The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.
most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
AI, database tech, etc I find I read about it on X much earlier and the comments are a lot less negative.
X is what you make it. It will feed you with more of what you read and interact with.
Shows how valuable the Play Store is to them
Twitter is 100% better now than a year ago. For one, I haven't gotten a single bullshit click-farm fake-ass sock-puppet follower in months. Secondly, I see very few low-effort reply guys lately, human or otherwise.
Not exactly sure how that changed anything but I see a lot less bot slop now.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things.
There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it really isn't as bad as people demonize it to be.
I need to quit this place. It's a total echo chamber these days – arguably worse than X because at least when you express an unpopular opinion there people can't just flag and burry your post.
It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.
bigyabai•1h ago
A little cocky.
gota•1h ago
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
unsupp0rted•1h ago
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
bigyabai•59m ago
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
unsupp0rted•18m ago
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
blokey•57m ago
If the town itself is an aids-ridden, nazi infested bunch of child-porn-creating yobs.
They can keep that town and its square. I'd nuke it from orbit, only way to be sure.
mindslight•48m ago
Onlyfans was included under "almost every single aspect of the internet".
dgellow•45m ago
unsupp0rted•15m ago