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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.
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
imho Nikita did a good job and I wish he stayed on.
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.
In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
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.
There's a lot of negative about twitter here, especially related to timeline being shit.
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.
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.
People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
I don't know how you wrote that with a straight face. The site is really bad now. Every time I log in I get a full screen upsell ad, most of the features don't work, people get banned at random (big scary "permanent ban, no recovery" then a silent restoration afterwards), there's CSAM all over the platform, and moderation of legitimate bad posts goes ignored.
Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job.
What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.
It's a far right cesspit run by the worlds most egotistical racist asshole, so if you think the experience has improved that says a lot about your character and political affiliation.
There was a burst of improvements over the year after Musk bought it, then it stagnated. The Hasbara bots are drowning every conversation about any subject. I'm sick of hearing about Mamdani or roofs.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
it's the social in a social media website that matters the most. every decent person is gone and what's left is bots, hucksters, vapid influencers, slop, racists, soyjakparty, pedophiles, proanas, personifications of the dunning-kruger effect and children who send eachother death threats over shipping the wrong roblox characters. there's a persistent aura of misery over everyone's heads
Maybe it improved in the last year but it's substantially worse than before it became X. Back then the algorithm was tuned to align with the users interests and posts would get visibility based on engagement. Now it's still a cesspool and visibility is pay to play.
Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.
I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.
one recent UX change that sucks is app reload always shoehorning you into the "for you" feed instead of your own timeline -- something that previously worked since the beginning
96 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 35.3 ms ] threadA little cocky.
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.
He seemed to get it. It's too bad he's leaving.
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.
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.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214903
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
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.
About 90% of the interesting people I ever followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky or Mastodon. They're never coming back.
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.
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10098-2
Now THAT is an improved web experience!
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
Really not what Twitter used to be about.
It is possible he's done a good job at the micro level, but at the macro level the platform is a cesspool.
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.
Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job.
What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.
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.
I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.
Sure, the site is still working, but to call it improved is stretching the word to its breaking point
you say this like it had anywhere to go but up.
Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.
I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.