Comment by robinhood
3 days ago
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.
Who is using Bluesky in the US?
Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
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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.
Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government.
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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
The problem (if you want to call it that) with following a person on sites like Bluesky or X is that people aren't machines and won't stay "on topic" regarding the reason you followed them in the first place. You might follow them for software dev, biking, birding, or whatever, but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.
IMO, Reddit/HN-esque sites are better for following topics, and Bluesky/X/Mastodon are better for following people. Maybe hashtags are a good middleground but I don't have enough experience using those sites to say.
(Disclaimer: I don't use any social media except for HN.)
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I'd love to give it another try and be proven wrong. At the beginning it felt like "old Twitter", before it became mainstream, because it was almost entirely software engineers who had left Twitter. After Trump took office it felt like a constant deluge of hand-wringing and people shaking their fists at clouds, and it was tough to immerse myself in it.
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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.
Yep. I ruthlessly anyone who induces the slightest negative emotion in me, be it annoyance, fear, anger etc. You are what you consume.
I check the mainstream headlines once a day, kind of like checking the weather. There may be something I need to know. But then I move on.
Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless.
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I think what's disappointing is that so many people that I've followed for years now routinely engage in daily political slapfights, or at least retweet ragebait. In the blogging era, it would have been really weird for a software engineer to sit down and write several paragraphs about their political views, but the friction of hitting "repost" is so comparatively low that everyone does it. Myself included, honestly, although I've been trying not to.
I don't have any problem with people having and voicing thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations about politics, especially with people with whom they disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of what's happening on social media, but that's a different topic.)
I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow topics, not people, and there isn't a great way to do that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber. And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated the site is at this point.
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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?
Charitably, I assume they mean it brags about not having an algorithmic feed.
Bluesky does actually have an algorithmic feed ("Discover"), but it isn't the default.
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.
Seems to me to be more possible than on a manually curated platform where any whiff of a differing opinion gets downvoted, [dead] and [flagged].
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?
Who did they ban? Old one was https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banne... plus the New York Post for the laptop thing
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.
While this is an interesting data point, the main thing it tells us is that when the algorithm has no information about your preferences, that it skews racist.
This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences.
Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the algorithm.
The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed?
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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.
If you do that all you get is a login wall. Have you actually done this or is this what you imagine it to be?
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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."
"..."
The same can be said of bluesky. In fact I think that you've said it yourself and recommended that people stick to manually curated follows!
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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.
You can take your analogy further. The buffet noticed you pausing on unhealthy food, and begins replacing all the healthy options with unhealthy options. People shame your criticisms and note you could easily put blinders on and intentionally look longer at healthy options anytime you accidentally glance at an unhealthy one. the alternative would be an absolute repression of free speech after all.
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.
You might find this useful: https://news.smol.ai/