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People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there s
by mmonaghan 2mo ago
People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
- wackget 2mo agoYeah, my experience of Twitter has improved dramatically since I deleted my account and disavowed it completely. I don't even visit the domain. If I need to visit a link, I'll change the domain to xcancel.com instead. Now THAT is an improved web experience!
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- SadErn 2mo ago[dead]
- solid_fuel 2mo agoThe web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people. But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
- modeless 2mo agoThe login wall predates Elon BTW https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263
- Aurornis 2mo ago[dead]
- dmix 2mo agoFunny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions. I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.
- jacobolus 2mo agoThe login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though. When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is frankly fine with me: it's a good reason to never visit a place that has become a cesspool of scams, porn, and white supremacist propaganda.
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoIt was a pretty shithouse experience as a non-logged-in user before Musk, but it's a worse experience now. Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).
- dmix 2mo agoX has gone harder on login gating than the old Twitter they adopted for sure. Reddit also started going in this direction. Instagram has had it for a long time. I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that. Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).
- kennywinker 2mo ago
- superze 2mo agoThe whole experience is extremely frustrating. I quit x as it became unbearable bad and not functional. It's really a shame what Elon did to x but it's exactly what cancer billionaires do. Whoever says x is good is out of his mind.
- gilthelander 2mo agoAll of your complaints are true of present-day Reddit. It has become completely unusable.
- lesinski 2mo agoHave you tried viewing Instagram or TikTok logged out? They all do this
- Banditoz 2mo agoDoesn't mean Twitter should've followed suit.
- EagnaIonat 2mo agoBluesky doesn't. I dropped X shortly after Elon took over. Around the time the neo-nazi spam increased. I also blocked it so I can't accidentally go to the site. Nothing of value was lost. Bluesky is like the early days of Twitter and I have a better control of my feeds. [edit] I see the X bots are unhappy.
- conradfr 2mo agoIn France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election because they noticed they speak in a void (journalists don't care about Bluesky) and also they all blocked each other in the purity battle. They still hate Musk though. Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.
- EagnaIonat 2mo ago> In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election Do you have a citation on that?
- brigandish 2mo agoPeople are still allowed to share their experience and opinions without citations being a requirement.
- EagnaIonat 2mo agoI never said they weren't. Although if its a personal opinion, then it can't really be taken as fact. The claim seemed off, so I was curious where it came from. A google search, it's an alleged claim by Nate Silver posted on X from a year ago. Recent post from Nate is that X is rigged. https://protos.com/nate-silver-says-x-is-rigged-musk-cries-bulls/ https://protos.com/nate-silver-says-x-is-rigged-musk-cries-b... That seems to suggest that it's Far right.
- HaloZero 2mo agoI mean a lot of sites do it unfortunately. Reddit is trying to push to it (if they don't already?), Pinterest does it, unfortunately user-generated content is worth more nowadays for user monetization, ads and preventing AI bot scraping. Can't fault them for it too much.
- peter422 2mo agoI created a new account recently and the default homepage was all videos that were either (a) AI slop (b) sexual imagery (c) AI slop sexual imagery. Really not what Twitter used to be about. It is possible he's done a good job at the micro level, but at the macro level the platform is a cesspool.
- WalterBright 2mo ago> Really not what Twitter used to be about. AI slop wasn't available then.
- epgui 2mo agoMarkedly not my experience at all, haha. I stopped using it.
- tcfhgj 2mo agoI initially didn't abandon xitter, because I still had a bunch of accounts I followed and BlueBlocker blocked the worst accounts, however it got so bad this year that I stopped visiting at all and eventually installed the xcancel plugin
- ActionHank 2mo agoThat must be why xcancel exists, because it was such a pleasant experience.
- daveidol 2mo ago[flagged]
- croes 2mo agoIt exists because you can’t see any reply without an account.
- aprilthird2021 2mo agoIrrationally? The man fired tens of thousands of American citizens from their jobs on a whim, disproportionately veterans. Failed at his ultimate goal after firing everyone, and then just left. Seems very rational to hate someone who messes with your livelihood to stroke his ego
- whattheheckheck 2mo agoDont forget stealing and leveraging all of journalist and politician Twitter phone data for his own nefarious means
- jasonvorhe 2mo agoTwitter abused phone data (handed out for 2FA) way before Musk took over.
- angoragoats 2mo agoThis is not in any way a counter to the post you’re replying to; both can be true.
- inemesitaffia 2mo ago
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoI love how I literally cannot sign up for a new account as of last month or two. Phone number required, and it won't even send the verification text if I try! Just lovely. Now if I want to create a news page dedicated to a project for people interested in updates to that specific project, I have to buy a fucking account second-hand. Pseudo-ID verification that still doesn't stop bots but does stop humans is such a dramatic improvement!
- valeg 2mo agoI have had a similar issue and support gave zero fs. I still cannot log in to my account from one of the Android phones (I suspect that it blocklists the older Android versions).
- danpalmer 2mo agoSetting aside any feelings about Musk, ad quality, or even product direction choices like locking down public access... I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also presented as server errors and 404s for a while until the necessary error states were added, and it has had some spotty downtime. Most of these things are better now than a year ago, but not all, and that's only getting back towards what it was before. The only notable feature addition I'm aware of is Grok, and again that's pretty debatable. So I'm interested in what you think has improved. Maybe I'm missing things, but it's not my perception.
- largbae 2mo agoThe new automatic translation is something that I would like to see all communities adopt. You can now follow folks who speak any language and each of you interact using your native language with no friction, just a tiny note of what language each message was translated from.
- alex1138 2mo agoYoutube is annoying about it "aaaaaaaahahahahahaha" [translate to english]
- archievillain 2mo agoThe translation feature was always there, they just made it so you don't have to press a button to translate a post. Which I guess is nice, but it's like a minor client-side setting. On the other hand, they switched from Google Translate to Grok, which means that now you can't even really trust the translation because, even ignoring the inherent imprecision of an automatic translation tool, Grok is subject to hallucinations has been caught making up posts wholesale.
- timpera 2mo agoI find that the translations are way better than they used to, because Grok translates slang and insults more truthfully than Google Translate, and those two things are -- for better or worse -- a large part of the conversations on Twitter.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoI don't know how you wrote that with a straight face. The site is really bad now. Every time I log in I get a full screen upsell ad, most of the features don't work, people get banned at random (big scary "permanent ban, no recovery" then a silent restoration afterwards), there's CSAM all over the platform, and moderation of legitimate bad posts goes ignored. Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job.
- masklinn 2mo agoThe upsell ads progressively getting more massive and desperate is pretty funny tho.
- DoesntMatter22 2mo agoI've been on the platform for 15 years, I use it for hours everyday and have never once seen CSAM. Idk what type of people you are following or looking up but I dont think your statement is true for many users (if any)
- tamimio 2mo ago>improved What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.
- pessimizer 2mo agoYou can't be implying that twitter's UI suddenly became shit when Musk bought it. It had become the worst popular site on the web years before.
- celticninja 2mo agoIt's a far right cesspit run by the worlds most egotistical racist asshole, so if you think the experience has improved that says a lot about your character and political affiliation.
- pessimizer 2mo agoThere was a burst of improvements over the year after Musk bought it, then it stagnated. The Hasbara bots are drowning every conversation about any subject. I'm sick of hearing about Mamdani or roofs.
- smohare 2mo ago[dead]
- locknitpicker 2mo ago> People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. This feels like a blatantly unrealistic opinion to have, which goes completely against any observable evidence. Without a login, you can barely click on any link without being spammed by login prompts. If you visit anyone's posts tab you are greeted with a comically bad collection of posts that only show stale years old tweets that follow no discernible pattern or logic. And you cannot sort by timestamp. This is comically bad given Twitter's sales pitch of being a microblogging site that lives in the now. The truth of the matter is that today's Twitter is a sad clone of the glory days Twitter. Lauding these developments as something praise worthy is perplexing.
- shalmanese 2mo agoI’ve been caught in a bug the last month where every day, it will ask me to complete a captcha, it tells me my account is banned, I click a button and it says congrats, I’m unbanned now and the first five likes I click tell me about how I’m improving the timeline. I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway27448 2mo agoImproved how? You can now generate child porn in app? You can only pay for a decent experience but can't hide the badge of shame? Commenting, posting, even reading tweets vanishes for hours at a time with no acknowledgement or retrospective? To pay the worst people you've ever met to stir up farcical drama for pay? Sure, the site is still working, but to call it improved is stretching the word to its breaking point
- ElProlactin 2mo agoAccording to Nikita, displaying country-of-origin on profiles was "one of the most impactful changes for X and the world." Get this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.
- psd1 2mo agoHyperbole aside, that was a genuinely good move. I assumed it was subversive, because i infer that musk wants twitter to be a vehicle for democratic capture. (I can't call it "x", it feels like baby talk. Dignity also prevents me from ordering in Starbucks. Get off my lawn.)
- spixy 2mo agoYou cannot, can you?
- throwaway27448 2mo agoI don't think you can anymore, explicitly emphasizing present tense and not even a month ago, but there were many many many months where you could.
- rsynnott 2mo agoThe most egregious one, IMO, is the pay-for-attention 'feature' (bluetick replies end up at the top). _Everyone knows this is a terrible idea_. Dating sites have known it's problematic for 30 years (these days, those that still allow pay-for-attention tend to ration it, because otherwise peoples' swipe stacks or grids are full of, well, the sort of people who pay for attention on dating sites, which are probably not the sort of people you want to date). And yet they did it.
- gnoll_of_gozag 2mo agoit's the social in a social media website that matters the most. every decent person is gone and what's left is bots, hucksters, vapid influencers, slop, racists, soyjakparty, pedophiles, proanas, personifications of the dunning-kruger effect and children who send eachother death threats over shipping the wrong roblox characters. there's a persistent aura of misery over everyone's heads
- inigyou 2mo agoYou're thinking in social network terms. Social media is a news feed (think media=TV) that looks like a social network.
- kilroy123 2mo agoI strongly disagree. It's gone to shit and paying people for attention is killing the platform. It's endless ragebait and nonsense now.
- 2PqboPPmKegvanx 2mo ago>People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+ you say this like it had anywhere to go but up.
- prettyblocks 2mo agoMaybe it improved in the last year but it's substantially worse than before it became X. Back then the algorithm was tuned to align with the users interests and posts would get visibility based on engagement. Now it's still a cesspool and visibility is pay to play.