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Feels like how people constantly talk about "the orange site" and how typical it is and what not and then continue to heavily use it.
The "Orange Hellsite."

And Twitter is the "Blue Hellsite*".

Both are bad, both still show up in my browser history. I don't know why.

If you'd like the "Orange Hellsite" to stop showing up in your browser history, enable "noprocrast" in your Orange Hellsite profile, then set maxvisit to 1 and minaway to 700 or something similarly large.
Nah. That only works if you are logged in. It's trivial to delete and account and make a new one. There's nothing particularly special about one's account (and, in fact, I regularly delete mine and create a new one so I don't get too attached to the 'number going up' on the karma.)
Indeed, twitter only benefits from people using it. Having more people use it to organise some kind of block-boycott on it will only help engagement. Ultimately it's a signal and one used by a tiny minority.

It's a bit silly, if they hate twitter they should stop using it.

nevertheless I approve of extensions allowing people to add functionality to sites.

Now let's enable people to block toxic posts, porn, adverts, politics as well. Something more helpful to people.

Yeah, continuing to use a product you hate and complaining about it is not going to bring the types of changes you want.
Why is removing the bookmark button a feature? It’s effectively a private “likes” list.

Filtering out all Elon and promoted tweets is a nice feature though.

Agreed. I think easier access to bookmarks is helpful. Knowing views is marginally helpful, I could live with or without it, but see no reason to remove it.

A lot of these features are for those who want no change. Which I can understand, but the changes aren't as drastic as say, GMail's pointless UI churn.

This wreck will be studied in marketing courses for decades and decades. It's just amazing how badly this was played. Musk bought the company, immediately went to war against his biggest customers[1], then demanded that they all then pay him for a previously-free feature that... didn't actually do anything for the people who had it[2]. What did he think was going to happen?

And the hilarious thing is that they're rolling it back now, by adding the blue check mark manually to "important" (or just popular) accounts that would be most subject to impersonation, essentially using it to mark "Twitter knows who this person is" as a signal to everyone else. Which is... exactly what the feature was for originally.

[1] Journalists, pundits and havers-of-opinions.

[2] At its core, the check mark is a feature for the rest of us, so we don't get scammed by reading imposter accounts.

This wreck will be studied in marketing courses for decades and decades.

Wait 'til you hear about Bud Light.

Bud light is as fine as it needs to be. They've been slowly losing market share for years, and that's built in to expectations. Now there's a localized drop in sales in a few areas which will fade away in a month or two as people move on to the next manufactured outrage, and it will return to its previous trend.
Budlight sent a few customized cans directly to an popular Influencer. They didn’t even put them in stores. Frankly, it just shows the idiocy of a portion of their customer base more than being a bad marketing campaign.
Stock’s up and has been going up since that sponsorship.

Twitter lost half its value according to Elon of all people.

This is factually incorrect. The ad was posted on April 1, a Saturday. On the last open stock day, the stock was at $66.73. After the ad, it started to slip. When news stories broke on April 4, it dropped from $66.34 to $63.38. Since then, it has climbed to $65.52.

It's undeniable that the stock is still down.

With that said, it's less than what some people seem to think. But it's also just a stock value which is based on speculation. The important sales figures will be visible far later. Bud seems to take it seriously by replacing the people in charge and doing a terrible ad targeting "patriots".

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You might want to find some better news sources.
Pissed off a bunch of transphobes, worth it honestly
Apparently Twitter have given blue marks to the people that were involved in the movement behind this, so they get blocked by it. Amusing.
He should add a gifting option, pay to troll.
Blocking Twitter blue users will be hard to do as Elon continue to force Twitter blue on high-follower accounts who refuse to pay for it themselves
Doesn't the API still disclose who is a legacy check vs who bought their check? I recall that being the case and seeing a browser addon that would udpdate the checkmark the last few times I used the bird site.
That's gone now.
We still have the list of legacy verified users. Off site. So it's technically possible.
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Sure but that would only work for users that existed with a blue checkmark last year. What about all the new creators and news sources?

I get the intention of this, to try and claw back some usability of Twitter. I say let it be. Spend these dev hours working on a new platform or working on open source protocols so this type of mass takeover doesn't happen again on the whim of a billionaire.

I just checked and it isn't gone. The only thing changed is aesthetic / front end.
Docs say it's just `verified` now, with no distinction in v2. Where should I be looking?
Blocking very high follower accounts is itself a useful thing to do to improve your Twitter experience.
Why? Because “I’m rebellious”?
Twitter blue subscribers get boosted independent of the quality of the tweet, blocking them improves user experience.
There are many many ways it improves my experience:

* I don't care about high follower count tweets, I'm not there for viral tweets, or popular media or generally anything that there are 1M in the world even care about. I'm there for niche experts that can not be found anywhere else

* I really don't care about reading the tweets of people who have to pay in order to get their opinion boosted. I do know severa people that have paid for Twitter for a long time, and would whitelist them. But otherwise, a blue check mark has become a very good signal for lower quality content that is likely to be some BS political propaganda I don't want in my life. I don't want NFT hustlers or get-rich-quick schemers rising to the top of any discussion.

The whole "verification" scheme was always of minimal utility on the site, mostly for making sure that what you're reading from a notable person actually came from that person and not an imposter. That was the value for users. Now that it's gone, the blue check mark has no positive value to me, and in fact 99% of the discussion from blue check mark holders is pointless idiotic defense of their purchases which is a massive waste of everybody's time. I do not care, burn it all with fire so I can get rid of the noise.

Twitter Blue (a) artificially increases reach and (b) signals to others that you're part of their so-called movement i.e. you're someone who is partial to culture wars.

If you're interested in non-political, high-quality content from those who are genuine about creating it then blocking Twitter Blue users is going to increase the overall signal to noise ratio.

You also gonna get bots as that was the intended purpose as it makes bot armies very expensive to keep, also to keep twitter afloat.
Twitter blue users under the new system, generally, are paying for _attention_. Generally people who pay for attention are not worth giving attention to; their content is rarely worthwhile.

Twitter blue acts as a sort of convenient filter heuristic; just filtering the lot out, you’re going to have a couple of false positives, but it’ll improve your experience.

Attention is like sex; if you have to pay for it, the other participants probably aren’t enjoying it much.

The people who have paid-for bluechecks, by and large, seem to fall into a few different overlapping categories:

1. People promoting their own personal brand (including meme accounts and sex workers) 2. Musk stans 3. Crypto people 4. MAGA

I'm willing to cut a break for some of the accounts in (1) on a case-by-case basis but I've seen all I care to see of (2), (3), and (4) so even if any given tweet from someone is innocuous--and they're not clearly in (1)--the bluecheck is a great signal to block.

I thought we all agreed that advertising was the enemy[1] of the web? It turns out that $8 monthly fees for egomaniacs is the enemy of the web.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...

For $8 you still get ads.
But you still get to be self-important. Seems like a small price to pay.
worse really, he promised "better, more targeted ads" to the subscribers, which implies letting advertisers have more access their data.
Most of the unwanted tweets and users go away for me by telling twitter to only show people I follow. Although annoyingly, twitter appears to reset that setting every so often.

Another alternative is to make use of private lists, as recommended here:

https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

I haven't double checked but I believe it's cookie based. That's why some people don't have any issues and others complain about it being reset. They delete their cookies.
I have a dedicated browser profile for twitter and all the cookies are kept there, so I don't think it's cookies. My theory is that twitter want users to consciously opt out of algorithmic recommendations whenever they push a new UX change. The last one coincided with this:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/10/23549368/twitter-for-you-...

Alright, I thought "twitter appears to reset that setting every so often" was something that happened to you frequently. There was a bug with the new "For You page" when it was released a few months ago so it didn't save the settings. Musk tweeted about it and it was fixed within 1-2 days.
"• Filter out Tweets by Elon Musk as you scroll"

What a useless feature, just block him?

Despite blocking him, he still appears on your feed randomly.
Never had it happen, I blocked him and I've never seen a single post from him.