Comment by simonsarris
2 days ago
> but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]
Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.
yep, x/twitter is great (relative basis). people will confirmation bias their way to whatever matches their priors though. i spent a day or two marking things as "not interested" and blocking people -- my feed is great: 99% tech niches, 0% politics.
i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.
[dead]
Xtwitter is NOT the best place to be. For anything unless you’re a horny cryptobro.
It's not all that hard to curate a feed without that stuff. Block people who annoy you, mute words/phrases that annoy you, and follow people you enjoy.
Yeah, and pressing the three dots and selecting “not interested” goes a long way as well
Agree. I ~never see that stuff.
Curious as to why people think this (other than partisan trend-following). I've been on Twitter since 2009, and it's arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively. A lot of people still build publicly on Twitter. If you're conservative you can follow conservatives, if you're liberal you can follow liberals. I find Elon annoying, so I just muted his account because it seems like it was being algorithmically pushed, especially during the DOGE days. But I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall.
Not sure if it turned into Musk's idealistic "town square," but it's certainly more interesting than it was before.
So, I suspect the key to your experience is buried in this sentence: "I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall."
Balance doesn't mean much by itself. Doesn't mean "informative" or even "accurate". Extremists from every walk of life screaming at each other might be in balance, but isn't much fun to be around. Note that the person you're replying to didn't even mention politics as such, much less a lack of "balance".
I watched twitter for years, starting in 2007. It was never what I'd call "good", but for quite a lot of years you could reasonably use it to follow people or topics that interested you without consuming an inordinate amount of time or attention. In fact, for most of its history you could do this without even bothering to log in - for a long time, that made it fairly useful as sort of an alert system. And that is long gone, so gone there's a good chance most folks using it now don't even remember (or never knew) that was ever a draw.
What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.
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>arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively
So the best ever except for one of the biggest crap parts that didn't exist at all just a few years ago?
Though actually I think it's just more people figuring out how the interests of social media companies aren't the same as their own interests, and Musk's very-visible fiddling with things drove home the "people are trying to to addict you and influence you" point MUCH more quickly than anything ever did in the past to a wide chunk of the population. Not new in essence, but now highlighted with a giant neon sign pointing at it.
I think it depends on if your values align with the communities or not. For those that align, it seems fine. For those that don't, it's hostile.
I stopped using it because offensively stupid drivel from morons who paid for blue checks started getting upranked everywhere, pushing down the tweets I actually wanted to see. I have no problem talking to people with different ideologies and political views (actually I tend to enjoy it), but what the site was showing me was consistently not worth my time.
That's because most liberals don't like to be questioned or defend their positions, in general. On X they are forced to confront or actively block people. Note that the your comment is downvoted for essentially saying "twitter is still good" with no malice, and parent is still totally fine after saying (speciously) "twitter is for horny cryptobros". They have no actual response other than to downvote or leave for an echo chamber. This has been hashed out here many time before. Truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged.