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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 th

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.

boringg 11mo ago
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.
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  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.
  - _whiteCaps_ 11mo ago
    Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government.
    - jeroenhd 11mo ago
      https://social.overheid.nl/directory https://social.overheid.nl/directory has a list of government services, municipalities, and other stuff. https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11mo ago
  It's network effect, same as Facebook
- bpavuk 11mo ago
  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.
  - ndr 11mo ago
    Who is using Bluesky in the US? Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
    - digianarchist 11mo ago
      Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed. There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.
    - toyg 11mo ago
      > 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.
      - itsoktocry 11mo ago
        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.
        delecti 11mo ago
        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.
- mrguyorama 11mo ago
  But X doesn't have a lock on live information. What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back) X will tell you to invest in <Scam> X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire. People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate. X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.
- codingdave 11mo ago
  It certainly doesn't. About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above. So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form. (And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)
maxlin 11mo ago
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.
- rcruzeiro 11mo ago
  Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened.
- nkohari 11mo ago
  If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell you.
  - carlosjobim 11mo ago
    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].
  - maxlin 11mo ago
    When Musk took over he added the "Following" tab back as front and center. People do like following the algo still, but also frequent the Following tab, something many competitors still don't have.
- platevoltage 11mo ago
  Oh god are we still pretending X is a free speech platform.
  - maxlin 11mo ago
    No need for anyone for ever having had to pretend, there's no platform with the amount of criticism of even the owner of the platform as X. If that confuses you, look up the definition. It really is defining to Freedom of Speech that people that don't like specific speech still support it!
nomdep 11mo ago
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.
- edent 11mo ago
  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.
  - degamad 11mo ago
    While this is an interesting data point, the main thing it tells us is that when the algorithm has no information about your preferences, that it skews racist. This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences. Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the algorithm. The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed?
    - afavour 11mo ago
      Or you can just leave the platform. We don’t always need to interrogate the exact reasons why something happens, we can just see it, document it, then go elsewhere.
    - int_19h 11mo ago
      > This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences. ... of people actively using Twitter, yes. Which is precisely the point.
- MrOrelliOReilly 11mo ago
  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.
nkohari 11mo ago
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.
- myko 11mo ago
  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
  - nkohari 11mo ago
    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.
    - myko 11mo ago
      Make sure you stick to your "Following" feed and not "Discover" or even the feed dedicated to what your friends are into
  - nozzlegear 11mo ago
    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.)
pie_flavor 11mo ago
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.
- spankalee 11mo ago
  BlueSky brags about not having what, exactly? Nazis?
  - delecti 11mo ago
    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.
Uhhrrr 11mo ago
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.
morshu9001 11mo ago
I like the new Twitter stance on speech and some of the new features, problem is the UI is super annoying. It was actually kinda bad before too, but it got way worse.
- rc_kas 11mo ago
  You like the X.com stance where it bans speech from liberals and leftists?
  - morshu9001 11mo ago
    Who did they ban? Old one was https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banned_from_social_media_platforms https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banne... plus the New York Post for the laptop thing

boringg 11mo ago

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.

jeroenhd 11mo ago
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.
- _whiteCaps_ 11mo ago
  Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government.
  - jeroenhd 11mo ago
    https://social.overheid.nl/directory https://social.overheid.nl/directory has a list of government services, municipalities, and other stuff. https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11mo ago
It's network effect, same as Facebook
bpavuk 11mo ago
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.
- ndr 11mo ago
  Who is using Bluesky in the US? Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
  - digianarchist 11mo ago
    Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed. There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.
  - toyg 11mo ago
    > 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.
    - itsoktocry 11mo ago
      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.
      - delecti 11mo ago
        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.
mrguyorama 11mo ago
But X doesn't have a lock on live information. What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back) X will tell you to invest in <Scam> X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire. People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate. X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.
codingdave 11mo ago
It certainly doesn't. About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above. So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form. (And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)

maxlin 11mo ago

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.

rcruzeiro 11mo ago
Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened.
nkohari 11mo ago
If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell you.
- carlosjobim 11mo ago
  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].
- maxlin 11mo ago
  When Musk took over he added the "Following" tab back as front and center. People do like following the algo still, but also frequent the Following tab, something many competitors still don't have.
platevoltage 11mo ago
Oh god are we still pretending X is a free speech platform.
- maxlin 11mo ago
  No need for anyone for ever having had to pretend, there's no platform with the amount of criticism of even the owner of the platform as X. If that confuses you, look up the definition. It really is defining to Freedom of Speech that people that don't like specific speech still support it!

nomdep 11mo ago

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.

edent 11mo ago
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.
- degamad 11mo ago
  While this is an interesting data point, the main thing it tells us is that when the algorithm has no information about your preferences, that it skews racist. This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences. Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the algorithm. The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed?
  - afavour 11mo ago
    Or you can just leave the platform. We don’t always need to interrogate the exact reasons why something happens, we can just see it, document it, then go elsewhere.
  - int_19h 11mo ago
    > This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences. ... of people actively using Twitter, yes. Which is precisely the point.
MrOrelliOReilly 11mo ago
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.

nkohari 11mo ago

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.

myko 11mo ago
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
- nkohari 11mo ago
  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.
  - myko 11mo ago
    Make sure you stick to your "Following" feed and not "Discover" or even the feed dedicated to what your friends are into
- nozzlegear 11mo ago
  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.)

pie_flavor 11mo ago

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.

spankalee 11mo ago
BlueSky brags about not having what, exactly? Nazis?
- delecti 11mo ago
  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.

Uhhrrr 11mo ago

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.

morshu9001 11mo ago

I like the new Twitter stance on speech and some of the new features, problem is the UI is super annoying. It was actually kinda bad before too, but it got way worse.

rc_kas 11mo ago
You like the X.com stance where it bans speech from liberals and leftists?
- morshu9001 11mo ago
  Who did they ban? Old one was https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banned_from_social_media_platforms https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banne... plus the New York Post for the laptop thing