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I know it’s hard for some people (for understandable reasons), but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely and make politicians and public service

• demo4567 12d ago
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  • tommica 12d ago
    Holy buzzword-salad, Batman! In any case X is a pretty decent place, as long as you mute the topics that get annoying. But the Algorithm is quite good at serving you what you engage with.
    • bigyabai 12d ago
      > as long as you mute the topics that get annoying People have been saying this since the Dorsey days, they were wrong back then and they're still wrong today.
  • gfdd 12d ago
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• asdff 12d ago
  I don't understand who all these people are who keep saying 'but I need twitter for my local politicians.' Like really? I have not followed any local politicians or authorities twitter and I still get relevant information. Believe it or not, which you might not if all you do is parrot these comments and I have seen this very comment line of thinking parroted for YEARS about twitter, most people do not follow the city hall twitter if they even have a twitter, and they get by fine. I mean people are citing they need to follow their utility. Are you kidding me? Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
  • bpt3 12d ago
    > Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever? It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard. Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years. You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.
    • aperrien 12d ago
      Is it possible to help or encourage our local municipal services to have either an RSS or BlueSky feed? At this point, it's becoming apparent that putting all the information eggs in the twitter basket is/was a bad idea. This is a place where open source standards should shine.
      • immibis2 12d ago
        The most practical way would probably be to create that feed yourself based on their Twitter feed. You could automate it using some Nitter-like service (please do not scrape public Nitters, but you can run your own Nitter and scrape it as you like). It is generally easier to do something like this yourself than to convince someone else, who does not care at all, to do it. I don't know how you would advertise it.
      • multjoy 12d ago
        This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas. No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates. Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.
• jdc0589 12d ago
  about once a year I try signing up for X after friends tell me I really should be on there for news in certain niches. multiple times now I've signed up with a fake name/handle/email/etc..., sometimes from a VPN, and within 10 minutes a friend usually tells me they see me as a recommendation to follow (they can tell, by the handle). Insta delete, every time.
  • immibis2 12d ago
    You should prefer to donate accounts to circumvention efforts rather than deleting them.
    • zzzeek 12d ago
      explain?
      • immibis2 12d ago
        Nitter has to be logged into an account to read tweets so it can show them to you. Elon made it quite difficult to make even one account, let alone many. If you have an unused registered account, some Nitter instance operator would be happy to have it. The same is true for all the other alternative front-ends, like the ones for Instagram, and Play Store.
  • nullocator 12d ago
    This isn't a criticism, but I do think this comment actually raises part of the problem. There are people on twitter telling people they should be on twitter, and it's apparently effective enough that at least some people are still signing up or trying to at least. The world needs more of the inverse, people telling those they care about who are on twitter to get off it.
    • Henchman21 12d ago
      And likewise, continuing to call it "Twitter" when that is long dead, which has amazingly positive brand association as near as I can tell entirely from the name doesn't do any of us a service. If you want people to stop using it call it "X". Not something clever, like "Shitter" -- which I personally enjoy! Just call it by what it was intentionally renamed to: "Oh you mean X? No I don't take part in that hateful stuff, sorry"
• whalesalad 12d ago
  > at some point we have to ignore the X site completely I've been doing that for years. Since just prior to Elon's purchase of it. Nothing of value in my life has been lost.
  • ruszki 12d ago
    Not since then, but before it, I could read smart people's opinion there about random topics. Of course, when the takeover happened, almost all of them left already years prior. There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.
  • fuzzfactor 12d ago
    Things like twitter aren't supposed to be worth money anyway :) In an ideal world nothing would be able to change that. Edit: not my downvote btw, where did that come from? - - corrective upvote instead contrary to bot action
• sailfast 12d ago
  This would be totally doable except for a couple of recent changes during the DOGE take-over where federal agencies mandated communication on X as their primary means. This is clearly illegal as all comms need to be posted in different accessible places as well as the federal register - but that never stopped anybody in this administration from a bit of grifting to drive users to their own platform. I’m bummed about this service being taken down. I will now just not be able to see updates from folks in the AI field that choose to post there and I’ll rely on aggregators instead.
  • gong_hits 12d ago
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• adamrezich 12d ago
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  • deleted 12d ago
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• mahboi 12d ago
  It's gotten ridiculous. I get it if they have a login wall. I've had a Twitter account for years for occasional reasons. But suddenly it thinks I'm a bot and wants me to scan some QR code, download an app on my phone separately, and take photos of my hand. For whatever reason, that didn't work on my phone, maybe cause it's a Samsung A16 (not to be confused with a16z) they decided is too poor to generate ad money. Maybe they have legit reasons for all that, but it's not my problem. It's not worthwhile to me to view stuff on there anymore.
  • ErroneousBosh 12d ago
    You know, as a television personality, Jeremy Clarkson is a pretty polarising figure. The gammons see him as all that's wrong with Britain with his pro-EU views, the cartoon student lefties are whining about "oh it's all just about him zoomzoomzooming about dangerously in fast cars", some people actually like him. But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place. Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it. And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?
    • ssl-3 12d ago
      > And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think? All we know is, he's called the Stig
  • J-Kuhn 12d ago
    Photos of your hand? What is next? Run some arbitrary command? Make photos of your feet? We really ought to think what is an acceptable way to verify that someone is an actual human.
    • gh02t 12d ago
      "We reserve the right to retain your security feet pics indefinitely, but won't use them for advertising purposes. We may use them for other business purposes, subject to change at any time without notification." --new TOS Then, a few months later x.ai announces a new SOTA frontier model, FeetGrok.
• arppacket 12d ago
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  • dburkland 12d ago
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    • leonfarwrite2 12d ago
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  • xigoi 12d ago
    Shitter was already bad before Elon bought it.
  • cpach 12d ago
    Did it way before that.
• burnt-resistor 12d ago
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  • sippingabonedry 12d ago
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    • burnt-resistor 12d ago
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      • sippingabonedry 12d ago
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• sippingabonedry 12d ago
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  • immibis2 12d ago
    Do we actually have proof that X is more popular now than it was then?
    • sippingabonedry 12d ago
      X is either dying, or this is a 550+ comment discussion about how we cannot divorce ourselves from it. It can't be both, Schroedinger's X.
      • aigetoutofjailf 12d ago
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      • mahboi 12d ago
        Maybe X hasn't increased userbase, and nobody uses BlueSky, and there are some people on HackerNews who complain a lot about X.
      • croes 12d ago
        Sure it can. If HN has a bubble of X users BTW if BlueSky is fading to obscurity why did a post about how they put their logo on their screenshots got 715 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338459 Schrödinger‘s BlueSky?
      • immibis2 12d ago
        Maybe it's decreased, but not enough.
  • croes 12d ago
    How many of the userbase are real people and how many are bots?
• rustystump 12d ago
  maybe my brian is memory holed but twitter used to not require an account which made the whole public square gov thing very valid even if u were banned for political reasons u could still read and be informed. x requiring an account to even read content from gov officials has to be a massive insane deal breaker for anything gov official. i hate x, not because of elon but because it is still just twitter where the format breeds the most disgusting human interactions possible. Everyone is performative in every interaction which leads to a net negative. Instragram and meta cannot even claim such a divisive crown although they win on other fronts. No, bluesky is just yet another twitter with the same fundamental problem because the format is the issue not the politics. At least on bs i can generally read without logging in tho so it wins for me.
  • conradfr 12d ago
    No Twitter was also sometimes walled off. Elon Musk actually opened it back at the start. Instagram is also hard to browse without an account. It's all so annoying.
• usernomdeguerre 12d ago
  The unfortunate part is that each individual who attempts to leave is fighting the Network Effect[0]. It's fighting against the human organism's basic social nature. If every person wants to leave the platform but X person stays because Y person is there, and Y person stays because Z person is there, and Z person stays because X person is there then it's a feedback loop. Each person wants a better solution or platform, but none end up leaving because of the network effect. Breaking that dependency involves the individual user but can't be overcome by the individual alone. Over time, the network re-asserts itself and monopolizes the connections. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
  • mrtesthah 12d ago
    If there were an API or reliable way to delete accounts programmatically, you could create a reverse-kickstarter-like site in which you pledged automatic future deletion of your account once a critical percentage of the people you followed (or who followed you) did the same. Action would be suspended for all participants until that critical threshold was reached.
  • cjkaminski 12d ago
    Unfortunate, yes. Futile? No. Remember that AT&T once had a firm grip over human communication. That didn't last. Remember that AOL once had a firm grip over how a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet. That didn't last. Elon Musk currently has a firm grip on social media (via X) and internet access (via Starlink). This too will not last.
    • nradov 12d ago
      X and Starlink don't even remotely have a "firm grip" over the social media or Internet access markets. They have many active competitors.
      • cjkaminski 12d ago
        Ok. Show your work. Which social network has larger reach than X? Which social network has stronger influence on humans who make policy decisions than X? Which internet provider can deliver reliable access to remote regions than Starlink? Which internet provider has manipulated access in contested regions than Starlink? Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. I don't know. What I do know is that your baseless assertions are meaningless to me. Show the facts and figures that support your claims. That's the only way to avoid being a garden-variety internet troll.
• mulderc 12d ago
  Maybe it is different elsewhere but I have seen little reason to use X at all and none of the public services or institutions seems to use it all that much. If they do post to it, they are also posting to all the other major social media services. All the news you want is available elsewhere and often with far less toxic commentary attached.
  • hsuduebc2 12d ago
    Exactly. I do not use it at all and other than never ending propaganda or ridiculous ragebaiting claims I miss nothing of importance.
• misiti3780 12d ago
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  • literalAardvark 12d ago
    Plenty of smart people on mastodon.
  • QuadmasterXLII 12d ago
    Pretty well everyone who still posts on X is deep fried, smart or dumb. Some of them can tell but can't stop (Nate silver, one of the greens, Zvi) and some seem unaware.
• DoesntMatter22 12d ago
  You are naive, yes. It's thier data. You have no claim to it. If you don't like it don't use it.
• hyperman1 12d ago
  Very well said, and I'd like to extend the idea much further: Old reddit, Windows debloater, youtube adblock, ... There are plenty of services that turned into customer disrespect, but people do huge efforts to keep them a bit less abusive. Huge kudos to these people, but isn't it time to just let the bad businesses die? If the power users are just as unhappy as everyone else, the exoduses start much faster.
  • mapontosevenths 12d ago
    Nobody needs social media of any sort. Everyone should just turn it off and stop making excuses for yourselves to stay addicted. That said, it's easier said than done. Trust me, I know. I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
    • mitxela 12d ago
      HN is social media.
      • Plont 12d ago
        I'm really just here because Google is shit and there are only so many alternative ways to find an aggregation of links to potentially interesting tech articles. I'm hoping to find new blogs or sites to follow, in part so I can stop coming here. I might give up on it soon though, like I've given up on reddit. Too many junk article lately. As for my commenting, that's because I, like everyone else here, am a bit of an idiot. HN makes it easy enough to comment that it's hard to resist sometimes.
        • mitxela 11d ago
          Could you make your own HN?
    • Sabinus 12d ago
      We do, just not social media for the sake of extracting maximum ad revenue out of users. We're a widespread society we need large online spaces, but not ones algorithmically designed to addict and derrange users.
• Foreskin_Mafia 12d ago
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• 1659447091 12d ago
  > but at some point we have to ignore the X site completely [...] xcancel was amazing and I hope they can continue in some way To ignore the X site completely would mean to ignore the xcancel site aswell otherwise the 'politicians and public services/institutions' will stay aware that even people who don't use x/twitter still read whatever quips they come up with through xcancel, thus mission accomplished. Same for the seemingly increase of twitter/x toilet epiphany threads that somehow count as worthy enough of the first couple pages of HN.
  • kelnos 12d ago
    I expect that the percentage of politicians and public services/institutions who have even heard of xcancel is incredibly small. The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. The best way is probably to ask questions about something you care about, and when they reply "I've posted about this on X", tell them you are unable/unwilling to use that platform, and as a government official they should not be using a closed service as the sole means of communicating with constituents. Of course, that probably still won't work, since politicians are lazy, and most care more about fundraising and getting re-elected than doing their jobs, but it's probably the best you can do.
    • ryandrake 12d ago
      > The real way to combat this is to write to your representative. I always kind of chuckle at this advice. Is there any case of a representative changing their mind on an issue because someone wrote to them about it? I've written to representatives in the past and you are always going to get one of two outcomes: 1. If you are writing in support of something the representative already agrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. Representative Jones fully supports initiative X and is fighting to enact it in Congress!" 2. If you are writing in support of something the representative disagrees with, you'll get a form letter back saying: "Thank you for your input. While your input is valuable, Representative Jones is adamantly against initiative X and will not be supporting it in Congress." I think of lawmakers as unchanging boxes of fixed beliefs and you only get to vote for and change the contents of that box every N years. The real way to combat this is to elect representative who already align with what you want.
• wetpaws 12d ago
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• ajkjk 12d ago
  I feel like the answer is not that hard... someone just needs to make a copy of the basic functionality of twitter with better intentions and not owned by Musk et al. If they are sufficiently trustworthy and competent in how they do it, I really believe that lots of people would be willing and even eager to jump ship immediately. Mastodon and others tried to do this but they keep spending all this energy on decentralization which is not the problem to solve. The problem is just to be Twitter but (a) not shit, (b) trustworthy, and (c) prosocial. People want to move, just give them somewhere to go and demonstrate more empathy for them than twitter does (not hard). Implementing this should not be too hard in the AI era and considering that a lot of people would probably donate engineering effort to a Twitter replacement. Paying for it is of course annoying, especially at scale but maybe that's solvable (ideally with a donation model / raising money from people who want to see it exist instead of taking outside investment, or at least limiting the influence of investors so you don't end up making Twitter again). Running it should be easy, just "try to do a good job" (I volunteer, but I don't even use Twitter so I'd probably not be a good candidate). Getting sued for patent violations or something might be a real problem, but maybe it's circumventable, I dunno. It often feels like every knew large-scale project is corrupted by the Silicon valley funding model (yes I know I'm on a site that has a lot to d with that), so everyone has lost any trust that a new thing will ever be benevolent... but seriously it is not that hard to start a website, that's what Twitter and Reddit and all them did back in the day. The problem is aligning the site to people's morals enough that everybody hypes you up for free. Which ... I think things have gotten so bad now that one could get a lot of free labor if you even start moving in this direction and seem like a serious contender. Although all the VCs are trying to cash in, all the other 'normal' people really just want to live in a safe and happy world where institutions operate prosocially instead of the opposite, and they'll often do whatever they can to manifest that... if somebody just makes it easy to do.
  • jonny_eh 12d ago
    You described Bluesky. They did get founded to pursue decentralization, but it's completely ignorable. It largely operated as a centralized service.
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• DarmokTanagra 12d ago
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• cbeach 12d ago
  No, we don’t have to ignore it completely. You might be unable to tolerate a company CEO having a different worldview to your own, but the rest of us don’t care, and we’ll use whatever online services we like, thank you very much
• RIMR 12d ago
  I don't think ignoring is the right choice. This site has power that must be challenged. One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits. There is absolutely no reason I should have to agree to a private company's TOS to receive communications from the government. It is a violation of my rights that refusal to agree to the X TOS would cut me off from public information. It's fine if they post to X, but we need to demand laws that the government isn't allowed to have special private clubs where the general public isn't allowed without giving up some amount of their speech rights.
  • acomjean 12d ago
    >One of the biggest issues I see is that governments still use X as a primary form of communication with the public. We need to push back on this with lawsuits. This. I’m in the northeast and I’d love to not have to go search x/facebook etc to find out it’s a snow emergency (which city dept will post this?). My city has a website, use it.
• maxlin 12d ago
  Or, you know, just be a normal reasonable person and just use X. We got to get rid of this extremist-esque narrative. X is more unbiased than it has ever been, and Community Notes work better than any other platform's nearest attempts.