Which links show the engagement data?

At least X has Community Notes. It's not present on reddit, substack, HN, etc. Easy to spread misinformation on reddit/substack while hardly anyone reads the correction.

> The flipping robots underneath this post which have nothing to do with his message demonstrates to me the ridiculousness of X, that is a reminder of the cess pit that these social media platforms have become.

Who are the flipping robots you're talking about? Do you mean HN posters or X users?

It's a shame you've had such a poor experience on X. The site isn't perfect by any means, but it's become one of the only places online for new humor. The fact that reddit, Imgur, and Instagram front pages are frequently just X screenshots is a good indicator that this platform still has legs.

Where did you read that engagement was down? I was under the impression the platform was getting more usage than ever.

That has always been a recurring issue on Twitter's mobile app for the last decade. They are forever trying to balance the algo feed with the following feed. The clear separation between the two is the correct course IMO. I remember when old Twitter removed that option and tried to merge the two and it was far worse.

That's been my experience too. I left twitter a few years ago, but when I created a new account (only following AI and startups and people MAKING things, and movie and show clip accounts), it's been so awesome to keep track of all the stuff going on.

Are you paying? I see an endless stream of AI or bot-like posts in the replies of basically every tweet I see with any traction, but i'm not a paying user so I may have the bad version of the platform.

I'm a supporter of X but even I admit I see non-stop AI bot comments

It’s been pretty clear for a while that Nikita has been looking at the ways twitter is bad- foreign accounts stoking hatred in the west for cash.

He started putting in ways to change it and put in better incentives (not monetizing this rage baiters, disclosing country of origin). The problem is, the people he screws by doing that are the exact accounts Elon Musk loves, do every time he wanted to make a change cat turd would go screaming to daddy. Hence why I find it so unsurprising he’s quitting.

Well, anything you monetize it will turn to shit, period.

Long live Rabble.

It sure was interesting for a minute.

I’m not normally an accelerationist about stuff… but now, when it comes to most social media, I’m kinda ok with the idea of it all burning to the ground.

Interestingly Nikita has made several negative comments about monetization, which have been publicly rebuffed by Musk, so they clearly had different visions for the company.

maybe the tech trade deadline is this week (baseball's was on monday)

I’ve been caught in a bug the last month where every day, it will ask me to complete a captcha, it tells me my account is banned, I click a button and it says congrats, I’m unbanned now and the first five likes I click tell me about how I’m improving the timeline.

I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.

It’s Q2 earnings time so likely people leaving after a quarterly vest.

I'm aldo using x more than ever. I nearly stopped in the 2019-2021 era, always confused when people are complaining about it these days.

it has always been this way across every platform.

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.

I forgot twitter is part of SpaceX.

Was the account origin feature removed soon after release?

Why aren't the community notes subject to manipulation too ?

I haven't been following it closely, but Nikita posted recently that they were running experiments to de-monetize the top accounts found to be reposting spam content. I don't know where it went, but he did say that in the A/B test the people who were no longer seeing content from those accounts were showing better interest in the site.

He seemed to get it. It's too bad he's leaving.

I felt the same before then realized that what I missed was my youth. Plenty of time to kill. No real privacy need. Being a night owl with little hangover, etc. etc.

Not saying that's you. Just cannot help going down the memory lane.

> It's a shame you've had such a poor experience on X. The site isn't perfect by any means,

This line is identical to what deluded Twitter users said when they wanted me to join the site. "Yes, look past the NFT features, ignore the bots and the advertising and the brand accounts, disconnect from the hustle culture and make sure to block this list of artists. Used ironically, then the site is great!"

X and Twitter are not just imperfect. They are both unprofitable and untrustworthy brands, a net-negative service provided to humanity as a mechanism for selling ads and manipulating public opinion for brands and governments. It is an extremely ridiculous website and you're looking equally ridiculous as the Twitter zealots trying to defend it's merit. X is the piss-take of social media, there's no point in trying to vindicate it this late in the game.

The algorithm is not a neutral one. It pushes conservative talking points, and toxic content.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2

Nikita Bier's whole claim to fame was getting apps into top positions in the app store. It's his thing.

Quite the opposite - the fact that the default assumption of "what you (will) engage with" is a radioactive dumpster fire that you need to fastidiously Mute / Block / Not Interested / Less Like This / Not Relevant through to eventually "train" the algorithm to give you a consistent window into "really isn't as bad X" - that's proof that the default/average content and experience is every bit as bad as people make it out to be.

And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).

Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".

Oh the monetization made it noticeably worse. I've been pretty active in tpot/tech twitter and it practically happened overnight. Posters figured out the best way to get engagement was to write things that are incorrect but plausibly believable to generate controversy.

It became so grating, so many people turned into rage baiters.

And you get to see complete outright racism unchecked. Like comments saying the most vile stuff, like calling something a jewish conspiracy, and they don't even get ratioed. Embarrassing to see it.

I see researchers, tech people and my friends. This is a problem with how you curate your social media.

How far left do you have to be to oppose white supremacy?

>The service has just gotten worse

the story of literally every product Elon has been involved in for the last 26 years.

That sounds like bad design.

If you get hit by a car once, that doesn't mean you want to get hit by a car more times in the future.

What ends up happening with this algorithm is that the "for you" page is dominated by posts asking open-ended questions for engagement. You want to see game clips or screenshots, but every recommended post will ask "What game do you like the most?" or "What character of game X do you like that most?" A question that the author isn't really interested in knowing, asked only to farm engagement from passerby users.

I think that's a really ugly situation all around and a failure of how the system was designed. People should be able to just tell the algorithm what they want to see without secret trackers that promote perverse incentives.

Also, for twitter in particular, buying a subscription is pretty much buying ads on the For You page. Since users can choose to hide the blue checkmark that indicates they are paying for preferential treatment, that means, effectively, that those are promoted posts that aren't marked as "promoted" like normal ads would have to be. I think that's illegal.

The site has become a right-wing echo chamber and Musk's personal soapbox: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...

About 90% of the interesting people I ever followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky or Mastodon. They're never coming back.

Just follow the people you care about, only use the "Following" tab, ignore the "For you" tab, block the ads - so you can still choose freely who manipulates you and how. At least X still gives you real control over a chronological timeline.

The HN discussions you linked to:

1. 10 points, 15 comments

2. 9 points, 17 comments

3. 44 points, 84 comments

That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.

I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699

(471 points, 512 comments)

Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.

This is sadly too common in silicon valley mindset. Full of superlatives, and often not understanding the world outside.

I disagree with your assessment. My twitter feed pre and post Elon’s takeover changes dramatically.

Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc

After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.

I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.

Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.

Nikita was always a bad hire.

If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.

His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.

His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.

He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.

My issue is that you can't exclude yourself from the algorithm. You post something even tangentially political, it immediately pops up in the feeds of people that have no connections with you at all and have the extreme form of views opposite to yours. The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.

I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.

Journalists are still on X; it's still relatively easy to get the scoop on stories (well beyond the AP!) without paying a dime. No other site on the internet can replace this confluence of information.

Twitter is eternal; musk & his worldview is temporary.

It has collapsed. It is just bots and racism that have collapsed it, not a technical failure.

It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.

Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc.

It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.

I want to echo this point. My X feed is not full of politics either. It tends to just be a mix of stuff I engage with, and I tend to engage with stuff I find interesting or funny.

Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.

I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.

I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.

Please don't use personal epithets against people here. Sure, critique people's actions. But the guidelines ask us to be kind and to avoid name-calling. Personal meanness is not the energy we want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That must be why xcancel exists, because it was such a pleasant experience.

The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people.

But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.

Setting aside any feelings about Musk, ad quality, or even product direction choices like locking down public access...

I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also presented as server errors and 404s for a while until the necessary error states were added, and it has had some spotty downtime. Most of these things are better now than a year ago, but not all, and that's only getting back towards what it was before.

The only notable feature addition I'm aware of is Grok, and again that's pretty debatable.

So I'm interested in what you think has improved. Maybe I'm missing things, but it's not my perception.

A decent guy would have quit when Musk bought it

And how much they (like all other social media) put their mobile web experience into limp mode for no good reason.

He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.

Assertions that Twitter/X was surely going to shut down after the Elon Musk acquisition were wishful thinking on the part of two groups of people:

1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)

2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.

the fact that this recently changed on twitter means it has not, in fact, "always been this way across every platform"

Ah, yes! Should have mentioned. I am a paying Premium customer.

There's has been a noticeable improvement in bots for me since the new Android app rolled out a few weeks back.

Not exactly sure how that changed anything but I see a lot less bot slop now.

Same. I just skip verified posts because the ones at the top are LLM replies. Unless I'm missing something, that should be easy to detect. Instead I've got ghost banned for a week+ now, no reason given and no way to appeal. X now is the place if you want to check for yourself the dead internet theory.

What's the good part of X

There were some changes when "american_patriot_47" style political accounts were discovered to be from Sri Lanka or India.

> People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+.

This feels like a blatantly unrealistic opinion to have, which goes completely against any observable evidence.

Without a login, you can barely click on any link without being spammed by login prompts. If you visit anyone's posts tab you are greeted with a comically bad collection of posts that only show stale years old tweets that follow no discernible pattern or logic. And you cannot sort by timestamp.

This is comically bad given Twitter's sales pitch of being a microblogging site that lives in the now.

The truth of the matter is that today's Twitter is a sad clone of the glory days Twitter. Lauding these developments as something praise worthy is perplexing.

Don’t forget that whoever stays on X is willingly manipulated towards more conservative views.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2

I love how I literally cannot sign up for a new account as of last month or two. Phone number required, and it won't even send the verification text if I try! Just lovely. Now if I want to create a news page dedicated to a project for people interested in updates to that specific project, I have to buy a fucking account second-hand. Pseudo-ID verification that still doesn't stop bots but does stop humans is such a dramatic improvement!

Yeah, my experience of Twitter has improved dramatically since I deleted my account and disavowed it completely. I don't even visit the domain. If I need to visit a link, I'll change the domain to xcancel.com instead.

Now THAT is an improved web experience!

I initially didn't abandon xitter, because I still had a bunch of accounts I followed and BlueBlocker blocked the worst accounts, however it got so bad this year that I stopped visiting at all and eventually installed the xcancel plugin

Right ? What a wild thing to say

X has the best tools for managing your feed of any social network. "Mute words" is a godsend and can practically eliminate any topic you hate (politics of course). The Following tab can give you the exact reverse chronological view of only your friends' posts that everyone claims they want. The "Not interested in this post" button works really well to modify the algorithm to your taste. You have the option to pay to completely remove ads. There's really no excuse to complain about the algorithmic feed these days IMO.

Markedly not my experience at all, haha. I stopped using it.

No, the login wall was first added by pre-Elon management https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263

Elons escalating behaviour is very concerning

Improved how? You can now generate child porn in app? You can only pay for a decent experience but can't hide the badge of shame? Commenting, posting, even reading tweets vanishes for hours at a time with no acknowledgement or retrospective? To pay the worst people you've ever met to stir up farcical drama for pay?

Sure, the site is still working, but to call it improved is stretching the word to its breaking point

Nikita publicly talked about wanting to go even further to kill those spammy foreign reposter accounts but X eventually pulled back at some point. Lots of the big X accounts complained and they came to some half-way middle ground where they released the country-of-origin feature + a more limited demonetization campaign. Which is still admittedly better than most social media companies have done about the issue. I guess those low quality reposters are just too popular among the public (Youtube shorts is notorious for this).

They had to bolt those companies together to get more fuel for the AI cash furnace division.

Oh, they're crowd-sourced internet UGC - of course they're subject to manipulation. But frequently having something is better than nothing.

I think it's ultimately a positive thing to have a mechanism for users to flag content as being questionable and have that flagging be subject to some kind of court of public opinion.

If anyone spends much time on Wikipedia they're familiar with this kind of public debate. Community Notes are a bit like a less sophisticated Talk page. Obviously it's imperfect and obviously ideological shades leak through, but it's still better than forum-style god-mod autocracy.

They would have to ban Elon from his own platform. I wonder why that didn't fly. Anyone who worked for that absolute pustule of a human will have to go somewhere else to earn respect, sorry.

The algorithm is specifically designed around manipulation resistance. You could think of it as being sort of like the difference between mob rule and trial-by-jury.

> greatest communication techonlogy

1. Snail-mail

2. Public cork-boards

3. E-mail

Thank you for speaking truth; I hope you don’t get flagged like I did.

> it's still relatively easy to get the scoop on stories

Cue Truth Social 100k/month early access plan to see Trumps tweets before anyone else.

That's a fair perspective of before/after. And yea, possibly this was just me curating my feed to a point where it's kind/pleasant. It truly is though - mine is free from politics and dinguses, it's just design and ai people I follow.

> always confused when people are complaining about it these days

The biggest complaint I've heard is about the owner and how he's using X as a megaphone.

feel like its mostly sports journalists at least in the US. pro athletes and journalists need to gtfo. everyone i knew in real life used to be on twitter. theres like one dude left, and he's just there for basketball. total graveyard on a lot of fronts. even a lot of corporate accounts that really wanted to be in the know are just auto posting graveyards now

Except that it hasn’t.

X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.

Not sure, but it's active as of now FWIW

They are. The "proposed" ones you see if you are a CN moderator show you all the crazy, biased ones. Those then get whittled down to the ones you see. The published ones are generally high-quality, with a small percentage of wrong or bogus ones.

The login wall predates Elon BTW https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263

I'm sure there's some of that.

There was a moment where I made genuine friends through Twitter...people I worked with, knew their families, and really got to know over time.

Now, X is a mess and HN is intellectually stimulating but impersonal.

sounds like the "what have the Romans done for us?" bit

I’m on X only for my business (AI, tech, startups) and stick to only my Following feed. But the second I accidentally click on the “For You” tab it’s a complete, utter, bot primed shit show.

That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.

One of the weirdest parts of X is seeing Nikita go ham on some random account.

Nikita shows up in the replies of a guy with 12k followers complaining that he doesn't get his small payout anymore, and Nikita posts a screenshot of how the guy posted the same text message 12 times in two years, and that's why the guy isn't allowed to make money on X anymore.

As if X has solved low quality reposts so well after turning on monetization that the head of product himself is doing manual demonitization detective work on the final stragglers.

Meanwhile, the biggest accounts on the For You page are zero effort repost bots raking in money, and Elon decided that you're allowed to post the N-word freely. https://x.com/search?q=n*****

Also, X is now just TikTok. Not just its video system (click any video and now you can swipe through recommendation algo), but its text posts too since the whole website is adversarially trying to post their way to a monthly payout.

> the telegraph, the telephone, the television

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.

>It has also collapsed

>There are rumors

Interesting methodology you use to make concrete assertions.

It's partly being younger but it's also partly that things were actually better.

Certain users were handpicked to be able to write community notes. Nobody else can.

I'd like to address the YouTube claim-- I find it really quickly leaps from my algorithm into a terrible place, from innocent clicks. One of the more common examples of this in my experience is: I want a video demonstrating the form for a specific lift. I watch it. My feed is immediately 80% weight lifting content, much of which overlaps straight into toxic material I would never engage with. I run into this issue constantly, to the point where I often avoid clicking on things I am genuinely interested because I am worried it is too adjacent to something else that is adjacent to something toxic. When I give in and watch it, I often enjoy it but find afterwards that I was right and my feed has a load of objectionable material on it.

Would that be acceptable in exchange for shaping your political views?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2

Breaking headline news that is inaccurate and then has no corrections issued(not even getting into how poor corrections are a week later on msm after they reported a false statement might be) are easier to get.

Speed and accuracy are directly opposed to each other when it comes to news reporting so the absolutes fastest “scoop” as you said, is giving up a lot on accurate reporting in exchange for getting the most eyeballs.

My feed suddenly started showcasing far-right lunatics and grifters. It didn't settle down until I blocked them all - which was drastic, but did the job.

Have you tried viewing Instagram or TikTok logged out? They all do this

> truly impressive growth hacking on children

I haven't been more viscerally disgusted by a phrase I've read about tech in a while. Astonishing word choice.

> The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.

Isn't the same true of hackernews though?

The whole experience is extremely frustrating. I quit x as it became unbearable bad and not functional. It's really a shame what Elon did to x but it's exactly what cancer billionaires do. Whoever says x is good is out of his mind.

It's why Nitter exists. xcancel is one public server of Nitter.

I mean a lot of sites do it unfortunately.

Reddit is trying to push to it (if they don't already?), Pinterest does it, unfortunately user-generated content is worth more nowadays for user monetization, ads and preventing AI bot scraping. Can't fault them for it too much.

Elon was well on top of what AI was capable of. That sounds less luck and more well played.

> No other site on the internet can replace this confluence of information.

So be it.

Edit: updated to quote previous end to parent before it was amended

What were the changes?

You don't think he tanked the company?

Twitter used to be profitable.

Now, it needed to be folded into xAI to survive. Then that combined mass needed to be folded into SpaceX to survive. Then that combined mass needed to IPO to survive.

Sure, Elon can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Doesn't make it not a tank.

The decent people did.

The new automatic translation is something that I would like to see all communities adopt. You can now follow folks who speak any language and each of you interact using your native language with no friction, just a tiny note of what language each message was translated from.

Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions.

I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.

Twitter was famously unreliable for practically its entire existence. Don't remember the "fail whale?"

Well the good reason, ostensibly, is that web versions develop a small user base and are not profitable.

Just a few years ago on Show HN it was a daily occurrence that somebody would post a web app and somebody else would complain it’s broken with JavaScript off.

HN cares about things average users don’t.

All of your complaints are true of present-day Reddit.

It has become completely unusable.

How is this guy who keeps starting or taking over and fixing wildly successful companies always this lucky?

I have had a similar issue and support gave zero fs. I still cannot log in to my account from one of the Android phones (I suspect that it blocklists the older Android versions).

> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions

Onlyfans was included under "almost every single aspect of the internet".

I guess.

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.

This is not correct. You apply to join the program. Somehow my account applied and I am in it. I am not a twitter power user at all.

Every once in a while I get a notification that says "the community needs your help."

I usually never weigh in unless it's something I know intimately.

> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.

That's not great. That's hideous.

It’s a good thing to be able to post the N word. If it is legal to do it why should X apply their own ethics on top? Thats how you get Reddit censorship

According to Nikita, displaying country-of-origin on profiles was "one of the most impactful changes for X and the world."

Get this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.

You cannot, can you?

He fought the bots, but the bots won?

The most egregious one, IMO, is the pay-for-attention 'feature' (bluetick replies end up at the top). _Everyone knows this is a terrible idea_. Dating sites have known it's problematic for 30 years (these days, those that still allow pay-for-attention tend to ration it, because otherwise peoples' swipe stacks or grids are full of, well, the sort of people who pay for attention on dating sites, which are probably not the sort of people you want to date). And yet they did it.

New York Times, the Guardian, the WSJ, certainly the Post (any of them) are so shit these days I think my view of the world would get markedly less accurate if I only consumed from the mainstream western media bubble.

Truly some incredible stuff getting cooked up in the Silicon Valley

Doesn't mean Twitter should've followed suit.

What do you mean? HN doesn't have a social graph. It's an entirely different beast as far as I'm concerned.

No, you unlock the ability. I think it's just account age + submitting ratings on existing community notes.

I prefer to be polarized over being ignorant (and, frankly, I was polarized long before I was ever on twitter, long before Musk bought it). The financial times is not covering NSPM-7. The NyTimes has barely mentioned it. Ken Klippenstein certainly is covering it, though.

Technically, you don't need to be on twitter to follow him—but it's certainly easier to follow the general discourse if you are.

nostalgia's not what it used to be

Bluesky doesn't.

I dropped X shortly after Elon took over. Around the time the neo-nazi spam increased. I also blocked it so I can't accidentally go to the site.

Nothing of value was lost.

Bluesky is like the early days of Twitter and I have a better control of my feeds.

[edit] I see the X bots are unhappy.

Freeing yourself from giving a crap about the "news" is the best thing. Once a month I check if the various wars are still on and that's about it.

> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.

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.

> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.

Uh neither did "X"... She originally went viral on Tik Tok [0], and then built a following on Youtube and later in podcaster circles. As near as I can tell, she doesn't even have a twitter account. So it's pretty weird to credit Twitter with building her career.

In fact, I really can't think of anyone who originally went viral just from twitter. Lots of famous people have used twitter as a microblogging platform after gaining notoriety but by itself I wouldn't say it drives much popularity amongst the larger internet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haliey_Welch

Hacker News and X/Twitter don't have nothing at all in common. For example, both of them use HTML.

were you able to block Elon?

In 2025, Ad revenue was down 60% as compared to 2021..

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertise...

I really wish there was a way to tell all of the algorithms like "I found the info I needed on <niche topic X>, STOP SHOWING IT TO ME". You want to buy a new dishwasher, you look up dishwashers, you buy one. You'll still see nothing but dishwasher ads and content for the next year across the entire internet....

I was hardly a heavy twitter user before acquisition but I recall generally being able to read threads and reply chains without logging in.

I’m not sure exactly when that changed, but it completely destroyed what little use the platform had left to me.

Youtube is annoying about it

"aaaaaaaahahahahahaha"

[translate to english]

I actually agree, they did the world a favor walling themselves off. The vile trash would be shared way more otherwise.

Not all of them. The ones on ridiculously restrictive visas had to stay.

> Twitter used to be profitable.

Twitter posted a profit in only two of its eight full fiscal years (turning profitable in 2018 and 2019)

In its last year (2021), Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million on $5.1 billion in revenue.

HN isn't a bunch of disconnected communities that sometimes overlap due to algorithmic feeds. It's one community with one front-page.

The town square concept has never made sense. The idea that you have a place where everybody goes and scream at each others insults non stop is completely insane in the real world

They started requiring log-ins when industrial level scraping for LLM data became a thing.

The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though.

When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is frankly fine with me: it's a good reason to never visit a place that has become a cesspool of scams, porn, and white supremacist propaganda.

The translation feature was always there, they just made it so you don't have to press a button to translate a post. Which I guess is nice, but it's like a minor client-side setting. On the other hand, they switched from Google Translate to Grok, which means that now you can't even really trust the translation because, even ignoring the inherent imprecision of an automatic translation tool, Grok is subject to hallucinations has been caught making up posts wholesale.

Tearing something out only to re-build it a few months later is classic tech industry move fast and break things hubris.

Most things exist for a reason, and if you don’t know the reason that doesn’t mean it’s a bad reason - it just means you don’t know the whole story.

> each of you interact using your native language with no friction

I wouldn't be so sure about that... Translations contain a lot of telltales and signals - even perfect translations end up as translation-specific dialect separate from natural speeches - and there are significant average content quality differences between cultures. With these signals + differences combined creating a much tighter closed loop than before, it feels to me that it's introducing concept of racial supremacism/classism to a lot of previously unaware people, in which the en-US(or en-GB) culture is not at the top of the food chain.

I mostly only care about the former of ^ that, but I don't like the latter offending wrong set of people, and I think that is slowly going on over at Twitter.

I do, yes... from about 2009. Twitter was fairly reliable for a good while.

In related news, I heard they’re locking down old.reddit.com now

Because we decide on the quality of community, discussion, and engagement that we want to have, not the government.

HN has a lot of moderation just to keep this place a pleasant place to be. One of the most basic levers in that direction is to prohibit the worst slurs.

Hyperbole aside, that was a genuinely good move. I assumed it was subversive, because i infer that musk wants twitter to be a vehicle for democratic capture.

(I can't call it "x", it feels like baby talk. Dignity also prevents me from ordering in Starbucks. Get off my lawn.)

I don't think you can anymore, explicitly emphasizing present tense and not even a month ago, but there were many many many months where you could.

It's also that as we get older we don't pick up as many new things but try to get deeper in our selected things. A kid today is exploring tiktok and having fun even if it also rots their brain. I'm not exploring tiktok, I'm lamenting IRC. My grandparents are probably lamenting the death of physical stores, but they're not getting next-day Amazon Prime shipping so for them it's just a pure negative.

Humanity is interested in hideous things.

You don’t solve this by making NY Times editors the deciders of what’s fit to be interested in.

Absolutely agree. Went cold turkey after being a news junkie for decades, a year or so back. One of the best decisions in life for me, right next to quitting alcohol.

In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election because they noticed they speak in a void (journalists don't care about Bluesky) and also they all blocked each other in the purity battle.

They still hate Musk though.

Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.

Daytime television was intermediated by tv producers.

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.

It was a pretty shithouse experience as a non-logged-in user before Musk, but it's a worse experience now.

Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).

I find that the translations are way better than they used to, because Grok translates slang and insults more truthfully than Google Translate, and those two things are -- for better or worse -- a large part of the conversations on Twitter.

I guess these points can be true but is it worth the cost to avoid them? I much prefer this to the prior status of having friction to see international perspectives at all.

Actually this place exists and it’s called a jail pod

X has gone harder on login gating than the old Twitter they adopted for sure. Reddit also started going in this direction. Instagram has had it for a long time.

I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that.

Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).

Chesterton’s login?

if someone shares me a link to x.com, it is literally faster for me to edit the URL to xcancel, even on my phone which makes this awkward, and load that, than to wait for the original URL to load.

xcancel does not have a login barrier, nor all the popup messages.

Yes that would be insane, but that's not an accurate depiction of my x feed at all

There may be a single feed, but it’s definitely a bunch of “disconnected communities”. That’s why half the people think HN is pro-AI and the other half thinks it’s anti-AI. Everyone gets the same feed but interact with different content on that feed and come to completely different conclusions.

I wonder when the re-building part is going to start for all the stuff that DOGE tore out.

They are. Requires Persona verification to view NSFW.

Exactly, this issue was really solved by the mid 2010s. Twitter had a much longer run (10+ years) of solid reliability than they did of spotty reliability (2-3 years?).

I’m not. Maybe you’re just sick.

I agree that it's best for your mental health, but an ignorant populace will not act in its own interest.

It's not even about wrong-think. So many people I know just drifted away--or cut contact and nothing equivalent replaced it. It was a fairly important type of social media to me and many of the the people I knew/know but it really isn't anymore.

> they all blocked each other in the purity battle

I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read before talking to me") is scary and genuinely interesting. For some people it almost seems like a full-time job.

We even see it in some other, non-political, social circles (knitting famously had a purity competition/obsession a while ago).

I'm still struggling to explain why this is such a focal point for some people. Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people?

> In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election

Do you have a citation on that?

I think your assumption that HN hates X "because of wrong-think" is clouding your judgement. There is a long list of reasons to hate X.

For example, paying users get top spot in replies to tweets, which instantly meant spam bots with paid accounts posting completely unrelated replies on anything popular while real users who aren't trying to make money off twitter disappear at the bottom.

This isn't even complicated 4D chess user interaction design. Anyone with 2 neurons to rub together could see the obvious and immediate effect of such policy. If it's dropping the ball with something so obvious, how can you trust it to handle any situation more complex?

Good for you I guess? Seems to validate that the analogy is a pretty bad one, you cannot really filter out voices in a town square setting

Not just when. Also if.

Of all the many ways to automate that redirect, https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ isn't bad.

  Redirect: https://x.com/*
        to: https://xcancel.com/$1 

and

  Redirect: https://twitter.com/*
        to: https://xcancel.com/$1 

( also reddit to old.reddit, various cdn image servers to deliver hi-res versions, etc )

Those are different individual values, not different communities. All of the conversation is co-mingled in the same threads that everyone sees. Everyone is expected to follow HN rules. 1 person can be a part of multiple communities.

An example of different communities would be subreddits. Reddit as a whole connects all of the communities with a front page, but each community is isolated from one another unless you choose to look over or someone else chooses to look into your community. Cross-community conversation happens from the overlap of subreddits followed between individuals.

I agree with the other commenters here - your assumption that all of us hate it for "wrong-think" is precluding your judgement here.

Twitter was also not a good social media, in my opinion. Jack Dorsey was a pretty clueless leader and ostensibly talentless businessman. The platform was mostly loved ironically by jaded millennials, and the entire thing became a laconic quip-off between minor celebrities and brand representatives. It set the stage for LinkedIn-tier corporate cringe content that became a tentpole of late Twitter and now X too. Celebrities fled the site for personal use and left it as a political shit-slinging platform for C-tier online influencer personalities to rile up their audiences. The universal appeal that made Twitter interesting for bored idiots was completely abandoned in favor of this new ragebait paradigm. Worse yet, X is just as debt-ridden as Twitter was, so Elon is walking around to political haymakers just like Chris Poole did when his forum was bleeding cash: https://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/epstein-met-4chans-founder...

People like you existed back in the Twitter days too, insisting that it was valuable to ignore the site politics, trending topics, livestreams, crypto/NFT features and focus on the minority of positive content on the site. Those people were frankly deluded back in 2016, and you're equally as deluded trying to convince people that a cash-poor federal honeypot is tolerable now because the Hawk Tuah girl uses it to interact with her audience. You're the target audience for this slop, and you bit it hook line and sinker like a Facebook mom.

Not on hand but you can observe it along the way, and sometimes they do a post or video to justify themselves, on X or BS.

People notice because some loud proponents of https://helloquittex.com/ came back, sometimes quietly.

Personally I think X & BS impact is over exaggerated anyway.

Listening to Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" podcast I was distinctly struck with the idea that the main thing leftists like to do, even more than fighting rightists, is fighting other leftists.

> Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people

I would say it’s narrower, loosely a sort of heresiology. It would be motivated by a strong internal sense of insiders vs. outsiders. Which isn’t saying much, but I think that’s that.

Those are all valid areas crying out for improvement.

But that’s not what HN hates about X… any comment about the platform gets angry blindly political replies.

Whereas other platforms and topics get discussed in more neutral pros/cons terms.

Downvoted for asking for a citation?!

Aye.

My (literally, and self-proclaimed) communist former partner noted left-wing infighting. The Monty Python Life of Brian scene about The Popular Front of Judea ("he's over there") are, according to her, totally accurate in spirit.

Ironic, the right does strength through unity, the left talks about it and then argues with itself about who else used the phrase; the last time the left really did it was when trade unions still had teeth.

Interesting. That won't work for me directly (iOS), but it made me search around and find this, which has xcancel in one of the screenshots: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/redirectweb-smart-url-router/i...

My X feed is finance, AI, robotics, etc…

… I don’t eat Cheetos but I don’t get angry at the grocery store for promoting them to people who do.

That’s a silly definition. In real life everyone has access to the same street (feed) with the same shops/restaurants/bars/etc (posts), but people choose which of this they go to and they each have their own vibe. They don’t typically cross pollinate. So there are different “communities” within a “community”. Surely you don’t read and interact with every post, only those you are interested in.

People are still allowed to share their experience and opinions without citations being a requirement.

Jameela Jamil put this out pretty well: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOvh4_UDHGy/ (sorry for the instagram link, couldn't find the original clip)

Basically the gist of it is that if you want to be "on the left", you need to have the exact, correct, and up to date opinion on every single micro-issue or you're literally a fascist hitler paedophile and will be ostracized.

Meanwhile "on the right" as long as you agree on maybe one or two bigger things and you can deal with or tolerate the rest while you move on with winning elections.

> People are still allowed to share their experience and opinions without citations being a requirement.

Expressing feelings and staying assertions are two different things. If you go around saying the sky is red and someone asks you for the source, it's not reasonable to throw a tantrum while desperately trying to move the goalpost by weaseling around with excuses such as "well aktchualy it feels red to me" nonsense.

If you make a statement, own it. If you are caught peddling baseless bullshit don't complain about being caught, complain about mindlessly posting baseless bullshit.

It's not a silly definition. it's the definition. And it make far more sense than saying people are part of a community simply because they happen to have the same overlapping values, even if they've never interacted with one another. The whole point of a community is that it's where people interact with one another.

A neighborhood is a community. A commercial area you choose to shop in is a community. A forum is a community. A subreddit is a community. HN is a community. Not every person in each of those locations have the same shared ideals and values, though they likely have some overlap since they each choose to be in that location.

I never said they weren't. Although if its a personal opinion, then it can't really be taken as fact.

The claim seemed off, so I was curious where it came from.

A google search, it's an alleged claim by Nate Silver posted on X from a year ago. Recent post from Nate is that X is rigged.

https://protos.com/nate-silver-says-x-is-rigged-musk-cries-b...

That seems to suggest that it's Far right.

Where was the tantrum? I think a citation should be provided, else concerns about straw man arguments might not be allayed.