Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
3 days ago
Just saw the CEO of Substack celebrating traffic from X/Twitter shooting up thinking they stopped suppressing tweets with links[0]. Actually, this traffic is because now any time you open a tweet with a link, the in-app webview loads in the background, and displays when you press the link.
I run an ecom store that gets a lot of its customers from Twitter. I was also shocked to see my traffic double or triple overnight and thought the algorithm had blessed me and my business. Soon realized what was actually happening. Thought other traffic-monitors might appreciate this explanation.
Meanwhile Nikita Bier is pretending they never suppressed tweets with links to begin with, offering the alternative explanation: "a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn't get a clear signal whether the content is any good"[1]. A bit of a rewriting of history since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other links/platforms, even banning people who shared profiles of other social networks (including Paul Graham for a period). They suppressed all links shortly after.
[0] https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985464687350485092
[1] https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1979994223224209709
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.
URL Auto Redirector:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector...
For Kagi users - it's also possible to redirect it in Kagi with redirect rules in search settings:
Thanks for sharing! I continue using Redirector [0] on Firefox for other stuff but it didn't occur to me to set one for Twitter.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
I created this plug-in for firefox...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-cont...
Not being updated any more, but might be useful to someone.
Thanks. You only need this single regex for instagram:
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.
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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.
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No, it's also completely broken on desktop. Still have one or two friends who insist on sending twitter links. I don't click.
I have no idea why people still think it's a viable platform.
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.
Well, wasn't that sentiment a response to those arguing that the site would cease to function or be outlawed in several countries?
I don't?
I remember that, people were convinced that twitter had a load of woke lib employees or something
> 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.
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False. You used to be able to read Twitter fine without being logged in
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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
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> just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any)
What if those errors are trying to tell you to install one?
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.
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
same with Instagram
Another PSA. RSS is still very good.
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...
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> 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.
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> Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people.
The back button supplied by the OS is perfectly capable of this (at least on Android I have witnessed this)
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Something I see relatives do sometimes is they get a link to a facebook event over meta's messenger, and then they click the link and it opens in messenger's web view, which inexplicably isn't signed into facebook, so they can't view the event, and they don't understand why, as they are signed into facebook in their web browser.
They're also often very confused why they can't find links they've opened in web views in their browser's tabs or history.
In-app webviews are a usability disaster for normal users, I need to help a relative out of one at least once every few weeks.
The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone linked...
> The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.
I think you misunderstood. The problem wasn't/isn't that sites were mobile sized on mobile devices. The problem was/is sites that optimize for mobile, and look terrible or are hard to use on a desktop or laptop screen.
That's just asinine. Just because any user would like fast navigation doesn't mean privacy only matters if you know what a violation it is to ping every server in sight on user's device, with absolutely no way to prevent it.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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Pro tip, links clicked in private mode will always ask you before opening the app, so you can say no.
I end up just using YouTube through the browser and only installing the app when I need to download videos, e.g. for a plane trip, and then uninstalling it after I land.
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
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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.
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.
You know what to do..... ')
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.
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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.
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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.
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.)
It's network effect, same as Facebook
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.
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
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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.
I would try again, but not use discover, and aggressively mute/block.
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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.
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?
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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.
If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell you.
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Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened.
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.
You like the X.com stance where it bans speech from liberals and leftists?
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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.
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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.
Open a private tab, navigate to x.com. All you see are heinous neonazis casually discussing the jewish question and fantasizing about race wars.
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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."
"..."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Banning PG was a mistake [0]
> [George Hotz] I'm upset when I see PG get banned for mentioning mastodon
> [Elon] yeah, that was a mistake
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=42m14s
Meta note: it's worth listening to this historical 'space' in full (well, the first ~1h while Elon's on). The meta-pattern becomes obvious: people (esp nay-sayers) are outraged about ~20 different issues, X since addressed most of them, but the outrage-mob moved on to new issues, X will address them, and so on.
The point: the ragey mob is never satified, X moves very quickly (partly due to it's willingness to try things, and occasionally fail in the short term) but this strategy is long-term optimal.
counter point: x active usage is down. the “ragey mob” were engaged users who have since left, along with the user growth and MAU.
Depending on the metric (e.g. MAU, DAU, web impressions etc) X is generally down about 3-20% since Elon's takeover. Seems fair to say X is a 'break even' investment at best.
It will be extremely interesting to re-visit this thread in 10 years. X is currently a gateway for promoting Grok (with 11-figure DAU potential), and X is acquiring financial licences in US states, with a view to becoming an 'everything app' (something which the East seems to have - in the forms of wechat, Grab - but the West weirdly doesn't). If X can be the West's first 'everything app'.. trillion+ dollar valuation isn't out of the question.
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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.
Ads and “scammy” tactics were always like bread and butter. The whole point of industry is to just increase the numbers using whatever means possible except for what the industry deems unquestionably unacceptable, after all. So, naturally, there’s this incentive of making the paid-for action as low effort as tolerable (preferably under the guise of “improvement” to prolong the status quo) and make money while that window of opportunity is still open. Sad but true.
As long as pay-per-click exists it’ll always be like that. Minimally necessary action will be probed, negative feedback (“won’t buy this on principle/will bug others to raise awareness on ethical concerns”) eventually making the industry raise the bar higher.
Beats outright malware (auto-installing IE toolbars, yay!) and popup/popunders on a click anywhere eras of the past, but despite any possible illusions, the bar isn’t particularly high still (modern web is still nauseously popup-ridden), when viewed through the modern first-world optics.
Not that I like anything about this - just an observation.
> 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,
They did it for Android, too. Just the other day, I tried to view replies for an ad, and thought I'd accidentally clicked the ad multiple times before realizing that the replies indicator and even the timestamp (which is the normal "just go to the tweet" valve) were behaving the same as an ad click.
Edit: Re-reading your comment, not sure if that was exactly what you meant, or if you just meant that it'll e.g. open the ad if you try to scroll on it.
Instagram does that too, I never accidentally like any post when scrolling, but I accidentally like ads every day.
I noticed that too, it's so annoying.
The Tumblr app does this and it’s infuriating
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")
Why do so many supposedly smart humans think that we can make an artificial mind that is capable of AGI (or even something close to it), but from a completely detached evolutionary history and biological needs, and somehow force it to "align" to our human/biological/societal priorities?
Have none of these people ever had or been a teenager? At least teens have some overlapping biological requirements with non-teens that will force some amount of alignment.
I think the assumption is that without emotions there is no agression or evil intent
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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?
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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.
I follow a couple of writers on X through Nitter on a desktop browser. These writers inevitably draw bot comments whenever they touch on something relevant to some or another powerful country’s politics. For me, it’s easy to verify that these commentators (who often have convincing-sounding fake names and photos) are bots by simply ctrl-clicking on the commenters’ usernames and, in the tab that immediately opens, seeing at a glance that they post weird single-issue material at an unusually sporadic pace, and often in tellingly flawed English.
Do I suspect correctly that in the way most people consume X, though the official website or an app, this is not so transparent? Whether because opening new views is so slow on a phone screen, or because the official interfaces probably intersperse content with advertisements and other visual crap? I don’t think state actors would be so active in trying to manipulate discourse if the platform hadn’t degraded to a point where their activity isn’t obvious to most users.
Why do bots have flawed english? Seems like with LLMs being a thing they would not.
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It's a full PvP server now. Old Social media outrage algos + paying people for posts further broke it
When I left about a year ago the whole feed was entirely just bot slop from verified accounts. It was impossible to tune or subscribe your way in to a good feed. I imagine it's so much worse now with all the AI generated content.
I just use the "Following" tab (and not the "For you" tab).
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?
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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)
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/Raises hand Sam Altman hater over here.
I mean his personal lack of ethics, bigotries, greed, and ignorance is what directly made twitter what it is today. Maybe you should dislike him and hold him in low opinion.
[flagged]
no, X. It looks like K, but the left side is also indented instead of vertical.
[flagged]
[flagged]
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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 :)
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A better term might be antagonism. X seemed to switch to a system of rewarding views as a method of engagement far above all else, which led to people (generally and deliberately) ramping up the extremeness of their hot takes in a bid to get as much attention as possible.
A parallel term is "hate click", where there's a headline that's so stupid or off that you click it just to see what the hell they were talking about.
An example of this vile genre was someone tweeting about how:
"Teachers make plenty of money, and I think they should provide school supplies to their students out of their own pocket instead of making hard-working parents pay for them."
It was a message _designed_ to get people to yell at them, and for all of that, it wasn't any of the really hot-button stuff around politics, race, or any of the other divisive things that drive antagonistic engagement.
Twitter could have (and previously did) reward all sorts of other types of engagement, but the shift to rewarding divisiveness was just at another level.
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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
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.
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
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Make the pixel a zip bomb for lols
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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.
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
> Update 2: even correcting for the fake views, traffic to Substack links from X is up substantially. (full post reads, signups, etc. also track.)
Real traffic is estimated at 3-4x higher than before, after correcting for the preloading.
https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985852384531394916
Since this got so much attention, I feel the need to add that the CEO of Substack is now saying that even accounting for fake views, their traffic from X has gone up substantially.
Tweet with graph: https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985852384531394916
Here is more from an X developer: https://x.com/dinkin_flickaa/status/1985847269740990717
"Fix for false impressions going out in the next build"
EDIT: Ah your shared post seems like it accounts for that.
This link is all you need to know about the lack of free-speech Twitter has. https://themarkup.org/investigations/2023/09/15/twitter-is-s...
That's incredibly damning. The throttling of Substack writers is so cruel, especially considering how much these writers have contributed to Twitter.
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.
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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.
>Using up newspapers free stories a month on articles users never see etc
Webviews are pretty quarantined from the main safari app. I don't think cookies persist, so I don't think this would be an issue.
I hadn't considered this.
>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".
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 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.
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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.
[1]: https://x.com/danmurrays/status/1683446630245187584
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.
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I'm fascinated with the number of users of this site who seem disproportionately invested in getting people to stop using Twitter.
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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.
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Replace "mega app" with "platform" and that's pretty much what Apple and Google are, Apple especially.
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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.
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?
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.
I never use xitter by choice, but when I need to view a tweet/thread/profile I make sure the xcancel[0] browser extension is installed.
[0] https://xcancel.com/
It seems like they changed the strategy and enhanced UX. Feels like now there would a lot of worthless traffic in the web
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?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/x-purges-prominent-journalis...
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.
How does displaying the webview increase the traffic? Is it because when you scroll through the site, even if you have not openeded the link, it gets opened in the background and counts a visit?
What evidence do you have that the webview "opens in the background"? I just tried it, and it definitely isn't preloaded when I click a link...
> the in-app webview
What app are you talking about?
> since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other links/platforms
This is just so funny.
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.
Wait, so it's all just pre-loading traffic? Ugh. Why would they do this? Speed? Confusion? Both?
so many people seem to be complaining that it got worse - duh? it was always shite platform guys c'mon :)
but indeed unfortunately there is not many other things doing real-time info better than X / Twitter
seamless data harvesting hidden behind a feature, more cached urls for training data
That explains the extra traffic I've been getting from Twitter.
Wait, so it's all just pre-loading traffic? Ugh.
Mobile users with data caps must be super happy.
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.
Disagree, albeit with a /s. We should continue attaching increasingly more corrupted cores to the Wheatley-GLaDOS. Twitter as it is an artery IV port to inject defeatism and derangement into that group of people. Eventually the controlling core will come off and all will return to normal someday.
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.)
> 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.
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.)
It might be a 'cold start' problem that I had on Twitter a while ago as well. It takes a bit of time for communities to form, or for you do start interacting with people who are interesting and in the same circles, but also sharing cool stuff.
It is a journey, I still miss so many people from Twitter and it took me/us years of building a specific community, which is now mostly gone, but I do see signs of that appearing on Bluesky.
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.
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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.
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.
I have a bridge in downtown NYC, interested in buying?
https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4
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.
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It's not 2014 anymore. Check his tweets, right wing slop occupies most of his brain these days.
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What moon bases?
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That was 5-10-15 years ago Elon.
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Nice triple play: whataboutism, false equivalence, and a red herring. All in a single sentence.
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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".
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The only way to win is to not play.
> now any time you open a tweet with a link, the in-app webview loads in the background
The what now? Is this also a feature of the actual website if I go there in a browser?
The UI/UX of Twitter has always been a dumpster fire. The non-sequential view that you get when accessing a page when not logged in is horrible.
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.
whaaat a surprise....
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.
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It's still the platform where things happen. Even if I'm no longer fundraising there's still a strong, interesting investor community. When founders join an app or companies go to brag about their engineering prowess they still use X. Most people just don't care about Elon enough to leave or not join
I block X and related domains at the router.
what do you recommend instead?
What's so hard about reading scientific papers?
You DO care about the actual, meaningful, quantifiable results, right, not just the vibes and trends and fashions?
Hackernews, Mastodon, Onlineplatforms of Newspapers or Magazines is what I use
Physical contact with Gramineae
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I completely predicted this comment. Maybe give it five minutes and you'll figure it out. Or not. Hint: when you're a politician, you don't have much choice, no matter what your preferences are. But when you're an ordinary person, like you or me you actually have a choice.
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Until the media starts following other social media, politicians will be kind of forced to stay there, not for the reach on the platform itself, but because in regular medias, tweets are being given the same visibility as a book nowadays.
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What's 'reddit tier' about it? As opposed to your contribution it was at least on topic.
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Don't care, I'll go where the funny is. Simply amassing that much money makes one complicit in The System, effectively ceasing to be human and embodying the will of the money itself, so let's not pretend like Jack Dorsey is any different or better.
> so let's not pretend like Jack Dorsey is any different or better.
I wasn't.
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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.
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...)
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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.
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