General sentiment might be this, but every social network (even Instagram and Facebook) can be good and productive if you change how you use them.
If you follow specific profiles/channels/pages and just read the feeds from them as if they were news, you are removing the toxic part (mostly infinite scrolling) and getting a resourceful feature.
If for some reason someone you need to follow is on X (twitter) only, you have to choose between losing a source or compromise with the platform.
I personally belong to the former group (and possibly you do, too), leaving behind sources, but not everyone likes it that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The platform compromise is a new thing. One of the reasons people used Twitter was its open nature, enabling its use as a bulletin board where anyone could post a message and being sure that the message link was free for anyone to see. This isn't the case anymore, as X forces people to make accounts to see messages.
"Yes, I choose to frequent the nazi bar, out of all the bars. Yes, the one with a seig-heil'ing owner, and his friends and patrons who regularly talk about getting rid of nonwhite people and foreigners. Yes, I go a lot, and make them a lot of money to further their plans, but I do not listen to them, so we're good, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
There’s likely some information on there that some people must want to share if services like Xcancel and Nitter exist and allow you to share it without being on X itself.
Sir, you are controlling the buttons you push. I.e. it's up to you who you follow and what exactly you read on Twitter - just like any other social network.
There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine). There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
> it's up to you who you follow and what exactly you read on Twitter
The Twitter experience is a highly algorithmic feed where tweets from the people you follow are not guaranteed to be in chronological order, or even shown to you at all. The default experience also mixes it other tweets "you might be interested in", that is, things they want you to see.
There's also the fact people could freely see tweets and follow discussion threads, that's now locked behind an account requirement.
Sir, you are voluntarily using a website owned by an unstable Nazi, who purchased it because his feelings were hurt and people were making fun of him there. Now his brain droppings make it into everyone’s feed by default, from what I understand.
> There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine).
I am certain that Twitter is not the only place where you can find these updates, if you really care for up-to-the-minute news. But I don’t.
> There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
These people and companies are (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting a Nazi billionaire and they are not worth paying any attention to until they change their behavior.
A half of Twitter's point for me was the trending section, that you don't have any control on now (you used to be able to disable the personalization of that section but since X you cannot, if you want the actual trends you need to go in a subsection). The whole section is full personalized ragebaits (because at some point I used to reply to those), now it just makes the experience of trends quite unbearable and I can't change that.
Even if you tried to ignore ragebait the X algorithm is going to prioritize them because it is highly tuned to promote high engagement content. Any given feed is going to have white supremacy, flat Earth, climate change denial, immigrant hate, vaccine harms, and of course Elon shilling for his AI products.
A number of decent news accounts cross post on Twitter. I wish they would pick a platform other than Telegram or Twitter but it is what it is.
A lot of non-Western accounts were recently demonetized so maybe they will move elsewhere. Although the best ones don’t seem to be doing it for money, they usually have some personal grudge.
I get news from Ukraine just in a good enough pace from various bloggers etc on youtube. Then there is telegram, thats arguably even a better source for the "this just happened on the front lines" news (ofc without any sources, just like twitter).
Bottom line is you DONT need twitter if your only want is "i want rumours called news the minute something happens"
Option A: You occasionally encounter power tripping mods on a site where you are free to create your own community and become the mod yourself.
Option B: a power tripping drug-addled Nazi billionaire owns the entire site and can change the site behavior for every user on a whim, with no recourse.
An echo chamber isn’t inherently bad, and moderation is required to maintain any semblance of a well functioning online community.
Reddit can be good if you stay in your niche and off the default subs. Twitter is good if you similarly curate your experience and don’t let it push you into garbage.
> Twitter is good if you similarly curate your experience and don’t let it push you into garbage.
I want to follow the guy who tracked Elon's jet and documented its fuel usage and CO2 emissions. Oops, can't make that part of my "curated experience" on Twitter. So much for free speech absolutism.
The point is that when you're subject to the whims of an irrational asshole, you can't have any assurance that your curated experience will stay consistent. For this reason alone, Twitter is worse than Reddit.
Are you anti-drugs? Do you think drug users are bad people or using drugs is condemnable? I'm asking because anti-fascists are typically pro-drugs. So I'm confused.
It is if it affects your mental state at all during the time that you’re making important decisions that affect other people; say if you’re making safety decisions for a vehicle that’s being manufactured. Or, if you’re deciding to gut a government program that is responsible for feeding or medicating thousands of people, meaning that your decisions directly lead to thousands of deaths.
Default Reddit mainpage is strictly what you subscribe to. And from a tech point of view, Reddit has old. CSS, it has tree style comments with sorting and collapsing, it has no dumb character limits, and on big screens it properly fills the screen with content instead of dumb emptiness or fluff or just infogarbage (do people remember that hashtags are literally just a useless character dumps, born out of the limitations of the SMS tech).
So no, Reddit is not worse than Xitter both on social and tech merit.
Everybody who's not totally limited in their mindsets. Twitter/X is uncensored. I think open minds who are hungry for the raw, real truth prefer such platform, rather than one that's regulated by one political party of one particular country.
It doesn't become more true if you claim that multiple times around here. X under Musk is well documented to censor widely. It's just that the direction of censorship has shifted under him, so your particular bubble might get more left alone now.
> hungry for the raw, real truth
Haha sure. Why not go to the original where Tweets are actually literally called Truths?
If X is so open, why do I have to register an account to see practically anything? Why are they banning mirrors? If an open source project banned mirroring, there'd be an outrage.
Why did Elon ban PaulG and many for posting a link to Mastodon?
Why did so many get suspended for sharing the location of Elon's private jet?
Ex-x account holder here. Even if the world is going to fall and details about this even will be accessible exclusively behind X login wall, I am not setting up the account there again, NO WAY.
I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it. Almost certainly you won't miss it, as I didn't miss it. And there is a big chance you will get a big sight of relief, as I did.
But when I was doing it, I got a big warning that anyone could come up and register that handle for themselves. So I instead ended up just deleting every post, my personal details, and left the account alone (not using it anymore).
I know they do this intentionally (it's bad intentions all over the place on social networks nowadays, except HN, of course).
I'm terrified of somebody else just creating the account with the same handle I used to have, and impersonate me across old friends and contacts.
Pin a post that you leave X (or any major SM): say its your last post because they have become a greedy, amoral cesspool and add links where they can find you instead.
Fortunately it is almost impossible to set up a new account. The sign-up process is totally broken, links in the docs are stale and everything looks vibe coded. And they want a phone number and possibly an ID.
Nitter is good software, I have no idea how Twitter users put up with this garbage fire.
> I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it.
I'm not sure this is a great idea, if you have a somewhat unique username or you use that same username elsewhere.
Multiple times, me and others have changed usernames on some platform, and either immediately when you rename, or few seconds afterwards, some squatter will grab your old username, and most platforms don't care about helping you recover anything, so suddenly you've opened up phishing/spam venues associated with your old username.
Personally I'm not sure what the solution is to this, I've resorted to just not deleting accounts where this might happen, but leave the account inactive and unused.
Just do the obvious thing: stop posting there, don't view it anymore, and pin a post that you leave X (or any major SM) because they have become a greedy, amoral cesspool and links where they can find you now.
Why? X is one of the rare uncensored publishing / communication networks we have. Do you prefer living in a highly regulated, censored pre-gated world where information is hidden if somebody "feels offended" by it or state / ngo actors dont want something to go public?
The brainwashing against free, open, uncensored and community-corrected platforms is crazy.
It's quite unfortunate, a lot of people or organisations I am interested in - AI for example - only post on X, and perhaps it's only a matter of time until services like bird.makeup also get taken down. Also, accessibility wise it's sad too, X's web interface is not the best out there and without login you cannot do really much.
Starter packs can help bootstrap it. Perhaps this? [0]
A lot of the biggest boosters of AI are aligned with the politics of Musk, and so they're just going to stay on X. This means the AI discourse is far less on bsky.
useless advice - Prague firemen are not on bsky, Prague public transport company is not on bsky, Czech state police is not on bsky (though at least this one seems to be unofficially on mastodon), literally no institution here use bsky
My hope is that this reduces the relevancy of Twitter; a lot of people who consider it a moral reason not use X.com proper end up still using Nitter/Xcancel to keep an eye on discussions, which has helped reduce the reason to leave the site.
But in reality I suspect that group isn't actually large enough to have much impact, especially since some will just give in and register on the Everything App.
Going cold turkey on Twitter (and Facebook and the like) was amazing, but the problem for a while was that you'd still end up browsing it by proxy because it would all get screenshotted for Reddit.
It's been a long time since I've seen them (thank god), but the worst culprits were subs like facepalm, white people twitter, leopards ate my face, and pretty much any left-leaning or liberal sub.
They did a fantastic job of platforming the ideologies they stand against simply by screenshotting the most vocal advocates and talking heads and sharing them so commenters could get angry. That shit lived rent free in the subscribers' heads to an unhealthy degree and for everybody who hate-engaged, there were plenty more who saw it as an introduction.
One day I'll do for Reddit what I did for the rest of social media but for now it's easy enough to stay off Popular and All and just stick with the smaller subs with a specific subject matter.
I stopped virtually all social media (except commenting on YouTube videos and telling people they're wrong in HN comments) years ago. No twitter, no mastadon, no bsky, no facebook. I keep hearing myspace is going to re-launch and I would consider getting an account there for the purposes of irony.
But... instead of tweeting for an hour a day, I spend that hour reading long form dead tree format texts. I'm not saying this is what you should do, just offering it as an observation that it is an option.
yeah i have been doing the same for a few months now.. deleted all social media accounts and blocked sites like reddit, twitter etc., so i don't get into the trap of 'only quickly checking'. hn is the only social media site i still visit.
I boycotted with the API nonsense a few years ago and noticed I didn't miss it that much. Haven't really been back since. When a web search leads me back, it seems to have gone downhill with lots of low effort and bot-ish posts.
I pulled back significantly on reddit in that period too. Now I probably look at it 10% tops of what I used to. After being away from it and trying to enjoy looking at it these days... It's not the same as it was and simply not very good now. Most of the good communities died off, closed or got too big, the biggest communities are too big and the quality of posts+comments has plummeted. It feels either overrun with bots or it's the alternative: idiots that post so poorly they appear to be bots.
It was fun while it lasted, but with everything going on it often feels nicer to just not look at the internet and do something else. Rage baiting, copy cat posts and spam have become so common on Insta even that's become harder to enjoy.
It's been wild to see the Dead Internet Theory mature in real time after reading about it like... 15 years or more ago.
I got banned (always for some political stuff, like being too anti trump, anti isreal etc) for the Nth time so i just uninstalled the app. I browse sometimes in bed, but thats only as anon on some libreddit instance. Never poltical stuff, usually just programming and some related subreddits.
It’s all fine until the entire community you’re trying to participate in decides Twitter is the place to post things.
ahem
Would be great if we maybe chose someplace else to do this as a community… but I guess the eyeballs are there and that’s what is valuable to the folks posting.
Our HOA is forced to use an email mailing list. Enough older people who don't use facebook... and now younger people who refuse. Maybe ask for a show of hands at the next meeting. Sentiments can change overnight. Especially with the meta stuff happening at the moment.
We use a SaaS provider for our HOA and it works well, but there is a monthly / annual cost for that. That said, people still insist on posting to Facebook but the group can easily turn to poison and sniping which is super awesome for being neighborly…
You can still selfhost it. You might lose the privacy benefit and you got to have an account to get session token etc but the tracking is way less than using X's app/browser and Nitter is extremely lightweight on resources both at server level and at client.
Stopped using social media a few years ago (deleted all content and stopped using the accounts). Finally got annoyed enough and wrote my own NopeMod in tampermonkey last year that scans all pages I visit and disables URLs of links I do NOT want to visit. X/twitter/facebook/etc...
Proposal: if you don't have X account and live in a cave, don't even come post on HN. This is about news. X is now a big player with latest top news in many topics.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] threadIf you follow specific profiles/channels/pages and just read the feeds from them as if they were news, you are removing the toxic part (mostly infinite scrolling) and getting a resourceful feature.
If for some reason someone you need to follow is on X (twitter) only, you have to choose between losing a source or compromise with the platform.
I personally belong to the former group (and possibly you do, too), leaving behind sources, but not everyone likes it that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Twitter is a private company, deciding for their own services. Leaving it behind is more useful than asking them to rollback.
And they all require accounts that I don't want to have.
There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine). There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
The Twitter experience is a highly algorithmic feed where tweets from the people you follow are not guaranteed to be in chronological order, or even shown to you at all. The default experience also mixes it other tweets "you might be interested in", that is, things they want you to see.
There's also the fact people could freely see tweets and follow discussion threads, that's now locked behind an account requirement.
Not on Nitter! Which is the point, for me at least.
> There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine).
I am certain that Twitter is not the only place where you can find these updates, if you really care for up-to-the-minute news. But I don’t.
> There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
These people and companies are (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting a Nazi billionaire and they are not worth paying any attention to until they change their behavior.
You can see only Tweets from people you follow and nothing else. As I said, you are controlling the buttons you push.
Especially annoying when Twitter is a source for something.
This site is a good alternative for tech news.
A lot of non-Western accounts were recently demonetized so maybe they will move elsewhere. Although the best ones don’t seem to be doing it for money, they usually have some personal grudge.
Bottom line is you DONT need twitter if your only want is "i want rumours called news the minute something happens"
Option B: a power tripping drug-addled Nazi billionaire owns the entire site and can change the site behavior for every user on a whim, with no recourse.
This doesn’t seem like a hard choice to make.
Reddit can be good if you stay in your niche and off the default subs. Twitter is good if you similarly curate your experience and don’t let it push you into garbage.
I don’t use either much anymore.
I want to follow the guy who tracked Elon's jet and documented its fuel usage and CO2 emissions. Oops, can't make that part of my "curated experience" on Twitter. So much for free speech absolutism.
The point is that when you're subject to the whims of an irrational asshole, you can't have any assurance that your curated experience will stay consistent. For this reason alone, Twitter is worse than Reddit.
But I don't use either site anymore at all.
Are you anti-drugs? Do you think drug users are bad people or using drugs is condemnable? I'm asking because anti-fascists are typically pro-drugs. So I'm confused.
You don't think drug users are bad people, so surely that's just a neutral question...
Or maybe there are times where drug use can still be a problem, whether it makes people bad people or not.
Don't drink and drive. Don't do drugs and buy media companies.
No.
> Do you think drug users are bad people
No, at least not just because they use drugs.
> or using drugs is condemnable
It is if it affects your mental state at all during the time that you’re making important decisions that affect other people; say if you’re making safety decisions for a vehicle that’s being manufactured. Or, if you’re deciding to gut a government program that is responsible for feeding or medicating thousands of people, meaning that your decisions directly lead to thousands of deaths.
So no, Reddit is not worse than Xitter both on social and tech merit.
You may has well have replied that, in fact, its color scheme is more red than Twitter.
It's certainly more diverse than Bluesky, if this is an echo chamber-measuring contest.
>>then proceed to use bluesky
lmao
Also the Asian community (Korea, Japan etc) is incredibly strong on Twitter. They don't really care about the whole politics around the platform.
> hungry for the raw, real truth
Haha sure. Why not go to the original where Tweets are actually literally called Truths?
Why did Elon ban PaulG and many for posting a link to Mastodon?
Why did so many get suspended for sharing the location of Elon's private jet?
Why did Elon ban a journalist after reporting a dossier on JD Vance? https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-dossier-leak-hack-iran-ken...
Why did Elon ban a journalist who interviewed the guy who hacked a conservative activist? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/twitter-suspende...
Why did Elon ban a journalist for reporting on Tesla? https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/15/23512158/elon-musk-twi...
2) absolute freedom to post whatever you like and have it shoved in people's faces by the algorithm is harmful
3) usually when people are "hungry for the raw, real truth" they're actually chasing a bunch of conspiracy theories
If you aren’t a polyglot, the only ways to follow news about global conflicts and non-Western politics are Twitter or Telegram. Pick your poison.
Although, I don't see how this will hold up in court as they're pretty much an archive-like site hosting UGC.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449576
I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it. Almost certainly you won't miss it, as I didn't miss it. And there is a big chance you will get a big sight of relief, as I did.
If you really must, use https://twitterwebviewer.com/ which imo has better interface than Nitter.
But when I was doing it, I got a big warning that anyone could come up and register that handle for themselves. So I instead ended up just deleting every post, my personal details, and left the account alone (not using it anymore).
I know they do this intentionally (it's bad intentions all over the place on social networks nowadays, except HN, of course).
I'm terrified of somebody else just creating the account with the same handle I used to have, and impersonate me across old friends and contacts.
What do you suggest?
Nitter is good software, I have no idea how Twitter users put up with this garbage fire.
I'm not sure this is a great idea, if you have a somewhat unique username or you use that same username elsewhere.
Multiple times, me and others have changed usernames on some platform, and either immediately when you rename, or few seconds afterwards, some squatter will grab your old username, and most platforms don't care about helping you recover anything, so suddenly you've opened up phishing/spam venues associated with your old username.
Personally I'm not sure what the solution is to this, I've resorted to just not deleting accounts where this might happen, but leave the account inactive and unused.
The brainwashing against free, open, uncensored and community-corrected platforms is crazy.
Why did Elon ban PaulG and many for posting a link to Mastodon?
Why did so many get suspended for sharing the location of Elon's private jet?
Why did Elon ban a journalist after reporting a dossier on JD Vance? https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-dossier-leak-hack-iran-ken...
Why did Elon ban a journalist who interviewed the guy who hacked a conservative activist? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/twitter-suspende...
Why did Elon ban a journalist for reporting on Tesla? https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/15/23512158/elon-musk-twi...
Fortunately their URLs aren't obfuscated, so it works with Redirector
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
Starter packs can help bootstrap it. Perhaps this? [0]
A lot of the biggest boosters of AI are aligned with the politics of Musk, and so they're just going to stay on X. This means the AI discourse is far less on bsky.
[0] https://blueskystarterpack.com/starter-packs/@nimobeeren.com...
https://zpravobot.news/@PolicieCZ
But in reality I suspect that group isn't actually large enough to have much impact, especially since some will just give in and register on the Everything App.
It's been a long time since I've seen them (thank god), but the worst culprits were subs like facepalm, white people twitter, leopards ate my face, and pretty much any left-leaning or liberal sub.
They did a fantastic job of platforming the ideologies they stand against simply by screenshotting the most vocal advocates and talking heads and sharing them so commenters could get angry. That shit lived rent free in the subscribers' heads to an unhealthy degree and for everybody who hate-engaged, there were plenty more who saw it as an introduction.
One day I'll do for Reddit what I did for the rest of social media but for now it's easy enough to stay off Popular and All and just stick with the smaller subs with a specific subject matter.
But... instead of tweeting for an hour a day, I spend that hour reading long form dead tree format texts. I'm not saying this is what you should do, just offering it as an observation that it is an option.
it's done wonders for my mental.
It was fun while it lasted, but with everything going on it often feels nicer to just not look at the internet and do something else. Rage baiting, copy cat posts and spam have become so common on Insta even that's become harder to enjoy.
It's been wild to see the Dead Internet Theory mature in real time after reading about it like... 15 years or more ago.
ahem
Would be great if we maybe chose someplace else to do this as a community… but I guess the eyeballs are there and that’s what is valuable to the folks posting.
Mostly I was thinking about tech folks and AI news that seems to go out on Twitter most of the time.
Reasoning: inaccessible to HN users. OP should find another source or mirror.