how I literally cannot sign up for a new account as of last month or two. Phone number required, and it won't even send the verification text if I try! Just lovely. Now if I want to create a news page dedicated to a project for people interested in updates to that specific project, I have to buy a fucking account second-hand. Pseudo-ID verification that still doesn't stop bots but does stop humans is such a dramatic improvement!
> People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+.
This feels like a blatantly unrealistic opinion to have, which goes completely against any observable evidence.
Without a login, you can barely click on any link without being spammed by login prompts. If you visit anyone's posts tab you are greeted with a comically bad collection of posts that only show stale years old tweets that follow no discernible pattern or logic. And you cannot sort by timestamp.
This is comically bad given Twitter's sales pitch of being a microblogging site that lives in the now.
The truth of the matter is that today's Twitter is a sad clone of the glory days Twitter. Lauding these developments as something praise worthy is perplexing.
I created a new account recently and the default homepage was all videos that were either (a) AI slop (b) sexual imagery (c) AI slop sexual imagery.
Really not what Twitter used to be about.
It is possible he's done a good job at the micro level, but at the macro level the platform is a cesspool.
> Really not what Twitter used to be about.
AI slop wasn't available then.
>improved
What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.
You can't be implying that twitter's UI suddenly became shit when Musk bought it. It had become the worst popular site on the web years before.
There was a burst of improvements over the year after Musk bought it, then it stagnated. The Hasbara bots are drowning every conversation about any subject. I'm sick of hearing about Mamdani or roofs.
It's a far right cesspit run by the worlds most egotistical racist asshole, so if you think the experience has improved that says a lot about your character and political affiliation.
There are some of us who are old enough to remember Twitter’s true time of “unprecedented growth.”
I miss old Twitter.
It sure was interesting for a minute.
I’m not normally an accelerationist about stuff… but now when it comes to most social media, I’m kinda ok with the idea of it all burning to the ground.
I felt the same before then realized that what I missed was my youth. Plenty of time to kill. No real privacy need. Being a night owl with little hangover, etc. etc.
Not saying that's you. Just cannot help going down the memory lane.
Long live Rabble.
Is there anyone at X (including xai cofounders) who has been there more than 2 years?
I will give him credit for launching country-of-origin. I'm really curious if it's been effective at all for users to get signal. I don't use X anymore since Musk bought it but though it was an interesting choice.
Was the account origin feature removed soon after release?
[flagged]
Journalists are still on X; it's still relatively easy to get the scoop on stories (well beyond the AP!) without paying a dime. No other site on the internet can replace this confluence of information.
Twitter is eternal; musk & his worldview is temporary.
> No other site on the internet can replace this confluence of information.
So be it.
Edit: updated to quote previous end to parent before it was amended
Would that be acceptable in exchange for shaping your political views?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2
feel like its mostly sports journalists at least in the US. pro athletes and journalists need to gtfo. everyone i knew in real life used to be on twitter. theres like one dude left, and he's just there for basketball. total graveyard on a lot of fronts. even a lot of corporate accounts that really wanted to be in the know are just auto posting graveyards now
Why do you need to know something 24 hours before it hits the various aggregation sites?
I get it if it's your job to do this, but for most people it's basically fine to just not be at the firehose.
Breaking headline news that is inaccurate and then has no corrections issued(not even getting into how poor corrections are a week later on msm after they reported a false statement might be) are easier to get.
Speed and accuracy are directly opposed to each other when it comes to news reporting so the absolutes fastest “scoop” as you said, is giving up a lot on accurate reporting in exchange for getting the most eyeballs.
Freeing yourself from giving a crap about the "news" is the best thing. Once a month I check if the various wars are still on and that's about it.
Absolutely agree. Went cold turkey after being a news junkie for decades, a year or so back. One of the best decisions in life for me, right next to quitting alcohol.
> it's still relatively easy to get the scoop on stories
Cue Truth Social 100k/month early access plan to see Trumps tweets before anyone else.
Just follow the people you care about, only use the "Following" tab, ignore the "For you" tab, block the ads - so you can still choose freely who manipulates you and how. At least X still gives you real control over a chronological timeline.
I see researchers, tech people and my friends. This is a problem with how you curate your social media.
I'm on Mastodon, Bluesky, and X. Most of my network seems to have abandoned X at this point. Bluesky has the most of my old network. Some of those are also on Mastodon.
In terms of UX and algorithm, X has a one size fits all algorithm that seems to favor a lot of crap that I really don't care about. If I switch to the Following feed, it's a lot more similar to other networks. That crap isn't coming from my network. It's very polarizing and it's the reason people are voting with their feet. As a product, it has stagnated. Whatever this product lead was doing, I don't think it's made a difference.
Mastodon's algorithm is basically sorting by time; I actually appreciate that but it has its limitations. It means my feed is utterly dominated by a handful of prolific tooters which is causing a rather low signal to noise ratio.
Bluesky has the most promise in terms of filtering and having lists. And it's federated nature means there are a growing number of third party things being built on top. And I like that it has multiple feeds that filter the content in different ways. It's actually very close to what Twitter was before they started locking down their APIs, shutting down third party applications, etc. It's essentially a better Twitter. And the at protocol is interesting relative to Mastodon. Its take on federation is more about interoperability and less about everybody trying to run their own private servers. You can. But you don't have to. Like Mastodon, there are also a growing number of use cases that go beyond being a Twitter clone.
Tangled is a very interesting at proto based application that is still a bit immature. It's the first take on challenging Github as a social network for developers that I've seen that might actually work.
Quick Google search shows engagement is down. This post references registrations not engagement. I wonder how much this guy believes what he’s saying.
The flipping robots underneath this post which have nothing to do with his message demonstrates to me the ridiculousness of X, that is a reminder of the cess pit that these social media platforms have become.
Not to mention the crypto scams, sensationalised untrue “news” etc.
X has gotten significantly worse for me. For what it's worth, I am not super anti-Elon or super left-leaning, and I only say that because I'm sure a lot of people may think I'm biased because of some political leaning. I'm really not. The service has just gotten worse, and I feel like I see enough people saying it's gotten better for them and I don't know what to make of it (maybe I'm going through some sort of psychosis). Either way it has caused me to significantly slow down on posting.
- my feed is significantly more rage-baity both from bot accounts (to be expected) and personal accounts (assuming they get paid for engagement?)
- lots of AI slop reply comments which destroyed the fun of feeling like I'd get a real conversation under every post
- way more onlyfans / porn accounts self-promoting
- lots of genuine racism and way more gender war stuff than I remember
Not hardcore enough.
The first SpaceX stock lockup expiration is tomorrow, timing seems nice assuming he had some in his pay package.
I forgot twitter is part of SpaceX.
Maybe it is me, but for a random Wednesday in August there have been a strange amount of big moves today. Normally you expect quiet or nonsense.
It’s Q2 earnings time so likely people leaving after a quarterly vest.
maybe the tech trade deadline is this week (baseball's was on monday)
I thought it would be a decent guy saying he wouldn't work anymore for unethical companies. How is just someone realizing his profits. No news here.
A decent guy would have quit when Musk bought it
The decent people did.
Not all of them. The ones on ridiculously restrictive visas had to stay.
Makes sense. I don't know this guy meant well or not, but his goals and actions didn't seem well coordinated or aligned with neither of the platform inertia or his boss's vision(the latter of which being is to let impoverished Commonwealth spamhouses take it over).
one recent UX change that sucks is app reload always shoehorning you into the "for you" feed instead of your own timeline -- something that previously worked since the beginning
That has always been a recurring issue on Twitter's mobile app for the last decade. They are forever trying to balance the algo feed with the following feed. The clear separation between the two is the correct course IMO. I remember when old Twitter removed that option and tried to merge the two and it was far worse.
https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/2085105586966827343#m
The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.
I haven't been following it closely, but Nikita posted recently that they were running experiments to de-monetize the top accounts found to be reposting spam content. I don't know where it went, but he did say that in the A/B test the people who were no longer seeing content from those accounts were showing better interest in the site.
He seemed to get it. It's too bad he's leaving.
Nikita publicly talked about wanting to go even further to kill those spammy foreign reposter accounts but X eventually pulled back at some point. Lots of the big X accounts complained and they came to some half-way middle ground where they released the country-of-origin feature + a more limited demonetization campaign. Which is still admittedly better than most social media companies have done about the issue. I guess those low quality reposters are just too popular among the public (Youtube shorts is notorious for this).
They would have to ban Elon from his own platform. I wonder why that didn't fly. Anyone who worked for that absolute pustule of a human will have to go somewhere else to earn respect, sorry.
Interestingly Nikita has made several negative comments about monetization, which have been publicly rebuffed by Musk, so they clearly had different visions for the company.
Well, anything you monetize it will turn to shit, period.
it has always been this way across every platform.
most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.
Except that it hasn’t.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
the fact that this recently changed on twitter means it has not, in fact, "always been this way across every platform"
Haha, he seemed to do a pretty good job in the end. I stopped posting on Twitter the week Charlie Kirk got shot because I didn't want to watch a guy shot and Twitter is less controlled about this stuff. I've since gone back to read because it's definitely a good source for AI news, which I am interested in. He was given a couple of bum deals haha. The link deboosting one is something he kept going around telling people they didn't have to do but Elon's decision there stuck and now everyone does the "link in comments" thing. Watching him go around saying "hey, btw you don't have to do that" to everyone prominent was quite amusing. Did he have a social media intern dedicated to doing just that?
imho Nikita did a good job and I wish he stayed on.
Twitter is 100% better now than a year ago. For one, I haven't gotten a single bullshit click-farm fake-ass sock-puppet follower in months. Secondly, I see very few low-effort reply guys lately, human or otherwise.
Are you paying? I see an endless stream of AI or bot-like posts in the replies of basically every tweet I see with any traction, but i'm not a paying user so I may have the bad version of the platform.
Same. I just skip verified posts because the ones at the top are LLM replies. Unless I'm missing something, that should be easy to detect. Instead I've got ghost banned for a week+ now, no reason given and no way to appeal. X now is the place if you want to check for yourself the dead internet theory.
There's has been a noticeable improvement in bots for me since the new Android app rolled out a few weeks back.
Not exactly sure how that changed anything but I see a lot less bot slop now.
I'm a supporter of X but even I admit I see non-stop AI bot comments
That's been my experience too. I left twitter a few years ago, but when I created a new account (only following AI and startups and people MAKING things, and movie and show clip accounts), it's been so awesome to keep track of all the stuff going on.
I'm aldo using x more than ever. I nearly stopped in the 2019-2021 era, always confused when people are complaining about it these days.
> always confused when people are complaining about it these days
The biggest complaint I've heard is about the owner and how he's using X as a megaphone.
Nikita did plenty of good for X, this is a big loss.
> We've climbed 70 spots in the App Store since this time last year.
Shows how valuable the Play Store is to them
Nikita Bier's whole claim to fame was getting apps into top positions in the app store. It's his thing.
And how much they (like all other social media) put their mobile web experience into limp mode for no good reason.
Well the good reason, ostensibly, is that web versions develop a small user base and are not profitable.
Just a few years ago on Show HN it was a daily occurrence that somebody would post a web app and somebody else would complain it’s broken with JavaScript off.
HN cares about things average users don’t.
I recently had my account hacked - it was a pure lurker account, I only scrolled elephant videos and such, and never posted or did reactions or anything.
Someone logged in to my account from a state I'd never logged in from before and posted a bunch of spam for an hour.
X perma banned my account. They told me I was banned for life, and any account I ever tried to make in the future would be banned. I appealed, explained that my account had obviously been hacked. It was denied.
So, ok.
I went and canceled all of my business subscriptions to Super Grok, and removed any business relationship I have with them. I've been banned for life, after all.
After a couple months, I have to say, it's been a total positive development. I miss the elephant videos, but I absolutely don't miss the constant background anxiety from political outrage/engagement farming. I liked grok, got some laughs from unhinged mode, but don't really notice not having it anymore, lots of good options out there. Hell, I get 90% of what I want (better search experience, summaries) from Kagi.
It's wild to think that people are going to be relying on X for financial stuff now.
Hope their accounts don't get hacked.
As a random lurker, since Nikita took over I mostly only see racist, misogynistic, and pornographic content other than Elon Musk's tweets.
Twitter used to be a better place than this. I hope he is happy with the engagement that he brought on to the site.
The long press blurred image thing was a disaster, the app no longer usable.
Is this guy the reason why xcancel.com exists ?
Would it be possible to be a nice human being and at the same time work on a fascist-enabling platform like X?
> X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history.
No it’s not
What an absolute miserable experience Twitter is now, even more than before, I can feel my cortisol spiking every time I open that website.
Maybe stop?
Isn’t the whole point that they don’t want you to use the website - they want you to install the app. Why would they make the website an enjoyable experience?
Stop using it! It is like an oxy addiction and we all just need to stop - it isn't good for us.
It's wild to me how many replies are like this. I like X. HN, on the other hand is miserable, with censorship through down votes of unorthodox thinkers (PG would be completely down voted if he were to post here anonymously).
I find I get a lot more hacker news from X now than HN.
AI, database tech, etc I find I read about it on X much earlier and the comments are a lot less negative.
X is what you make it. It will feed you with more of what you read and interact with.
Turns out that even with the limited self-curation power X gives you it's not too hard to customize an experience you'll mostly enjoy; some people enjoy being miserable though. A large fraction of my "For you" feed is just neat artwork/fan artwork, which is peaceful. HN gets in "moods" with what gets to the top and I end up ignoring it for a while. Maybe one of these days I'll try one of the wrappers around HN that try to let you self-curate more. But despite that, for topics I do feel like engaging with, HN still wins by many miles. The "censorship" here is also very light-handed, whether from the staff or from fellow users; downvotes signal to authors that maybe their point of view is unwelcome and they'll be less inclined to post similarly, but they aren't outright removed even if downvoted/flagged to death. I've always had showdead on. I can also easily find stuff that's many years old, and read discussions from many years back that aren't full of "[deleted]" or other nonsense. (I got in the habit with old twitter to automate saving copies of images I've "liked", just like I save copies of videos on youtube I put in a "likes" playlist, because I hate it when things disappear out from under me.)
I have been disappointed that "Not interested" seems to have very little influence over anything on X, it does add some friction on shaping the experience to be what you make it. I pretty much never used the block (or mute) function pre-X, and now I've used it so much. Not just for the never-ending bots or blue-check click farmers either, sometimes it's just "that was such a stupid comment about Y; I'd prefer to deprioritize showing things related to Y, but at least by blocking I can ensure I won't see further remarks about Y from this person, or further dumb remarks from this person about some future Z". I have a little Tampermonkey script for HN that gives me similar functionality, "blocking" (more precisely muting) by username those I've decided I'd just rather not see comments from again for a variety of reasons. I never needed/wanted it before [insert date] but the HN decline has been real. (It just replaces the comment content with an "[unblock]" clickable, so it's cheap for me to give them an nth-chance to see some particular comment, and re-block if as usual it was also undesirable.) Staying out of certain HN threads entirely is the best self-curation one can do anyway, there are topics that just don't get reasonably discussed here yet keep being brought up.
Ironically for you, the HN guidelines recommend to not complain about the voting system:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Now read the rest of those guidelines and then other comments in this thread.
What unorthodox thoughts get filtered out by downvotes?
It’s “censorship” when he gets downvoted for extreme right wing commentary, like supporting the complete elimination of USAID for one example.
Agree totally. X is pretty open. I like reading the stories her more but it's an extreme group think of only one position
I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.
Nikita was always a bad hire.
If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.
His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.
His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.
He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.
> truly impressive growth hacking on children
I haven't been more viscerally disgusted by a phrase I've read about tech in a while. Astonishing word choice.
Truly some incredible stuff getting cooked up in the Silicon Valley
I bet the position is backfilled with Grok.
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Here's some fun stuff that this guy's boss has been posting recently:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
The fine folks working in the upper echelons of Twitter have been perfectly happy with their site turning into something indistinguishable from Stormfront over the last few years. May the taint from this repulsive project follow them around for the rest of their careers.
Don’t forget that whoever stays on X is willingly manipulated towards more conservative views.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2
Elons escalating behaviour is very concerning
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Please don't use personal epithets against people here. Sure, critique people's actions. But the guidelines ask us to be kind and to avoid name-calling. Personal meanness is not the energy we want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history
Reality check, when there is a fire or another emergency what do you use to call the emergency services?
Never smell your own farts.
> X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history.
A little cocky.
Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
> the telegraph, the telephone, the television
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
The town square concept has never made sense. The idea that you have a place where everybody goes and scream at each others insults non stop is completely insane in the real world
Yes that would be insane, but that's not an accurate depiction of my x feed at all
Actually this place exists and it’s called a jail pod
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
That's not great. That's hideous.
Humanity is interested in hideous things.
You don’t solve this by making NY Times editors the deciders of what’s fit to be interested in.
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions
Onlyfans was included under "almost every single aspect of the internet".
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
Daytime television was intermediated by tv producers.
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
It's not even about wrong-think. So many people I know just drifted away--or cut contact and nothing equivalent replaced it. It was a fairly important type of social media to me and many of the the people I knew/know but it really isn't anymore.
I think your assumption that HN hates X "because of wrong-think" is clouding your judgement. There is a long list of reasons to hate X.
For example, paying users get top spot in replies to tweets, which instantly meant spam bots with paid accounts posting completely unrelated replies on anything popular while real users who aren't trying to make money off twitter disappear at the bottom.
This isn't even complicated 4D chess user interaction design. Anyone with 2 neurons to rub together could see the obvious and immediate effect of such policy. If it's dropping the ball with something so obvious, how can you trust it to handle any situation more complex?
Those are all valid areas crying out for improvement.
But that’s not what HN hates about X… any comment about the platform gets angry blindly political replies.
Whereas other platforms and topics get discussed in more neutral pros/cons terms.
I agree with the other commenters here - your assumption that all of us hate it for "wrong-think" is precluding your judgement here.
Twitter was also not a good social media, in my opinion. Jack Dorsey was a pretty clueless leader and ostensibly talentless businessman. The platform was mostly loved ironically by jaded millennials, and the entire thing became a laconic quip-off between minor celebrities and brand representatives. It set the stage for LinkedIn-tier corporate cringe content that became a tentpole of late Twitter and now X too. Celebrities fled the site for personal use and left it as a political shit-slinging platform for C-tier online influencer personalities to rile up their audiences. The universal appeal that made Twitter interesting for bored idiots was completely abandoned in favor of this new ragebait paradigm. Worse yet, X is just as debt-ridden as Twitter was, so Elon is walking around to political haymakers just like Chris Poole did when his forum was bleeding cash: https://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/epstein-met-4chans-founder...
People like you existed back in the Twitter days too, insisting that it was valuable to ignore the site politics, trending topics, livestreams, crypto/NFT features and focus on the minority of positive content on the site. Those people were frankly deluded back in 2016, and you're equally as deluded trying to convince people that a cash-poor federal honeypot is tolerable now because the Hawk Tuah girl uses it to interact with her audience. You're the target audience for this slop, and you bit it hook line and sinker like a Facebook mom.
My X feed is finance, AI, robotics, etc…
… I don’t eat Cheetos but I don’t get angry at the grocery store for promoting them to people who do.
I guess.
If the town itself is an aids-ridden, nazi infested bunch of child-porn-creating yobs.
They can keep that town and its square. I'd nuke it from orbit, only way to be sure.
> greatest communication techonlogy
1. Snail-mail
2. Public cork-boards
3. E-mail
sounds like the "what have the Romans done for us?" bit
This is sadly too common in silicon valley mindset. Full of superlatives, and often not understanding the world outside.
Now we just need everyone else who works for X to do the same.
In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214903
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.
Elon was well on top of what AI was capable of. That sounds less luck and more well played.
How is this guy who keeps starting or taking over and fixing wildly successful companies always this lucky?
The HN discussions you linked to:
1. 10 points, 15 comments
2. 9 points, 17 comments
3. 44 points, 84 comments
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
(471 points, 512 comments)
Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.
The site has become a right-wing echo chamber and Musk's personal soapbox: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
About 90% of the interesting people I ever followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky or Mastodon. They're never coming back.
It has collapsed. It is just bots and racism that have collapsed it, not a technical failure.
It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.
>It has also collapsed
>There are rumors
Interesting methodology you use to make concrete assertions.
In 2025, Ad revenue was down 60% as compared to 2021..
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertise...
Assertions that Twitter/X was surely going to shut down after the Elon Musk acquisition were wishful thinking on the part of two groups of people:
1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)
2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.
You don't think he tanked the company?
Twitter used to be profitable.
Now, it needed to be folded into xAI to survive. Then that combined mass needed to be folded into SpaceX to survive. Then that combined mass needed to IPO to survive.
Sure, Elon can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Doesn't make it not a tank.
> Twitter used to be profitable.
Twitter posted a profit in only two of its eight full fiscal years (turning profitable in 2018 and 2019)
In its last year (2021), Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million on $5.1 billion in revenue.
I'm honestly surprised he held on for so long.
Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.
I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.
> I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.
When did you ever miss important news if you weren’t on Twitter?
There was a time, maybe 15 years ago?, when a journalist "on the ground" of something happening would post it to Twitter within seconds of it happening; and it'd be picked up by major news cycles only next day or something.
It may have lasted for a couple of years, a few at most, and the news clearly adapted. We (the reader/consumer) adapted.
Check out how long it takes for someone to post on Twitter they are leaving OpenAI or google or (...) and for non-Twitter users to find that out. It's minutes at best. Seconds, usually.
That moat is dry and filled in and has been for a decade
> it'd be picked up by major news cycles only next day or something
So you never missed anything if you weren’t on Twitter? And you have no idea if you’re “missing” anything now?
The people who say censorship has ended under musk need to really check reality. Almost immediately after musk took over he suspended anyone remotely investigating or reporting on any company he was associated with. This has continued to this day except now anyone reporting on folks like catturd also get protected by musk et all.
Would also like to know what actual censorship folks complain about in the beforetimes, the twitter files were full of nothing, and if you complain about government takedown requests, trump round 1 had far more requests than under biden so uhh yeah.
There's a lot of negative about twitter here, especially related to timeline being shit.
I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things.
There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it really isn't as bad as people demonize it to be.
My issue is that you can't exclude yourself from the algorithm. You post something even tangentially political, it immediately pops up in the feeds of people that have no connections with you at all and have the extreme form of views opposite to yours. The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.
> The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
Isn't the same true of hackernews though?
HN isn't a bunch of disconnected communities that sometimes overlap due to algorithmic feeds. It's one community with one front-page.
There may be a single feed, but it’s definitely a bunch of “disconnected communities”. That’s why half the people think HN is pro-AI and the other half thinks it’s anti-AI. Everyone gets the same feed but interact with different content on that feed and come to completely different conclusions.
What do you mean? HN doesn't have a social graph. It's an entirely different beast as far as I'm concerned.
Hacker News and X/Twitter don't have nothing at all in common. For example, both of them use HTML.
The algorithm is not a neutral one. It pushes conservative talking points, and toxic content.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2
Quite the opposite - the fact that the default assumption of "what you (will) engage with" is a radioactive dumpster fire that you need to fastidiously Mute / Block / Not Interested / Less Like This / Not Relevant through to eventually "train" the algorithm to give you a consistent window into "really isn't as bad X" - that's proof that the default/average content and experience is every bit as bad as people make it out to be.
And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).
Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".
I disagree with your assessment. My twitter feed pre and post Elon’s takeover changes dramatically.
Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc
After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.
I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.
Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.
That's a fair perspective of before/after. And yea, possibly this was just me curating my feed to a point where it's kind/pleasant. It truly is though - mine is free from politics and dinguses, it's just design and ai people I follow.
My feed suddenly started showcasing far-right lunatics and grifters. It didn't settle down until I blocked them all - which was drastic, but did the job.
were you able to block Elon?
That sounds like bad design.
If you get hit by a car once, that doesn't mean you want to get hit by a car more times in the future.
What ends up happening with this algorithm is that the "for you" page is dominated by posts asking open-ended questions for engagement. You want to see game clips or screenshots, but every recommended post will ask "What game do you like the most?" or "What character of game X do you like that most?" A question that the author isn't really interested in knowing, asked only to farm engagement from passerby users.
I think that's a really ugly situation all around and a failure of how the system was designed. People should be able to just tell the algorithm what they want to see without secret trackers that promote perverse incentives.
Also, for twitter in particular, buying a subscription is pretty much buying ads on the For You page. Since users can choose to hide the blue checkmark that indicates they are paying for preferential treatment, that means, effectively, that those are promoted posts that aren't marked as "promoted" like normal ads would have to be. I think that's illegal.
I want to echo this point. My X feed is not full of politics either. It tends to just be a mix of stuff I engage with, and I tend to engage with stuff I find interesting or funny.
Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.
I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.
I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.
I'd like to address the YouTube claim-- I find it really quickly leaps from my algorithm into a terrible place, from innocent clicks. One of the more common examples of this in my experience is: I want a video demonstrating the form for a specific lift. I watch it. My feed is immediately 80% weight lifting content, much of which overlaps straight into toxic material I would never engage with. I run into this issue constantly, to the point where I often avoid clicking on things I am genuinely interested because I am worried it is too adjacent to something else that is adjacent to something toxic. When I give in and watch it, I often enjoy it but find afterwards that I was right and my feed has a load of objectionable material on it.
I’m on X only for my business (AI, tech, startups) and stick to only my Following feed. But the second I accidentally click on the “For You” tab it’s a complete, utter, bot primed shit show.
That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.
He fought the bots, but the bots won?
Guy who loves drinking shit believes that we are not talking about the same liquid.
X has been great lately for me, especially compared to any of the big alternatives. Things like having auto translation, community notes, a followers tab that actually works, and account location are all fantastic.
My experience with X is you get back exactly what you seek out and put into the platform. If you are engaging with toxic political nonsense, engaging with clickbait negativity, or try to farm engagement with hot takes that's the posts you get back. If instead you simply follow PEOPLE you find interesting, ignore the noise, block the really bad, within a week your feed is cleaned up and fun to go through.
Honestly those who are still crying about X and Elon are coming off like clingy ex-lovers who can't accept that the other side isn't thinking about them anymore. Move on if you don't like Elon or X, it's fine, be happy elsewhere... we don't need to listen to the belly aching.
X has the best tools for managing your feed of any social network. "Mute words" is a godsend and can practically eliminate any topic you hate (politics of course). The Following tab can give you the exact reverse chronological view of only your friends' posts that everyone claims they want. The "Not interested in this post" button works really well to modify the algorithm to your taste. You have the option to pay to completely remove ads. There's really no excuse to complain about the algorithmic feed these days IMO.