I've been a long-time Twitter user. I don't hate Elon, so when he bought it I was cautiously optimistic.
I deactivated last week. The platform is bad and getting worse. It's scammy and spammy. Everything is designed around garbage engagement, so that the X team can brag about how good the product is doing.
It's a full PvP server now. Old Social media outrage algos + paying people for posts further broke it
I prefer the X now. Unlimited stream of unhinged, unfiltered thought stream from strangers straight into my feed.
A small percentage might even be actual humans!
Is this … sarcasm?
Maybe GP genuinely enjoys madness.
If you grew up with image boards in their heyday (pre-2004) then X could feel a bit nostalgic.
However the word filters (to suppress messages) does dampen it a bit.
I mean, is 4chan better than those image boards? or worse? how about 8chan
I just use the "Following" tab (and not the "For you" tab).
What is garbage engagement?
I think its entirely reasonable that an algorithm shows you things that you engaged with. It would be weird if it didn't promoted stuff I didn't engage w/.
garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not engage with the content. And for some people it is quite difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is trending so might be i should show this to more people. So this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is loosing battle in the sea of bots :)
Only last week is shocking to me. People were saying this about twitter for like 10+ years as soon as it was commercialized and was no longer just user content.
I am honestly curious what Elon would need to do for you to dislike him. That ship sailed for me long ago
Words have meaning. He said he does not hate him. That does not mean he likes him. Hate is a very strong emotion. Dislike is a much less stronger emotion. That is not all the same.
(I also don't hate Elon, but I still don't like him or consider doing buisness with him in any way)
USAID was a highly effective and efficient operation. Musk dismembered it, leading to untold misery, death, and the spread of infectious diseases. I think this is reason enough to hate Musk.
Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while he also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...
I would argue without Musk and his Twitter/richest man of the world power, Trump would have never been elected in the first place, which would have prevented this and a lot of other bad things. Still, I don't hate him. (Hate is not a condition I think is healthy or constructive or something I should explain myself not feeling it)
> Hate is not a condition I think is healthy or constructive
I agree with you on this. Strong emotions impede our ability to be creative and problem-solve.
The race to the highest body count looks like Elon in first, RFK jr. second, and Stephen Miller a distant third but looking like he'll finish strong once the camps are fully operating.
/Raises hand Sam Altman hater over here.
Nobody wants a damn web view. If I'm clicking off to a link, I may want to click to another app and back in and still be where it was... If it's in a webview that's gone as soon as I click out. Yes, you can open in Chrome or whatever, open in a browser, but that's a pain in the ass to do an the time. I hate web views, in all forms.
>Nobody wants a damn web view.
OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance).
FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
It's not just HackerNews. I can remember when Facebook rolled out their "in-app browser", and a huge amount of content appeared on how to disable it.
That was partly due to websites being broken. You can still find some old discussions on Stack Overflow about features of their websites not working correctly in it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000708/file-upload-con...
> This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users.
My wife just didn't know what a web view was (she still doesn't), but she prefers using the browser after I showed her how to "escape" Facebook's web view and open pages in Safari where the content blocker and ad blocker extensions could do their work. You probably have a point about preloading pages, but until content and ad blockers start working in all web views, then I agree with the person you're replying to: nobody wants a damn web view.
I dont know if this is in the same vein, but I want to complain about how websites handle pdfs.
Slack, Teams, confluence, jira, etc all open a pdf in a in-browser preview thing. Then if you try scrolling, it makes the PAGE contents bigger, but does NOT zoom into the pdf.
Who thought of this? Who thought it was a good idea?
Never have I wanted to open a preview of the pdf.
This sounds more like however your OS handles opening the PDF mimetype(xdg-open,open,Invoke-Item) I'm assuming you're on windows. I think often times browsers will just be set to the default for previewing a PDF unless set otherwise. This is all just conjecture though as I don't use any of the tools you listed above and I'm not absolutely certain of how Windows/MacOS handles PDFs by default.
Twitter's handling of opening links in its own webview is a bit different, unless Slack, Teams, Confluence, Jira all open these browser instances within some sort of webview wrapper as well(I wouldn't think so). So its a little bit different
Seriously. I have a featureful PDF viewer I am intimately familiar with. I want it to be the default for all PDFs, ever. This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.
Similarly... I _really_ dislike clicking a link in Safari on iOS and it opening an App instead of going to the web page. I have the YouTube app installed and use it on occasion, but its really jarring when I click an organic search result in Duck and get launched into an app that may not have the same privacy settings my browser is setup with.
Ironically, I have the opposite complaint with YouTube, particularly with these new Twitter web views. It takes 3 “navigations” now to get to the iOS YouTube app: one to open the Twitter web view, one to open that URL in Safari, then one to open at YouTube video in the native app.
Isn't that because they ask you to sign in if you're not leaking enough information?
The "open in YouTube" button just does nothing in the (iOS) webview, for whatever reason. So, in order to get a working open-in-app button, you have to open the webpage in your browser. Not sure if intentional or a bug.
Brave prompts you before doing that. Then you can long press to new tab.
I clicked a link in IG once and and it opened via a webveiw. it was one of those "give us your email for a discount" popups so I put in "mark@aol.com" and at a later date, IG asked if I wanted to associate that email with my account (or something along those lines). I tend to take the extra step to "open in native browser" whenever webveiws popup
I remember how tiktok basically injected a keylogger into any site they opened in a webview https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/technology/tiktok-browser...
I didn't think IG does something similarly shady
That's the point of a webview - to continue tracking users while "off" your app.
In the settings you can configure to open in the configured external browser. I recently switched phones, so had to adjust several apps for this. It's a pain and would be nice if it was a global setting to always open links in the browser.
You know what to do..... ')
Why would the web view be gone after you've multi tasked? On my phone the web view stays open inside the parent app.
idk but I’ve definitely experienced this. Presumably it’s a bug.
Since we're doing PSAs, isn't it also now just a completely broken platform on mobile for everyone who isn't logged in?
> Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another shot.
This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error, does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb oversight in the funnel
I set up a URL redirect rule in Edge/Brave/Chrome with the extension URL Auto Redirector (previously used Redirector but it was removed, there are other alternatives available for Firefox I'm sure). I also found a similar front end for Instagram but just added a rule yesterday so haven't tested it extensively yet.
I avoid most Twitter/X content after I deleted my account but it's helpful when it gets linked in HN.
Source | Destination
-----------------------------------------------------------
^https?://x.com/(.*) | https://xcancel.com/$1
^https?://twitter.com/(.*) | https://xcancel.com/$1
^https?://instagram.com/(.*) | https://imginn.com/$1
^https?://www.instagram.com/(.*) | https://imginn.com/$1
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector...
Serious question: Why doesn't Google de-rank content that requires a login? I remember they used to claim they did but they clearly do not anymore.
For twitter at least, that would have to be done manually. It still shows a timeline for grey checkmark (government) accounts, and a "best of" type page for all other accounts.
Most sites serve a special version of the page to visitors with "googlebot" in their UA string and/or coming from an IP range google controls with more SEO'd contents too.
That would be equivalent to demonetizing the entire web. Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality. As the old adage goes, "when you're getting something for free, you're the product being sold." Only sites making money by, shall we say, "indirect" means would be able to survive. A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.
I think I should at least be able to see even a subset of the content that caused the item to be returned in the search result, though. If I try to navigate away or see more content, sure, make me log in. But, if I search something, click on a Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin result, I should at least be able to see something.
The search --> visit --> immediate redirect to login results should be de-ranked.
“Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality” this doesn’t follow unless we assume the most extreme implementation, the openness of the content is just one factor of many that should count in the contents favor. Further it assumes the only non-shady way to monetize content is put it behind a login which is not true.
A site can be a billboard for a product or service, or provide a social hub, without participating in the surveillance adtech industry. There are plenty of hobby forums, like those for craft brewing, which get supported by brewery suppliers, for example. There are luthier communities which get supported by toolmakers and professionals, and so on. The implicit community networking, reviews by community members, and other interactions reward quality and honesty, and penalize the shady shit.
It's just not scalable into the exploitative cash cows that VCs drool over.
>>> nothing but a propaganda engine
And that's different from Google, how?
A search engine which prioritizes free content, reviewed intelligently, is curation, and not Goodharted gotcha games. If you can crawl the web and index sites with human level content curation, with a reasonably performant scaffolding, you can prevent SEO style exploitation, and use natural language rules like "does this content contain text attempting to game the ranking of a site or violate policy XYZ?"
Most AIs use bing and google, so the best you can get is a curated list from the already censored and politically filtered results from those sources, funneling commercial traffic toward the highest paying adtech customers - it's just refined, ultra-pure SEO results, unless they use their own index and crawler.
I'd almost rather have a naive raw index that can be interacted with, but custom indices, like xAI and Kagi, are definitely superior to Google and Bing. Google's a dumpster fire and Bing's a tawdry knockoff, and they're both interested in gaming the surveillance data and extracting as much money as possible from their adtech customers.
Paying for a service incentivizes the quality of that service. If that service is honest curation of and effective web search with custom indices and crawlers, then the free and paid distinction don't matter - the highest quality based on the curation criteria is what gets a site surfaced. I want my search engine to return McMaster Carr over Temu or Amazon, or a local flower shop over some corporate slop. Google doesn't get paid by meeting my expectations, it gets paid by exploiting my attention and extracting fractions of profit from commercial interactions, and makes more money by pushing me into business with companies that I'd otherwise want nothing to do with.
Demonetizing the entire web - dismantling the surveillance adtech regime - sounds like an absolute utopic victory to me.
Because Google wants the web to be broken like that, they're also part of the design team of tech behemoths that made the internet shitty und no fun.
They have had ways of letting people who give Googlebot access to content that requires login for a long time. A decade?
Because people can get a login. If the best quality result is behind a login and a paywall, I still want it to be the first result. Only quality should decide ranking.
Please do tell how to get an X account? It instantly locked my account after registration and I have several friends have the same issue.
I would much prefer if Google just stopped showing inaccessible information completely.
I have no idea, I've never used X or Twitter. But apparently millions do, so it is not inaccessible.
Well I sure don't
Openness and accessibility should absolutely be factors in ranking, otherwise where does it end? I dk what twitter requires these days, maybe an email, password and a couple more fields, what if a site starts doing id verification? What if accounts require a subscription? What if all the best content on the first page of your search results is behind a paywall with 3 easy payments of $299
It ends with you paying for information. If I need some information and it is only available behind a paywall, then I'll pay for it or I didn't need it anyway.
Google is doing the correct thing in not discriminating against content which is paid or behind login walls. Some of the most important content are on social media, and most of them only serve logged in users.
If you want to decide yourself how search results are presented to you, you should try Kagi for a search engine.
No, it's also completely broken on desktop. Still have one or two friends who insist on sending twitter links. I don't click.
remember when part of the commentary was "ha! twitter fired one bajllion people and it's still operating fine". I keep seeing errors, much more than in the flying whale era, just now they appear to be in the frontend.
I remember that, people were convinced that twitter had a load of woke lib employees or something
I don't?
> flying whale era
Is that the same as the fail whale era?
Always been like that. Twitter, Instagram, ... None of those platforms have usable UX if you're not logged in.
This is not true, this change is a recent phenomenon, I believe it came into effect sometime around 2021-2023 (maybe earlier even). I believe it changed when OpenAI showed the value of data.
Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to create an account, or log in.
This is my recollection as well when they all realized they were feeding the bots that the free use became broken
My recollection is that this happened pretty much immediately after Twitter became X.
That’s roughly when I stopped opening Twitter links, I still sometimes see posts from that platform, but mostly just as screenshots and with the discussions elsewhere. I don’t care for their dark patterns.
Instagram's been a pita to use without a login for years, they've recently got even worse though.
Best comment.
Instagram has always redirected me to a login page. Twitter only did after Elon and his friends went batshit ruining the website.
Following an Insta link gives me a dismissible login modal, but still shows the linked page when dismissed. Following any link becomes login only unless you right click to open link in new. Now it does the same previous behavior. I don’t use Insta, only when every now and then someone sends me a link with what looks like might be some other interesting post, but the game becomes boring and and I just close the tab
People already knew the value of data long before LLMs were popularised and web scraping has been a thing since the very beginnings of the web.
Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.
Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the same dark patterns you described too.
Getting down voted for stating a fact. Just goes to show how short some people’s memories are.
False. You used to be able to read Twitter fine without being logged in
When was that? Already pre-Elon it was terrible.
Sorry, are you actually five years old? Until just a few years ago Twitter was entirely open. You could view any and all public tweets, replies, threads. All exactly like you were logged in. Their APIs were open and you could literally plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users on the actual planet in real time into your own application.
Actually, you definitely could not plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users in real time into your own application (without huge cost). You only would ever see a subset of tweets via twitters API's and search results, if you wanted the full thing you had to pay for 'the firehose' which was very expensive.
No, I'm with GP: Most of the time I'd just get errors and retries that don't work, even years before Elon. I also never had an account there and assumed it had something to do with that.
From UI perspective you are right, but not for APIs.
The APIs definitly used to be open enough that you could hit a "Generate token", hit one endpoint with cURL and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on, no reviews or validation at all, all you needed was an account + token.
I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another).
At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too.
> and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on
The complete firehose was expensive and paid-only.
You could get a sampling of Tweets at a lower rate through the API. It wasn’t the complete firehose, though.
Some years ago you could even subscribe to an RSS feed for each user.
Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
And if you click on an account you just get top posts of all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's impossible to even find the context while being logged off.
Here's me complaining[1] about the login walls way back in 2021, this was before the Elon takeover.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365
Edit: Some more posts -
That's a completely unrelated issue. Once someone sent you a link to a tweet, you could read it.
Is it unrelated? From the parent comment:
> Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover.
(And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether)
Both are correct, at least according to my memory: you used to be able to read tweets without an account, but that stopped, and it stopped before Musk took over.
There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time.
Interesting; if you'd have asked me when Elon took over I'd have said something around 2020-2022. Probably why everyone assumes it's a result of him
Instagram explicitly tells you need to be logged in. Twitter/X just appears to be broken
Obviously wrong. The typical user-hostile thing isn't this dumb, you'd see a teaser that's probably vaguely sexual and get some "sign up for the full experience" prodding. Literally any 2-person startup that's a week old would do better than this at being thirsty and awful
Twitter never worked on my on desktop without account since Elon took over. It came down to security settings not allowing 3rd party cookies. If you allow it, it loads up.
change the url to xcancel.com
or nitter.net
This past week I rarely see quoted tweets now in the main timeline, it just says not available. So something about viewing RT is broken.
same with Instagram
Another PSA. RSS is still very good.
It's been broken for anyone not logged in since Elon turned a bunch of servers off. It costs too much to make Twitter freely available. If users who weren't logged in could see the site it would crash constantly.
Not really sure how that's possibly true considering CDN caching exists
I find it so sad that Twitter still gets traffic at all. Even if we put aside the super shady content on this platform (free speech, lol), the app, either on the web or mobile, has a sub-par user experience.
I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.
X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective.
Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.
Who is using Bluesky in the US?
Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I am.... For what it's worth.
There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.
And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem.
Believe me, you can live without Twitter.
Most embeds I see on Discord are Bluesky. Bluesky seems to have taken over for social media links on sports subreddits. It saw a huge spike during the last game of the World Series.
https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/
Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base there after the election spike that it's still growing toward the peak after dropping to a little less than half.
> Who is using Bluesky in the US?
A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness).
> Is it just my friends?
If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
The fact that the left defined Joe Rogan as right-wing for not adhering to very specific far left tenets (e.g. de-platforming personas non grata) only served to push him and his listeners rightward, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a year ago.
It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
I suspect our politics are just too different for my attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky.
You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls").
If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.
i consider myself left-wing and found it very toxic. the ubiquitous blocking features are also a pretty big negative as i found myself blocked by a considerable portion of the site simply for following people in AI
site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos
I consider myself left-wing, but bluesky is pretty casually toxic in a way that turns me off.
> Who is using Bluesky in the US?
Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes, if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.
> Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming that everyone is using that same site is silly. It doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other people are using other sites.
> But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.
I would Press X to Doubt (perhaps ironically, for this X...). Searching around, it seems like Bluesky has about a tenth as many total users as X has active users, but it's definitely growing at a faster rate, and X might be declining in active users.
Anecdotally, lots of people I noticed leaving for Bluesky very loudly and publicly quietly returned to posting on X after a while.
it's completely false for the ML technical discussion i'm interested in. here's a random topic, for instance:
https://bsky.app/search?q=%22induced+operator+norm%22 https://x.com/search?q=%22induced%20operator%20norm%22&src=t...
My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder.
Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government.
It's network effect, same as Facebook
I have a great user experience on it.
Here's what I do:
I follow people who are consistently interesting and don't post too much.
Then I only use "Following". "For You" is an algorithmic attention vortex for the proles.
There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky, but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons.
BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my feed enough that I don't usually see it.
They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better off not using either, but I still find myself going back to Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about Reddit, honestly.
I would try again, but not use discover, and aggressively mute/block.
Yep. I ruthlessly anyone who induces the slightest negative emotion in me, be it annoyance, fear, anger etc. You are what you consume.
I check the mainstream headlines once a day, kind of like checking the weather. There may be something I need to know. But then I move on.
Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless.
I think what's disappointing is that so many people that I've followed for years now routinely engage in daily political slapfights, or at least retweet ragebait. In the blogging era, it would have been really weird for a software engineer to sit down and write several paragraphs about their political views, but the friction of hitting "repost" is so comparatively low that everyone does it. Myself included, honestly, although I've been trying not to.
I don't have any problem with people having and voicing thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations about politics, especially with people with whom they disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of what's happening on social media, but that's a different topic.)
I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow topics, not people, and there isn't a great way to do that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber. And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated the site is at this point.
To follow topics on Bluesky, add feeds for those topics.
The "Following" tab is literally that - chronologically ordered posts and replies from accounts you follow. The "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" tabs give you algorithm-sourced stuff that is somewhat connected to who you follow.
When I click on the tab for the Game Dev feed, I see nothing but posts about game dev. When I click on the Astronomy feed, I only see telescopes and pictures taken with telescopes.
Interesting, BlueSky's non-algorithmic feed makes it really easy to avoid political ragebait and focus on tech accounts imo
Really depends on who you're following
The problem (if you want to call it that) with following a person on sites like Bluesky or X is that people aren't machines and won't stay "on topic" regarding the reason you followed them in the first place. You might follow them for software dev, biking, birding, or whatever, but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.
IMO, Reddit/HN-esque sites are better for following topics, and Bluesky/X/Mastodon are better for following people. Maybe hashtags are a good middleground but I don't have enough experience using those sites to say.
(Disclaimer: I don't use any social media except for HN.)
> but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.
Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting).
Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick.
I'd love to give it another try and be proven wrong. At the beginning it felt like "old Twitter", before it became mainstream, because it was almost entirely software engineers who had left Twitter. After Trump took office it felt like a constant deluge of hand-wringing and people shaking their fists at clouds, and it was tough to immerse myself in it.
Make sure you stick to your "Following" feed and not "Discover" or even the feed dedicated to what your friends are into
If someone is feeding you ragebait on Bluesky you should just unsubscribe. The feed is what you make it. Twitter can be kind of like this too, but the trolls haunt the replies on there whereas people can shut trolls out of their replies on Bluesky. That's the big difference, is someone comes into a thread just to stir shit the original poster can shut them down.
The danger that this creates an echo chamber has to be weighed against allowing trolls to run unchecked, or worse be like Twitter where these people get promoted to the top because ragebait generates big engagement numbers.
Ultimately, the entire social media world needs to admit that maximizing engagement is a bad idea. They have to somehow convince the advertisers that having their product next to content designed entirely to enrage the reader is not good.
It's good people like you who consider free speech some laughing matter don't lead the conversation.
I don't even want to think how dim the situation would be without him having taken over.
Oh god are we still pretending X is a free speech platform.
Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened.
If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell you.
Seems to me to be more possible than on a manually curated platform where any whiff of a differing opinion gets downvoted, [dead] and [flagged].
The app consistently shows me things that I want to see from the social circle around the people I follow and the topics they talk about. Alternative platforms like Threads are worse at this; the platform I hear the most about, Bluesky, brags about not having this. Maybe the Twitter experience varies by which topics you are interested in, you might get served more slop the more mainstream topics you follow. But the reason I have not quit due to unusability is because there isn't any unusability.
BlueSky brags about not having what, exactly? Nazis?
Charitably, I assume they mean it brags about not having an algorithmic feed.
Bluesky does actually have an algorithmic feed ("Discover"), but it isn't the default.
The algorithm is a mirror: it show more of what you interact with. You see “shady content” because you pay attention to it.
But you can also follow people and read only what they write, reply to them, and write yourself.
That isn't true. I signed up for a fresh account for a project I was working on. Despite following no-one and not having interacted with anything, all I was pushed were racists, bigots, and extremist political content.
Oh, and the owner's account.
Even if you believe that Musk and team don’t “touch the scales” of the algorithm, the inevitable consequence of the decision to prioritize comments of people willing to pay for blue checks, is to discourage users not in that segment from engagement at all levels.
The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to weight the input to the algorithm away from “what does an average user pay attention to” and more towards “what does a paying user pay attention to.”
Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO short-sighted, business goal. What it is not is a way to create a fair and impartial “mirror” as you have described.
The discussion over X is always the same:
"It's gone to hell"
"No, it just reflects your tastes"
"That's objectively false: create a new account and see what happens."
"..."
The same can be said of bluesky. In fact I think that you've said it yourself and recommended that people stick to manually curated follows!
I think it's good advice, the main difference is that Bsky encourages you to do that by giving you the possibility to customize your feeds (and set whatever as the default). You can have a combination of personal lists and custom algorithmic feeds (your own or someone else's).
Even ignoring musk's takeover, I think it's a better model that reduces doomscrolling, ragebait and generally low quality interactions.
uh, where...?
Thanks for that super insightful comment.
A whole lot of machine learning practitioners use X. Makes it difficult to avoid if you're interested in the news. It's definitely a network effect issue.
You might find this useful: https://news.smol.ai/
I find this a bit disingenuous.
If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as the best worst option.
Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash.
You can take your analogy further. The buffet noticed you pausing on unhealthy food, and begins replacing all the healthy options with unhealthy options. People shame your criticisms and note you could easily put blinders on and intentionally look longer at healthy options anytime you accidentally glance at an unhealthy one. the alternative would be an absolute repression of free speech after all.
Open a private tab, navigate to x.com. All you see are heinous neonazis casually discussing the jewish question and fantasizing about race wars.
If you do that all you get is a login wall. Have you actually done this or is this what you imagine it to be?
Well, I can confirm that this is the case with a brand new account.
I stopped using Twitter somewhere around the time of Musk takeover. Only used it for event coverage live during events for which I found it genuinely useful at some point and of course doomscrolling. Can't say I miss it. Its like nothing changed in my life. I also managed to miss the LGBT exodus after Musk policy changes and learned about it later at a random FOSDEM talk. Global "social" feeds do everything in their power to steal attention and having it all back is great for sanity.
A lot of teachers also stopped using it around the same time. This was unfortunate as it was an amazing source for project ideas for students.
I’m just happy they got rid of the system web view and replaced it with the one which they can inject their own JavaScript into. Bonus points that it covers the thing I want to read and I can’t turn it off. Truly, a masterpiece of engineering from the guy whose entire schtick was coming up with was to boost engagement from kids.
On a related topic, I've been following with some amusement the outrage on Reddit/r/Grok because Grok will no longer make porn. Apparently Grok was trained on all the NSFW material on X and Twitter before it intentionally so Grok could have a "spicy" mode. And spicy it was. Some of the stuff it made was really good and people loved it. But (allegedly) Musk changed his mind to go after enterprise and government accounts so spicy mode was killed and now there a lot of angry users complaining on Reddit.
My interest is this: It appears that it's not possible to over-ride the training effectively since NSFW material bleeds into normal image requests. Musk had this problem before trying to over-ride Grok's training, so at one point said he would have to retrain Grok. It's interesting to me that LLMs can't be steered effectively, which makes me wonder if they can ever really be aligned ("safe")
I think the more general issue with all AI and "safe" is that AI 'learned' what it knows from human content ... and we object to the content we as humans created.
Hard to avoid that problem.
> Hard to avoid that problem.
Agree. Even the Christian Bible has horrific content that in some communities would require trigger warnings
I mean isn't this just considered data poisoning?
The training data was considered good by Musk to start with, so he could have spicy mode, but he changed his mind and now Grok is considered poisoned with porn. My question is, can that be fixed or does he have to start over again?
There was research on LLMs training and distillation that if two models have a similar architecture (probably the case for Xai) the "master" model will distill knowledge to the model even if its not in the distillation data. So they probably need to train a new model from scratch.
(sorry i don't remember the name but there was an example with a model liking howl to showcase this)
Subliminal learning: https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/
If true, bad news for Elon Musk and xAI because they have to start over. He's already indicated this in regards to Wikipedia. He wants to train on Grokepedia and not Wikipedia. Removing NSFW material gives him another reason.
They're also doing something very scammy with ads - if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it, whereas it's much less sensitive on ordinary posts and behaves like any other app. This is clearly to increase click-through artificially.
I noticed that too, it's so annoying.
The Tumblr app does this and it’s infuriating
What about links to malware or other illegal content that will be downloaded without me clicking on it...?
Is it only in the app, or also with the browser?
Crazy.
> also with the browser
Browsers have been doing this forever: you make a request to a server (A) that you choose to interact with, and it could respond with various things (a redirect, a page with a meta refresh, a page with a frame / iframe, etc.) that result in your browser automatically making a request (and rendering the resulting page response) to some other server (B) that could get you in trouble.
However, in this classic scenario, when A starts sending you to B, you stop trusting A. This is simple when A's behavior is entirely determined by A's owner. What if it's determined by other users (not just A's owner)? Typically, A would be careful to not serve a redirect (etc.) based on user input, as that would be considered an "open redirect" vulnerability (with an exception for link shorteners, I guess). Interesting how the webview preloading that we're discussing now commits essentially this same offense.
You don't get it. It's worth it for the sake of UX.
/s
Reddit does something similar in some way but not like this.
I often save links to posts from Reddit in my Obsidian note app. Just copying the link marks it that you shared the link and artificially increases stats in that manner.
The new behavior is much better from a user perspective. When you tap on a post, it'll start loading the link in the background so once you are done reading the post the link will load immediately and the post will shelve on the bottom of the screen. It is very fluid, especially with blog posts / news articles.
deleted my account a few weeks ago and it actually feels like my health has improved because i'm no longer constantly bombarded with ragebait and doomerism
i hope they keep ruining the experience of using it some more
Again, anyone still using Twitter should know they are contributing to the richest man in the world actively pushing to disrupt the core fabric of our society.
I don’t have the same take, but the algorithm and site is so broken, the patterns so dark, that I’m down to maybe 5 minutes of X a week at best.
Everything is posted to get views, even from the more quality people. It’s ironic that I hear about “brainrot” the most on X, but it’s full of brainrot masquerading as valuable information.
They are all like this to a degree because controversy creates engagement. If a platform is not making you money, is not making you smarter, and not helping you form IRL connections, then I highly recommend disabling it.
You literally have people crying that their garbage content isn't getting enough views (and hence payout).
It's embarrassing, but that's what the entire site is.
I fully agree with your stance on Elon but I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit. I've tried Bluesky and although I am very left-leaning on sociocultural topics I just find them too... annoying over there. (I'm closer to neoliberal on economic topics and that's also a bit of an issue there. And I like AI and they pretty much all deeply hate AI.)
Simon Willison is on Bluesky, and I'm going to go out on a relatively safe limb and suggest that if you check out what he reposts, who he follows, etc., you will find people who do not deeply hate AI. I do think Bluesky, in general, is a lot like the Twitter of, say, 15 years ago, where the quality of one's feed is very much dependent on how aggressively one curates it -- although I wish they would finally add a feature for selectively turning off reposts user by user.
(It is absolutely true that a lot of creators hate AI, although I would argue that they have fair reasons to do so given the way AI is frequently presented / talked about / used. I find it unfortunate that everything remotely related to machine learning has now been rebranded as "AI", which leads people to reflexively dunk on tools that really aren't that much like the AI they have in their heads, but it's not their fault.)
> I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit
Like what precisely? Infosec twitter is gone, science twitter is long dead. Visiting my timeline in non-algorithmic mode yields a post from months ago. In algo mode it's just ads and rage-bait.
may I ask, any good follows?
Building rockets, moon bases, making fossil fuels less critical… yes, I agree
Literal moon shots, while he contributes meaningfully to worsening conditions on Earth. His dismantling of USAID will have a more consequential effect than 90% of his fever dreams ever will.
Not only that, but his @grok bot is now completely unhinged too (the public version) spewing an even more polarized version of his exact views without any ability to consider new information:
His only legacy will be the deaths of millions. Fifty years from now he will be known for nothing else, his other projects merely footnotes. Joining the esteemed ranks of Stalin, Mao, Leopold II, Hitler, Pol Pot.
"Consequential effects" to the pockets of the billionaires running public contractors that embezzle all the money, perhaps.
But hey, maybe those gay Nicaraguan's really needed that $3 million. Perhaps another $70 trillion to Israel, just to round it off.
On October 22nd the US national debt passed $38 trillion, a record number. That is the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars in debt outside of the COVID-19 pandemic. We only hit $37 trillion in in August.
Further, unless you are in the top .1% of earners, or you live on tips (I somehow doubt there are many stippers on HN) your taxes will not decrease as a result of any of Trumps "cuts".
In short, you have been lied to and are celebrating unnecessary cruelty for the sake of cruelty which will save you personally $0.00 and which only further increases America's debts.
Worse the ridiculous tariffs are pushing us toward a recession that only AI investment has forestalled. AI investment now represents the single largest investment of capital in human history, and if that bubble bursts we will enter into what could potentially be the worst economic collapse in not only American history, but human history.
Sigh, these talking points are beyond expired. There’s no evidence DOGE has ever saved the government a notable amount of money, they just straight up lied about the value of things they were cancelling.
I understand having a favourable view of Musk in the past. But to continue to do so today is to put your hands over your ears and say “la la la la” while confronted with overwhelming evidence.
The effects of shutting down USAID are extremely clear. Kids are starving and dying:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12150160/
Even if you truly genuinely believe USAID must be shut down then you phase it out over, at minimum, months. Doing so overnight means you have made an active choice to kill people. If your response to that is to completely ignore the suffering and pull out some absurd right wing talking point then I truly worry for you.
"Kids are starving and dying"
Emotional blackmail paired with dismissive ad hominem had a good run, admittedly.
Is it your contention that children are not starving and dying, or that you don't care if they are because you think this will lower your taxes?
I have bad news either way.
I am a messenger, and it turns out I've got some bad news as well.
My contention is that this kind of emotional appeal has been exploited to the point of (quickly) diminishing returns.
People are scratching the surface and following the money. Those who used such maudlin tactics to protect money laundering, war mongering and such things would do well to go and sin no more, lest more serious consequences come knocking.
Focus and determination can grant you the power of the queen on the chessboard.
But when you become blind to what happens around you, you become the pawn in someone else’s plan. A messenger is an authority’s favorite tool.
Someone would like to starve people and you are a part of their plan. If you feel the tug of appeal, it is because you understand something isn’t right here. If you don’t investigate, your mind is not your own.
I think specifically these NGOs were run by board members that ran 10 other NGOs all called "Save the children Africa" etc... And the weird thing about it, is that no children were actually being saved. Instead the money went to ActBlue through a few actors.
Mr Beast has done more for Saving the Children in Africa with $5m than USAID has done with $500b per year.
Citation?
> My contention is that this kind of emotional appeal has been exploited to the point of (quickly) diminishing returns.
That might apply to you personally, and if it does then it says a lot more about you than it does any broader societal point.
Personally, I’m able to distinguish between attempts to manipulate my emotions and the very real, very true fact that people are starving and dying as a result of cynical choices made by Musk and DOGE. There’s no reason to group that together with war mongering and money laundering, the only reason to do so is if you’re seeking to dismiss real documented suffering.
“People have cynically tried to manipulate my emotions so I don’t have any emotions any more” isn’t the retort you apparently think it is.
> this kind of emotional appeal
It is not an emotional appeal. It is a statement of objective and provable fact that cutting off funding for food resulted in people not having food. It's also obvious that this would be the result. The grandparent posted a link to one study. There are others if you do a quick search.
> People are scratching the surface and following the money. Those who used such maudlin tactics to protect money laundering, war mongering and such things would do well to go and sin no more, lest more serious consequences come knocking.
I have no idea what any of this even means. I don't live in whatever bubble you do, but it sounds like you believe there is some kind of global cabal of "them" that profited by these children not starving and you're out to stop that?
I googled it. It turns out there are ton of wacky conspiracy theories about USAID, and that's largely where Musk got his ideas. I had no idea.
It's a wild world we live-in when internet conspiracies can kill actual children.
"you don't care if they are because you think this will lower your taxes?"
Stop that. Now.
Is it untrue? You failed to address my point.
Children are being left to die. SOMETHING is more important than that to the proponents of these policies. What is it? If it's lower taxes... they aren't achieving that goal. Taxes are only decreasing for the top 0.1% of the population and tip earners.
If it's to lower the national debt that also isn't working. The national debt has increased at record rates.
Is there some other goal I'm not aware of? Why is it so important that these children not be fed?
Don't let them die then. Go help save them. Give money to Mr Beast, he's done more for Children dying in Africa than all of USAID's $500B per year.
The most important goal IMO is to expose and weaken the misguided use and expansion of "soft power" in my name, with my tax dollars and without my consent.
Ironically, one of the consistent outcomes is starving and dying children. They're just delivered asynchronously and from the "wrong" side of the ledger.
As I said in my original comment, even if you disagree with the concept of USAID and want to shut it down you ramp it down over time to allow for replacements. Doing it immediately has an absolutely negligible effect on your tax dollars (putting aside the fact it’s a rounding error at best anyway) and is a deliberate choice to inflict suffering on innocent people.
The government decided to let food they’d already paid for rot while people starved. Twist yourself into a pretzel to defend that if you wish but I won’t be joining you.
Are you "consenting" to starving children, then?
That is a very vague justification for the very real lack of food those children are dying of.
Have you ever been without food? I have, and vague conspiracies and high ideals really didn't matter too much to me in those moments.
He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all to stay on X.
Starship will never get to the moon.
I have a bridge in downtown NYC, interested in buying?
those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of us are holding our breath on that one.
Cutting food stamps. What's the point of a moon base if we can't even feed people?
Escape from pitchforks
Shooting the billionaires into outer space would make the world a better place.
Schumer isn't engineering anything lol
Republicans control all three branches the government.
Not the Senate. That takes 60 votes to end the democrat's filibuster, which is why the last dozen attempts by republicans to pass a clean CR with no changes to the current budget failed. (The last one yesterday[1] failed with 54 in favor 44 against. Three democrats voted with the republicans in that vote, still not enough.)
[1]: https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2025-10-03-senate-again-fa...
Not having supermajority doesn't mean they aren't in control. The fact is, the president could say one sentence, and the shutdown would be over. It's no surprise that the last 2 record setting shutdowns happened under this president.
>Cutting food stamps.
How is Musk involved in the current budget debacle aside from being "republican"? It's easy to blame stuff on him when he was running DOGE, but since his falling out with trump blaming every cut on Musk is a tired and expired meme.
Given how much he contributed to the election outcome it hardly seems tired to blame him for the consequences.
Plus he's on Twitter every week publicly discussing how much he uses the platform to put his thumb on the scale of discourse towards his personal beliefs.
In what world is he not involved?
The consequences of blocking a CR?
The consequences of the 2024 election in which he played a significant role. This "budget debacle" is a direct consequence.
Also, Elon has weighed in quite aggressively on prior budgetary fights, so it would be crazy to say his influence isn't being felt here. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5046887-elon-musk-slam...
"He gave the federal government organizational cancer, but he left now so he's not to blame"
Americans will be living with Musk's legacy for decades.
Hopefully, fingers crossed
Actions speak to the character of a person. And some actions have long lasting consequences.
I'm okay with blaming him along with all of these Austin turds with podcasts.
It's not because he no longer works there that he doesn't have the exact same ideology. And now he's trying to push a Trump-like figure in the UK
What does he do except making fossil fuel MORE critical? What do you think rockets are powered with?
> making fossil fuels less critical
Tesla for years made billions by enabling others to pollute, and it still does so.
Every EV Musk sells enables more ICE cars to stay on the road.
If you want to drink the kool-aid thats fine, but the facts are not on your side.
It's not 2014 anymore. Check his tweets, right wing slop occupies most of his brain these days.
What moon bases?
These don't exist.
They did say building, not built. Starship R&D work is… tough to deny.
Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware. Unless it actually exists, it's safe to assume that it never will.
I'm very much in the Musk hater category, but it really takes some doing to dismiss SpaceX as vaporware.
This is the problem with the dialogue around Musk. He's not 99% vaporware, he's 80-90% vaporware. That's problem enough.
In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his personal brand. This is not going to end well.
Going to the moon is very much vaporware. Maybe the penultimate example of it.
Going to the moon was, at the very least, demonstrated as technologically possible in the 1960s, and you can literally go watch a Starship launch if you want. I have a very hard time putting it in the same "entirely prospective" category as androids, self-driving taxis, and Mars bases.
The moon is orders of magnitude more difficult to land on than launching a LEO satellite.
And that'd be a great point if we didn't already do it six times with slide rules in the 1960s.
> Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware.
Absolutely laughable motivated reasoning. Hate the guy if you must, but claiming one of the most impactful business leaders in American history is "99% vaporware" makes you look silly.
Every shareholder meeting he announces something that never comes to fruition. He’s the vaporware king.
Yet
More Musk vaporware.
It's near the middle of Musk's pile of vaporware.
That was 5-10-15 years ago Elon.
Is the implication here that the core fabric of our society isn't otherwise being disrupted, or that this particular disruption should be viewed as exceptionally egregious?
YSK, it feels like the implication of the framing of your question is that you're suggesting it doesn't matter and nobody should care.
The disruption is egregious. It is notable and worth pushing back against, even if you don't view it as "exceptional".
I am concerned with attacks on freedom, dignity, culture and national character. King Elmo of Twitter is "bad", but mild.
This seems like a fairly reasonable UX improvement. Unless I'm missing anything, it doesn't seem like this has nefarious intent, it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see the content as quickly as possible.
---
It's astonishing how quickly discussion disintegrates when Musk is mentioned on HN. He really is such a divisive figure, with incredibly polarised language both in support and against him.
Normal reasoned arguments are just absent here. Sometimes when two people disagree, they can still have a nuanced conversation/argument about it. But not about Musk.
There are some opinions in this thread that I vehemently disagree with, but it's not worth escalating by adding my opinion to the pile.
It reminds me of that phenomenon where you read the newspaper and notice an article in your domain of expertise and it's riddled with errors! Then you turn the page, read an article about something else, and completely trust it. You somehow didn't transfer the knowledge that the newspaper is inaccurate to the new domain.
It makes me wonder what other discussions on HN (and elsewhere) are completely devoid of nuance and reason, but I just don't notice it.
Preloading links is often avoided because it creates a wide range of issues. Using up newspapers free stories a month on articles users never see etc. Speed just isn’t that useful by comparison.
Incompetence is obviously still a possibility, but the likely intent overcoming such issues is to make X seem to generate more traffic and thus appear to be more relevant.
Even so, Chrome has preloading turned on by default with an option for "extended preloading" which is even more aggressive. There may be some downsides, but I don't think what X is doing here is unreasonable. Speed makes a huge difference in UX.
I hadn't considered this.
Webviews have serious security issues, at least if you enter any data into them.
See this article from 2016: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/modernizing-oauth-inter...
So my worries are that someone is going to click a link in Twitter and then enter their username and password into a news website. When this happens you need to trust the app developers.
>it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see the content as quickly as possible.
Yes and many people think that is outweighed by all the other issues raised in the larger thread here. That's "nuance and reason". Pretending it isn't there is not "nuance and reason".
> It's intriguing how normal reasoned arguments are just absent here
No 'reasoned arguments' were provided in your take. I'll give you one against this though -- it's all fun and games until you end up on a list because of Musk's UX.
How are you supposed to have a "nuanced discussion" about a guy doing literal Hitler salutes in public?
When you're either unwilling or incapable of understanding other people's perspectives it is indeed very difficult.
Try this: steelman the argument that what Musk did all those months ago wasn't a "literal Hitler salute". If you can do that, I suspect you'll find it a lot easier to have nuanced discussions about that topic (and possibly others) going forward.
Or we could look at everything else he does, like advocate for the AFD in Germany.
Fuck the salute. I can look at everything else he's done and still think he's a terrible individual that should not be given money or power.
Speaking of nuance, I find it rather unintuitive how it often seems like it's harder for people to have a nuanced opinion of other people than to have a nuanced opinion about a policy or software feature or specific situation.
You'd think given how complicated and faceted people are it would be especially easy to find both good and bad things to say about them, but online at least it almost seems to be the opposite: there's even less nuance when discussing people than there is discussing other topics. (Case in point.)
I'm not required to find the good in a person like Musk. I'm allowed to look at the many shitty things he's done and terrible opinions he expresses and say "that is a shit man, and I do not like him or trust him."
He has probably done something for someone somewhere that wasn't terrible. Does it counterbalance the rest? Not really!
There's that (possibly apocryphal) saying, "and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel." Just because a nazi has a redeeming quality somewhere does not undo them being a nazi.
This reinforces why I never use the social media apps and only the web versions. Very few apps avoid the invasive engagement-maximization that browsers make a bit more difficult.
Does this mean an attacker can turn any impression into any GET request?
It'd be an interesting way to count how many impressions your tweets get: add a URL to every tweet, put a tracking "pixel" in the webpage (assuming the webview loads all assets; if not, then just add the "pixel' URL to the tweet..
There's an impression counter on every tweet, visible to everyone
Not sure how much of an attack that is. FWIW the preloading is nice as a user.
Is the request coming from the user's IP or via a Twitter proxy?
As a plain webview would mean that you can grab everyone's details.
X is an authoritarian platform designed for freedomless speech.
People, including myself, were booted out for giving opinions that did not align with their corrupt values. Even post-Elon, after appealing decision, some of us still haven't been let back in.
Which opinions were those again?
That's precisely what Wechat is doing. Most chinese "mega apps" do this.
Elon absolutely on his track to copy this important feature [1]
The webview works as a traffic faucet. Elon can turn it on or off for every third-party site, you know, for "Internet safety".
My take:
Next step is X.com proprietary APIs inside the Webview, like payment and everything.
The ultimate goal is a "mini-app" framework that use PWA-like techs to run everything based on the Webview and circumvent Appstore.
And last a phone that runs the "mini-app" framework because why not, as an "AI edge node" like Elon recently proposed.
If there was ever a good reason to stop using Twitter, this is it.
I don't think this would even make it into top 10 good reasons to stop using Twitter.
A crazy ass billionaire trying to develop an "everything" app seems like a pretty damn good reason to run the other direction. I wouldn't want anyone controlling an app like that, much less Elon fucking Musk.
the same story applies to Wechat. Pony Ma was crazy rich for QQ and games already, he created another Wechat. Lots of ppl tried to boycott it, but network effect forced everyone to use it.
I'm fascinated with the number of users of this site who seem disproportionately invested in getting people to stop using Twitter.
Yeah it's so fascinating that people want an open internet rather than a small group of billionaires and big tech companies controlling everything. Truly bizarre.
"open"?
That's an interesting word to describe a platform that was previously the undisputed playground of Feds and NGOs.
What does this mean?
Pre-2022, Twitter was subject to heavy editorial oversight from D.C. and northern VA.
Censorship and propaganda at breathtaking scale.
This is a good place to start: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/
I like how you complain about "propaganda at breathtaking scale" and you fell for the Twitter Files, which was... precisely that.
Please show your work.
Musk's own lawyers did the work for us.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyers/in...
> “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.
> The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
> “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.” The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.
> Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.
Don't worry, though. Under Musk's leadership, free speech is well protected. Just ask https://x.com/elonjet, which Musk specifically promised (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456) to protect! They would never ban a news story just because it was from a hack! (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...)
"Show you're work"
Does exactly that using Musk's own lawyers
"...Wait no you weren't suppose to actually do that..."
Yes - it wasn't with respect to Trump. It was silencing negative stories about Biden and his son that was the proximate issue, and the general silencing of mostly Republican voices by mostly Democrat voices (though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent[0].
[0] https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil...
Again:
> > The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
That was the case for the Biden laptop story, too. (And SCOTUS, thus far, seems to agree; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri)
Again: Musk's own lawyers argued in court that the Twitter Files don't actually show what Matt Taibbi claimed they do.
(Taibbi also publicly claims Musk is now censoring him. https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1758230628355485979)
> though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent
While I tend to doubt that assertion, "Left-wing terrorism outpaces far-right attacks for first time in 30 years" perhaps points to a reason for a difference if it exists. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/28/left-wing-terrorism-far-rig...
The current administration seems just fine with similar jawboning. https://www.theverge.com/policy/799473/facebook-meta-ice-jaw...
If that were the reason we'd see even 10% of the same fervor for cutting out AWS or Cloudflare but we don't
In January the (now former) CEO announced the X Money payment platform will debut "later this year". "Yaccarino says the Visa partnership is the “first of many big announcements” that will be made about X Money this year." https://www.theverge.com/news/599137/x-money-payments-servic... I don't remember any other big announcements.
the webview messes up tokens and passwords managers so I don't see this happening. The US is too culturally different to have mega apps. In Asia their supermarkets also have a lot of information in the menu for example.
Replace "mega app" with "platform" and that's pretty much what Apple and Google are, Apple especially.
no I will not replace mega app with platform, WeChat app is totally different from the App Store.
In and Out has 5 menu items, similar to an app made in the USA, not too many features
A Chinese market can list 50 items similar to WeChat that has 50 different features.
The culture is reflected in the app design.
source: https://digitalcreative.cn/blog/how-china-ux-is-different
The App Store moved the clusters of icons to the home screen, but the messages and wallet app are right next to each other, and tightly integrated. You get to re-arrange and hide most icons, at least.
The UI looks different (information density etc.) but in the end it's still a collection of external applications neatly wrapped inside a platform with strong walls and a strict gatekeeper, with a basic suite available by default. In China, you could ditch most of iOS if you could trick a phone into launching directly into WeChat.
Who in their right mind would give X/Elon money or even enable photos or contacts access on their phone. At some point is just another money laundering thing for our (least) favourite billionaire.
Totally. Mini apps and mini-app stores are already developing in crypto (Farcaster, World,..) and the approach may well become the primary way to deploy advanced and secure apps going forward.
If you link to a page with ads on it, will that webview load count as an ad impression?
I’ve also noticed recently that when I click a Twitter link from Telegram, it hijacks the Telegram webview to open the tweet in Safari.
whaaat a surprise....
seamless data harvesting hidden behind a feature, more cached urls for training data
It seems like they changed the strategy and enhanced UX. Feels like now there would a lot of worthless traffic in the web
I don’t know what everyone gets out of Twitter/X. I signed up recently to see what the fuss is about,
I think I selected science and music as starting interests. Within 10 minutes I was getting lots of right wing borderline Nazi bullshit.
Tries it all again in incognito mode. Roughly same thing. WTF
First rule of Twitter is avoid the algorithm at all costs. The trolls have long since figured it out and now if the algorithm is involved you are going to see white supremacist talking points nonstop.
Second rule of Twitter is why are you on Twitter, it's a full on Nazi bar now.
The "following" feed that mostly shows you content from people you have explicitly followed is better, although the site really likes to swap back to the algorithmic "for you" feed whenever you aren't paying attention. However, even the following feed will still have the troll responses on most posts. You really can't avoid them on Twitter.
> Second rule of Twitter is why are you on Twitter,
It was a short affair.
No longer on Twitter. I can't see how anyone would want to be. It's a veritable cesspool.
Nikita should be ashamed of how BAD the android X app is.
Why are you using twitter for anything at this stage?
It's still the most interesting platform for AI
I just tried to find AI starter packs on BlueSky and confirmed that BlueSky is openly hostile to AI. I understand the reasons, it's just not where I'm at. I'll try Threads and see what happens.
I can't vouch for these, but they seem like reasonable starting points. I searched for "AI starter pack" with the quotes.
https://bsky.app/starter-pack-short/LFAZcGE
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/maosbot.bsky.social/3l3ix4wi64...
Thank you. I did follow one of those using the same search without the quotes and followed. And your second one now. I'm also cleaning up my X site to get rid of anything not AI so I can do a fair comparison.
Bluesky has lots of artists, authors, journalists, etc... who see AI as a direct threat to human creativity. Not that the AI will replace the creativity, but that it can generate slop that looks "good enough" and doesn't demand a living wage or healthcare benefits. Many of these creative types have little trust that corporate management won't try to replace them just to save a buck.
I'm sympathetic to their arguments but that doesn't lesson my need to understand AI if I'm going to help them with their concerns. Ignoring it is not an effective strategy.
I block X and related domains at the router.
what do you recommend instead?
Hackernews, Mastodon, Onlineplatforms of Newspapers or Magazines is what I use
Physical contact with Gramineae
Another example and incentive not to use apps and to be held hostage, when an equivalent web service is available. On Android, just use Hermit or some similar app to sandbox a webview of their webpage.
What bugs me is the sheer number of people, and organisations, who still link to images and video or '1/20' long screeds on twitter, while the next article on their own site is bitching about how bad twatter/owner/politics etc is. Seriously if a site, blog, forum etc you know ever links to twitter then just stop interaction with them, they're lazy mofos need to do their own groundwork.
I understand the rationale and I am happy for the authors and I think the distribution will be way better.
As a user I like to get out as soon as I click because I can trace back the link and I can do clipping or bookmark in my browser.
Huge fan of X, but it's pissing in the face of your fans to tell such obvious lies.
> Huge fan of X
Why? It's a cesspool of hate. Even if you try to avoid the political nonsense Elon forces himself and his cronies into your recommendations.
X has everything, and you can pick what you follow (there's a "For You" tab, but also a strictly chronological following tab). I like it for variety of political views (e.g. super-lefty @caitoz, super-righty @L0m3z), following interesting LLM stuff (@elder_plinius is a great follow), lots of devs (e.g. carmack...), art accounts (@yumenohajime, @neurocolor), nutrition/health stuff, so much good stuff!
(The FYP, alas, sucks, and has since forever...)
But Elon Musk is a Nazi who goes around doing Hitler salutes. By using X you are implicitly endorsing and supporting this.
Day One Twitter user; built the very first API app and the first Android client. Launching a "competitor" next month - Keep an eye on https://flipso.com