Comment by expedited123
21 hours ago
Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either
I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.
Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)
I actually paid for their dumb monthly subscription only so that I could download videos within the app to share with my friends who don't use X. Only after paying did I realize that by "download videos" it means "cache videos locally inside the app for offline playback". It still would not allow me to save the video to my local device. Misleading, tacky, possibly even desparate.
As both Nitter and Xcancel are down and I don't know of any alternatives, I use yt-dlp to download the videos now.
It's glorious. We no longer have to stumble into a blog post split into dozens of tweets.
I know it is Meta-owned and is just as algorithmic, but Threads is a breath of fresh air in terms of access - the website is pratically the same in terms of UX as the app, and it does not require an account to browse at all. Just thought it'd be worth mentioning.
I assume only because Meta have forgotten about it or haven't got around to closing it down yet.
Nah, it's just the standard enshitification playbook. It'll start out nice, open, useful, fun; then once they have enough users and the network effect kicks in, they'll lock it down and turn it into a weapon against its users. Happens every time.
Actually, the correct solution is Mastodon, which is an open protocol which can not become a walled garden the way Threads (based on Meta’s activity with Instagram and Facebook) will inevitably become a walled garden.
You gotta build the garden before you build the walls.
Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)
It’s a trivial project, it’s babbys first crud app. Getting everyone to use it is the hard part. There are already great alternatives that show this.
Then scaling and paying for it is the hard part.
Not just hard, but expensive as well. That's where the net really falls down. It's trivial to reach an audience of millions with text, but when you move to audio the data transfer starts to balloon, and if you're serving video it jumps to a whole new level of insanity. And then you have to think about the cost of the infrastructure, whether you're buying it outright or renting it from the likes of AWS, Google, or Akamai.
this one :thumb-up
There are many already. The code is not why people use those sites. In the case of Meta specifically, it's basically in spite of the user-hostile, garbage code.
The network effect / entrenchment means that any replacement has to be massively better in every dimension to have a chance. Otherwise people just stick to what they know, and then other people stick to it because the other people do. And so on.
I personally think Musk is a garbage-tier human who represents everything wrong with culture wars, and his brain is long blasted into a mush of worthless racist noise and stupidity by drug abuse, so I deleted my X account. Loads of others are too cowardly/selfish to do so.
I think people try alternatives, turns out to be a ghost town, then they just go back.
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People really do not want to give up the reach once they have tasted it.
It’s a shame: I remember when people would be so excited to get 100 strangers visiting their blogs but in a month, but now someone blogging for an audience like that would seem a little crazy, maybe paradoxically even overly grandiose.
Also, the harm from using X is complex. It basically comes from endorsing the site and encouraging other people to come there where they’ll be exposed to a cesspit of bigotry and right-wing ideas. It’s easy to tell yourself that what you’re doing there outweighs the cons, and that other sites are just as bad, etc.
Or they just disagree with you.
I believe Musk might be a decent person. He is obviously smart, but perhaps he fears foreigners too much.
X is decent for getting the latest news. The comment sections are often filled with garbage, even more so than Reddit. Ads are hard to distinguish from normal posts. There is a lot of bots in the comments.
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