Is this the case where you are?

If so, that’s appalling.

There's that, and the fact that the "town square" for my city ended up being a city citizens page on Facebook. So we've got the city government and the sheriff's office posting updates to X and/or Facebook, and anything coming from the residents can only really be seen on Facebook. I don't want an X or Facebook account. I guess I'm just supposed to remain in the dark if I don't submit to corpos. The merger of corporation and state is very real, and I guess it often arrives unintentionally rather than intentionally.

my guess is many people use nitter to do automatic scraping of Twitter for various projects, i.e. they can't believe they "have" to do it because so many people still use Twitter.

I do not use Twitter but some people who do interesting things somehow still do and only post about them there. It's all so tiring.

I can't even read specific public transport updates in my city because they only post those to Twitter, only vague messages on their own website.

> There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad.

No, not really, it's only people who are fine or apathetic about the CEO of that platform doing a Nazi salute in front of cameras, twice. It is a very specific kind of people.

I genuinely can't take this comment seriously if you think BlueSky has a CSAM and bullying problem while staying on X.

I really can't deal with BlueSky. I wanted to because I had a lot of good "starter packs" for NeoVim and OCaml development. Nerd stuff is the reason I visit these sites. The problem is, I start following people and it almost always turns into politics. I may even AGREE with the person's politics but I hate reading and talking about it. God forbid I ever disagree.

Funny thing though. I've heard the claims of "CSAM on Twitter" and now "CSAM on BlueSky". I've never had any of that ransomly show up. I do still have 2 or so random follows from clip-art female avatars with no tweets - per week. I've never quite figured out how that scam is supposed to work. I used to block 'em, now I ignore 'em.

If you look at the replies to basically any big post, you'll see all the blue checkmark bots in there. Usually just copying posts, sometimes doing a weird ai summary of the original post in a way that isn't actually replying to it.

I've got no idea if they're somehow making money off it or what's up

Bluesky has a weed problem, but eventually you can tune the algorithm to only show you thirty or forty posts about weed every day.

> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.

I left X permanently because the unfathomable amount of CSAM being generated by Grok, without seeing it myself, sickened me to the point of no return.

I don’t use Bluesky but it seems to me that if this is a real concern to you, then you should have left X as well.

> I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem.

There really isn't, unless you mean anime content(of both SFW and NSFW alike) by "CSAM". In case you mean by that, then there is, otherwise no. It also appears to be highly locale dependent - some say they see timeline filled to the brim with fetish furry images and male gay nudity dressed with right wing politics, but my timeline is like just Twitter 2014 stuck at 3AM without any of those. I don't use any filters or blocklists, the place seem naturally nice-ish.

> about how X was full of bots

They appear to have largely given up and scaled back efforts to replace existing social graphs by funding African/Middle Eastern/Indian/South Asian content farms under the guise of revenue sharing programs, burning out talents west to east, likely with the conclusion that they're all equally incapable of understanding contents posted on Twitter even without the language barrier, let alone gaining popularity and even with literal algorithmic manipulations. Or they just burned through quite a deep talent pool globally.

That effort started after Twitter was bought, beginning around South Africa or Nigeria. So it's not an improvement, unless you count someone ceasing hostility as an improvement.

The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.

Depends on the algos. My jp account sees none of that, mostly news, jokes and some random what’s happening in parts of Japan.

NA tuned account has more of what you said.

Racism, bigotry, a right-wing echo chamber and a vehicle for the generation of non-consensual deep fakes of women.

Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.

Linking to X is less useful than it used to be.

All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets.

It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it.

I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages.

Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.

Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.

There is a lot of Ukraine war reporting on twitter.

This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms.

So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.

Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.

I'm surprised people didn't mention this, but I find it to be unbeatable in these two areas:

1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)

A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok.

>>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.

Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.

From what I can tell, most Twitter users outside English speaking countries don't care about who is the CEO at all. Business as usual.

There's lots of US sports content. That's all I use it for.

White supremacist circle jerk sprinkled with a bit of narcissistic "influencing." (Along with some international communities that don’t intersect with this muck at all.)

Recent choice words from Musk:

* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"

* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)

* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."

* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)

Per Nate Silver, Musk's is the most engaged-with account on Twitter by far, followed by his far-right allies: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...

So, yeah: open sewer.

Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.

I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more.

On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.

I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.

>What is the main use case for X these days?

I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them.

I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...

It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).

(And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site".)

>Is it still as popular as it used to be?

A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.

Ah, TOS violations. I believe those may not hold up in court well from the limited amount I recall in previous cases, but IANAL

Is this comparable to LinkedIn scraping?

I wonder how xAI steals its AI training material! Of course no scraping is involved!1!!

They stole the Nitter code too of course without attribution. Does SpaceX really want to go into this?

if i understand correctly, in Meta v. Bright Data, the court ruled that brightdata was allowed to scrape public profiles because the user is unauthenticated. thus I do not believe that precedent is in favor of nitter currently