HN Explorer

48 comments

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genericacct
I miss tweetdeck... maybe not $8/mo miss, but maybe 9.99/yr miss it
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greggh
If the ads on Twitter were even close to relevant I wouldn't mind just scrolling past them. But every ad I see lately is just right-wing idiocy like PragerU.
askl
Who else would still want to advertise on twitter?
LukaD
I don’t understand why people even use twitter at all at this point.
walthamstow
Addiction to scrolling
acheong08
That’s probably not it. I still have Twitter because the people I follow are on there (mostly music artists). I’ve never opened the algorithmic feed. There is also a huge chance that much of the activity you see are bots. I have 0 posts and 2000 followers somehow. No way they’re human
walthamstow
It's not it for you, but it sounds like you are more of an edge case. I think it is true for a lot of people.

I don't see any activity myself, I don't use Twitter any more. I had an addiction which peaked with the UK 2019 election and I had to quit after that. It's an awful drug which gives no high and terrible side effects.

jeffhuys
Please be aware that the both of you don’t know, unless you’re not mentioning any studies on purpose. You’re both projecting your own subjective experience onto an entire community.
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itsoktocry
>I don’t understand why people even use twitter at all at this point.

Because it hasn't really changed for me. Some things are better (less censorship), some things are worse (bots and spam). But the overall signal is the same.

zogrodea
All my friends are on there and haven't switched to another site. Some nice features are definitely getting removed from it though (like being able to hide a tweet so only a subset of your followers can see it).
henriquecm8
I use mostly to follow indie game devs, to follow their progress and not miss announcements of release dates, and also a few artists.
huimang
Japan's crazy mascot, Chiitan, the god of advertising
itsoktocry
>But every ad I see lately is just right-wing idiocy like PragerU.

Any ideas why the algorithm is feeding you those ads?

I agree the ads suck, but I'm mostly getting drop-shipping junk and crypto.

bluish29
I really think the question is why wouldn't you block those ads using something like ublock origin or adguard (admittly you will lose using the app which is better for some people) but you solve your greatest point of pain.
jeffhuys
I think the original question is valid here - I also don’t get any right-wing ads. I guess that is because I never interact with those kind of post, also not negatively, exactly BECAUSE I want to see less of them.
dwighttk
Twitter still allows you to mute/block any advertiser… I’ve seen fewer big companies that make a million throwaway accounts for advertising to make it hard to mute. Any ad account I notice more than a couple times gets muted, Twitter asks me if I want to upgrade to paid and I ignore that.
thedumbname
It show me white screen, is it expected?
thedumbname
Totally forgot that X is blocked in my country, but app does not aware and does not display any connection errors
rcarmo
Well, I certaintly find it useful since I’ve removed X from my phone but still want to peer inside on occasion (a few people whose posts I value refuse to move to Mastodon and I don’t want to use Threads or Bluesy), so this is pretty useful. The ads have become so obnoxious that being able to just have “Following” open without hassles feels refreshing.
dwighttk
Refuse? Or tried and it was so complicated it didn’t work?
kstrauser
If you can use Twitter and email, you're capable of using Mastodon.
rcarmo
Tell that to the folk who are still on Twitter…
kstrauser
I can’t. I deleted my account when it went sideways.
swores
"Capable of" isnt the same as "is willing to".
dwighttk
It’s been ~three years since the last try, but I’ve made multiple mastodon accounts and none of them took
adleyjulian
Are you saying this is due to not having an interest in the people posting on Mastodon or due to a difficulty in using Mastodon itself?
1oooqooq
mastodon is beyond broken. also, network effect.

it's fine for cyber security content and furry con. besides that, everyone's on meta or xitter.

dwighttk
little from column a little from column b
TheCleric
My feet are capable of walking 100 miles. I’m still not going to do that.
brianjking
Are we violating TOS by using this?
mtnGoat
If you are hiding ads, chances are high you are violating TOS.
1oooqooq
barely. you're more helping them by keeping the network effect going despite how hostile to users they make it.

for one high quality person they retain thanks to this, they can abuse other one thousand who will also stay because of that person.

basically, they will moan it will be shut down but there won't be any true effort

add-sub-mul-div
As Twitter and Reddit were going user-hostile past the point of no return last year I fought it for a while with actions like these. But eventually giving up and ditching them completely was unavoidable and, in hindsight, freeing.
dotcoma
The same is true of Facebook, Google etc.
prmoustache
For some reason, the fight of most social media against any third party way to access them comfortably helped people like me finding the motivation to get rid of them altogether.
kstrauser
Same. I left Reddit when they killed Apollo. In retrospect it was a blessing.
Groxx
Yep. Instagram has been so hostile up logged-out people that it drove me away, and I actively recommend businesses avoid. Prior to this, quite a few small businesses I ran across used Instagram as their website, but it's completely useless if people can't see anything.
soylentcola
Pretty much. I ditched my Facebook account in 2017 and never really messed with IG. At some point I just wasn't seeing much of what I liked about the site initially (a feed of what friends and acquaintances were up to) and didn't find it worth the tradeoff - lots of companies are skeevy, but I might continue using their products if I get something out of them. Didn't find FB to be worth it.

But still, I'm in a few long running group chats with friends and maybe 60-70% of the links people post are to Meta sites. Can't access even though it's almost always just something reposted from a (openly accessible) website.

The bots and the spam ruining platforms is bad enough. Putting such a large chunk of actual online human conversation behind login-walls has seriously put a dent in things. I feel like this is the other half of the whole "search engines suck now because of ML-generated/SEO-optimized junk" argument. There's nothing to balance that stuff out because you need a sketchy persistent, personally-identifiable account to access the rest.

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barlog
Folks, let's talk about XDeck XD