9 ms·
X rolls out new ad format that can't be reported, blocked
- dangus 3y agoIs this even legal according to FTC guidelines? I thought ads had to be clearly marked in digital content. Either way, whatever. X is dying. I think the mainstream assumes “it’ll never happen, it’s too big to fail.” But it’s not. X really is shrinking and dying. It won’t die this year or next but it’s following in the steps of MySpace, perhaps more slowly. But it’s happening.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoElon Musk doesn't seem to be someone who cares about legality.
- infamouscow 3y agoTesla, SpaceX, and the Boring company are all extremely interconnected with government policy and goals. This is quite a claim to make.
- JohnFen 3y agoNot sure how that counters the assertion that Musk doesn't care about legality, though.
- FireBeyond 3y agoAnd yet, to pick on one alone, SpaceX has been smacked how many times now for EPA, FAA, and other regulatory agency violations?
- taway1237 3y agoMaybe, but there's still no alternative. Most people don't care, journalists and politicians still need Twitter to share their thoughts/amplify their voice, and researchers/content creators still link to their work on Twitter. Wake me up when it changes.
- kevinventullo 3y agoIs there any functional difference between Twitter and Threads, or is just the user base? (I don’t use either)
- ryanwhitney 3y agoI'm curious how much of this is perception vs reality. Context: Heard something about an active shooter this week and followed a link to the Baltimore Police twitter account[0]. As I'm no longer logged in, I see tweets from 2021 and 2017 with no indication that there's new content I'm missing. If this is how public services are trying to get the word re:ongoing events, it's a terrible option. (granted, you said journalists and politicians, not public services…) 0: https://twitter.com/BaltimorePolice https://twitter.com/BaltimorePolice
- dangus 3y agoNo alternative? Reddit, TikTok, (Instagram) Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon, Reels, Facebook… I think that we just assume that complete platform death (Friendster, MySpace) can’t happen anymore, but I think it definitely can. Network effects make AND break platforms.
- infamouscow 3y agoIf anything, it'll be the legacy media that ceases to exist soon enough. Twitter directly competes for the same advertising revenue the legacy media does. If Twitter was dying, it behooves the legacy media to report about it. I can't think of any other industry where a someone spends more time trying to paint the competition in a negative light, than casting their own brand in a positive one. Think about it.
- taberiand 3y ago¿Por qué no los dos?
- regularjack 3y ago"Legacy media", give me a fucking break.
- infamouscow 3y ago> "Legacy media", give me a fucking break. Since there's no rebuttal in your reply, consider this a break :) Analog radio, newspapers, and television were already in a managed decline before the 2016 election. The events that unfolded forestalled the inevitable a bit longer, but the music is about to end for these propagandists masquerading as reporters. Trust in legacy media is at a record low.
- AlexandrB 3y agoI think there's a lot to critique about traditional media, but their ethical standards are head and shoulders above random posters and grifters on social media. If traditional media is a cesspool, social media is a sewer. Edit: If you want a concrete example, look at how rampant plagiarism is on social media/Youtube[1]. Traditional media journalists regularly got fired[2] for doing shit like this. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtJ7bte_zg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtJ7bte_zg [2] https://news.yahoo.com/cnn-news-editor-fired-plagiarism-145003064.html https://news.yahoo.com/cnn-news-editor-fired-plagiarism-1450...
- Tepix 3y agoOf all the changes made to X, the one that places responses by paying members first is what ruins it for me. Those responses are usually pulpy.
- AaronFriel 3y agoOn prominent accounts I follow, the top replies are universally all paid accounts posting clickbait, totally unrelated (or possibly AI generated?) to the poster. Here's a great example. I follow Jake Sherman, founder of Punchbowl News, to stay up to date on happenings in Congress. This is a reply: https://twitter.com/3MTS_/status/1710360772612706416 https://twitter.com/3MTS_/status/1710360772612706416 All of that account's replies are spam like that. They're not even the worst offender, there are a handful of other accounts that just post emojis, complete nonsense, to every single popular account. Musk had already destroyed the value of looking at a tweet's replies, which I consider the "accuracy" of the platform. But that was never the main draw anyway. So far, my feed remains pretty good - the "recall". I've opted in to follow certain people or topics and truly, there's no better place to get the latest news. But if they destroy the value of the feed, there really will be no reason for anyone to stay.
- rsynnott 3y agoI’m stunned no-one was able to talk him out of that one. “Pay-for-attention” is an _awful_ mechanic; even dating/hookup apps, who to some extent depend on it, generally have to ration it; you can’t just pay to be at the top of the grid/stack of cards all the time.
- badwolf 3y agoElon is literally the ultimate target user for "Pay-for-attention" schemes. He literally spent $44 Billion Dollars to drive attention to himself.
- b112 3y agoThere are people who use twitter, who have no idea it changed ownership. Who barely know who Elon is. Twitter may be dying for hackernews, but is it alive for other communities?
- lukev 3y agoThe writing/poetry community is basically done there. Authors will still post announcements etc but there's maybe 10% of the community there once was.
- llm_nerd 3y agoElon's purchase and then (mis)management of Twitter has been recurring, mainstream news virtually everywhere. This is hardly some fringe HN type focus, it is literally everywhere. Everyone has seen the dramatic change in the quality and features of the site. Twitter has a massive amount of "lock in" effect, however. If it didn't Musk would have killed Twitter ten times over now, but somehow people always rationalize things getting much worse. With some of the newest change a new wave of Twitter refugees are hitting Threads, and it's comical, if a bit sad, how often their first tweet is citing their Twitter follower-count, seemingly obligating the Threads community to match it to keep their interest. Eh.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Twitter may be dying for hackernews, but is it alive for other communities? Probably depends on the community. The non-tech people I know have almost entirely abandoned Twitter. Those who still use it use it far less than they used to.
- rsynnott 3y agoThey presumably know that _something_ has happened to it, though; the identity of the idiot responsible is somewhat beside the point. Like, no regular user could possibly not have noticed the changes to it over the past year. There’s a restaurant near me which I used to like, but which has gone downhill over the last couple of years. I don’t know or particularly care who owns it, but I don’t go here anymore.
- anytime5704 3y agoPretty sure it’s illegal according to both FTC and EU guidelines (the not disclosing what is/isn’t an ad). Can’t imagine this lasts.
- tsujamin 3y agoEdit (I missed this): "In addition, users cannot add Community Notes to these ads either. Over the past few months, users have been utilizing Community Notes, the popular feature on the platform that allows users to add context to disinformation and other factually incorrect posts, to warn others of scam ads on X." Original comment: I'd bet $8 that either ads without Community Notes, or ads with hitbox the size of the entire tweet row that takes you to an embedded link (like the new format of Posted Links) are next. The latter would be especially bad: just one mis-swipe away from hitting an attacker controlled website :(
- scooby6 3y ago[flagged]
- petee 3y agoI wonder how long until that ad selling a compact ghost gun pistol appears again? Unreportable ads, a great haven
- ceejayoz 3y agoCan't be blocked with first party tools, at least. That "can't reply, retweet, or even see the account's name" format should be distinct enough for things like uBlock or a specialized extension to find.
- josefresco 3y agoDifferent but I've seen multiple ads from the @NFL (and a few other brands) on X that are not labeled as ads. This is on the "Following" tab which is supposed to only show tweets from accounts you follow (I do not follow the NFL)
- flandish 3y agoIn addition to this, the “hitbox” for the … to block the ad is very tiny and you end up viewing the ad…
- josefresco 3y agoYes - I've gotten very good at hitting that little, shrinking 3 dot spot.
- threeseed 3y agoPretty sure the company is going to be sold to a private equity firm once it reaches $1b in valuation. There's just no way Musk is going to want to stick around the way things are trending. Premium tiers are not going to come close to replacing the lost revenue to declining ad spend. Especially when it's in a death spiral with increasingly spammier ads causing a flight of higher quality advertisers. And there isn't the profit to cover debt payments let alone pay for new features like payments that X desperately needs to generate new revenue. Meanwhile Meta gave a glimpse of the levers it can pull by adding Threads to the Instagram sidebar. Ever closer integration is going to drive hundreds of millions of new users at zero cost.
- b112 3y agoPretty sure the company is going to be sold to a private equity firm once it reaches $1b in valuation. There's just no way Musk is going to want to stick around the way things are trending If he did that, it could recover its former might perhaps, and the censorship he disliked may return. Thus he likely wants it dead, rather than in other hands.
- throwawayq3423 3y ago> and the censorship he disliked may return. Banning Nazis is not censorship, it's basic hygiene.
- pennaMan 3y agoDid you just speedrun Godwin's law?
- riffic 3y agothere's a parable of a Nazi bar, that was made famous ironically with a tweet. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar > From an anecdote shared by Michael B. Tager (@IamRageSparkle) on Twitter in July 2020. In the multi-tweet thread, Tager recounted visiting a "shitty crustpunk bar", where he saw a patron abruptly expelled. The bartender explained that the man was wearing "iron crosses and stuff", and that he feared such patrons would become regulars and start bringing friends if not promptly kicked out, which would lead him to realize "oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now" only after the unwanted patrons became too "entrenched" to kick out without trouble
- Lou999k 3y agoWhy anyone is still on there is beyond me
- augstein 3y agoThere are still some high profile people posting great content for free there, especially if you are into tech and/or finance.
- MikusR 3y agoThere is no alternative.
- czottmann 3y agoExtremely debatable, especially when stated without qualifiers. I know a lot of people who are happily using Mastodon or Bluesky, not looking back and enjoying their chosen platforms a lot more than Twitter.
- _w1tm 3y agoWhat does it do? I’m not a user and all I’ve ever heard or seen from it is usually pointless drama or otherwise off-putting.
- carabiner 3y agoWhy is this bad? These superads will enable users to discover more products to improve their lives. Many will be YC companies. Advertising is the root of all good.
- ryanwhitney 3y agoI too have been looking to discover which surprising household product is a cure for <image of disfigured foot>
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoIf not for one of the ads featured in this article, I would never have thought to pour a bottle of baby oil in my ear to cure my tinnitus. I'm still not gonna do it but the thought would have never even crossed my mind, otherwise.
- ceejayoz 3y agoWill you seek out a TV with always-on screen and speakers in your bedroom for this purpose, as it is so useful?
- drdaeman 3y agoTV doesn't have a camera that can track your eye movements to ensure you're properly watching those ads and not stealing from the advertisers. /s, of course
- tsujamin 3y agoI presume OP forgot the /s
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dwedit 3y agoLooks like a userscript could easily detect and remove them.
- akomtu 3y agoWhy do you carry water for Musk? It's TwitterX not some generic unsearchable X.
- AlexandrB 3y agoWhy not let Elon live with his terrible branding decisions? I think there's a case to be made that referring to X by its better-known former name is more beneficial for Musk.
- AlexandrB 3y agoDespite having a reputation as an innovator, Musk's ideas for improving Twitter revenue seem to amount to squeezing users for more money or otherwise degrading the free experience. This is a playbook that any private equity shark out there could have executed equally well. Not sure how this will ever lead to a viable "everything" app.
- whalesalad 3y agoYikes. X starting to look more and more like Truth Social. The ads there are prettttty bad.
- artursapek 3y agoWow this looks awful, like those horrible ads on the bottom of weather sites Glad I stopped looking at Twitter every day
- Barrin92 3y ago>Users who have seen these X ads report being taken to a third-party website in a new window upon clicking anywhere within the ad, including when they try to click on the fake avatar. This is kind of nuts, that's "random porn site" levels of advertisement. I don't know why anyone even works for this company any more. They day when someone tells you to let ads through that fake legitimate UI elements is probably when any developer should throw the towel in Also btw is it even legal in Europe or the US to show an ad without disclosing it as such
- mmackh 3y agoThe entire rebrand to X allows the twitter brand to live on / be sold once X goes under. Up until this point there have not been any meaningful positive changes to the platform - everything seems to have been done for attention.
- wnevets 3y agoThat man truly is a business genius.
- rainworld 3y agoTwo obsidian-black patterns the “X” app has been employing for months: Force the “For You” tab after Every Single App Switch. Randomly use a `WKWebView` instead of a `SFSafariViewController` as the in-app browser. Denying you various features like Reader, AutoFill, Fraudulent Website Warning, and content blocking. Why? To fuck with you. Musk-Twitter has never been a good-faith operation. Where’s tech journalism when you need it? Thought they (still) spend half their days in that app.
- skizm 3y ago> There is no "promoted" or "ad" label on any of these types of ads that Mashable has seen. I thought this was illegal? I guess just toss it on the pile of lawsuits Musk is ignoring?
- reducesuffering 3y agoIt's hilariously ironic how mashable is making fun of these bad ads and at the end of the article are Mashable's other articles that seem indistinguishable from the same bad ads they're deriding.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoWill these be exempt from the community notes too? Hilarious to see those on obvious ads frequently saying "you can get this on amazon for 5 bucks".
- jbverschoor 3y agoX? Is that a way to cross out some old application of the 00s-10s? Like the old type writers
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- nunez 3y agoWow, Twitter is relying on chumbox just like msn.com. How the mighty have fallen.