Algorithm is much improved. Just way more interesting content reaches me now.
WAY less censorship. Like an unbelievably reduced amount of censorship. That's the biggest thing for me.
Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see. The fact that they send you a notification on posts you liked that get noted is awesome.
Better bot control (still a problem, though the bigger problem seems to be foreign sockpuppeting by humans, which is about the same as always)
More responsiveness to technical issues.
And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.
I can't see anything past all the blue checkmarks who pay for visibility. I've had to run the "block the blue" userscripts for hours just to make the site usable.
> WAY less censorship.
You could power a datacenter with how fast Orwell is spinning in his grave. But I guess letting Grok undress children means "less censorship" for you specifically.
> Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see.
This is the only thing I agree with.
> Better bot control
Elon just crashed out when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center, and right-wing account activity dropped on Xitter.
> More responsiveness to technical issues.
Things breaking and then getting reverted isn't better than things not breaking in the first place
> And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.
It probably would have been better if Twitter itself had moved to AT Protocol, as it's the future. But I'm happy to leave the people using Grok to undress pictures of children on Xitter.
No, I don't mean Grok undressing pictures (which I have honestly never seen on X, but maybe that's just my algorithm), I mean approximately 30% of the world political spectrum that can now voice their opinion without being censored.
Because the censorship on old Twitter was so wildly effective, people can't even fathom it was happening, despite the extensive documentation.
You're confusing moderation with censorship. Censorship is when governments tell Twitter to silence people, this went up by 66% under Musk if you can read the link I posted (try reading something longer than a tweet, you might learn something). Less moderation means people can say slurs, post deepfakes of children, and make the place an extremely hostile environment filled with racists, slanderers, bots, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy nutjobs, which you seem enthused about.
I guess not being able to yell fire in a movie theater is censorship too. There's good reason most civil people agree that there's a time or place for certain words and actions, and incitement is frowned upon.
It says a lot that the only "free speech" you care about is the hate speech that infringes on others civil rights and creates a chilling action on civil participation for minorities, yet you seem to not care one bit when Erdogan cracks down on opposition to his authoritarianism and Musk helps out, you welcome that government censorship.
I think it's worth noting that Elon didn't make Twitter bad.
Twitter was already bad. Jack found himself accidentally in control of the world's message board, one of them at least... And decided his plan to be responsible for that vast power was to have no plan. Selling to Musk should have surprised nobody because Twitter was, in that sense, extremely traditional startup company work... And the goal was always to sell out.
I left Twitter when they responded to the United States electing a Twitter troll President by changing their policy on what trolling looked like instead of enforcing it. Because I suspected that nothing good would come of an organization whose top-level leadership had already shown that much of a lack of integrity.
I am disappointed to have been proven right with depressing consistency.
>Selling to Musk should have surprised nobody because Twitter was, in that sense, extremely traditional startup company work... And the goal was always to sell out.
It's more than that. Musk tried to back out and was forced in court to finish the deal to buy Twitter.
I'd argue it's really the author just saying out loud for themselves, like they need to cast off this old, and always stupid idea, that interfacing is condoning, that if you don't performative turn your back on "$THING" for "$Reason" that means you are for "$THING", even if not doing so has zero material impact at all. Me shitposting on Twitter (you can still call it that, X is a dumb fucking name and everyone knows what you're talking about, if you want to do the performative thing) is not why Elon Musk holds the shitty views he does nor why he has a trillion dollars in net worth. Me tapping "like" on a picture of an old computer on there does nothing. I own no stock in any of his companies. I buy none of his products. I make basic text API requests to a website he bought and block ads on it. So why would I leave just because he's a twat? Fuck him! I was there first!
Twitter/X never stopped being the place where people who have something interesting to say or show stopped hanging out; conversely, the big Bluesky migration really just meant a lot of annoying people left. I'm glad some of the more interesting ones are figuring out what a lame idea it was to leave in the first place. Come on back! It's worse than it was but it's no worse than anywhere else!
Like, you have to first prove anyone should care if you turn your back on them before you make a big show of turning your back on them. Otherwise it's just cringe. And just like "it's not an airport, you don't need to announce your departures", you don't need to announce your return either. No one who matters will judge you for looking at Twitter.
I guess for some folks yeah having a clean list might be helpful. Frankly though the "cave diver heros are pedos cause they insulted the stupid submarine" should have been the wake up call, a half a fucking DECADE before the outright Nazi shit, for a lot of people that he was a complete stupid cunt, sadly they didn't and kept buying those crappy cars he made. I bet those thousands of dollars enabled far more of wealth he enjoys vs the meager pennies he might earn from a non-ad seeing user lookin at stuff on Twitter.
In fact, two of those cars were bought by the author of this article! Wow!
Lex, I don’t know how to put this nicely. But if you are reading this, sell your teslas. Finger wagging about Twitter/X has roughly zero moral weight coming from someone who has bought two Teslas.
The bumper stickers are worse, unfortunately. They read as self awareness without moral conviction.
Man if you don’t see the issues with what the author enumerated to the point of calling him “miserable”, I’m really sorry for you. I guess you lacked love in your life somehow.
I'll probably be downvoted for admitting this but I do quite enjoy the new X, the suggested tab is certainly full of crazy, unhinged conspiracy theories and obvious rage bait posts, it's like opening the door to an insane asylum, somewhat entertaining for a short time, you'll probably find a few things that challenge your views and there are some genuine gems of a post that come up there from time to time, but then I can always switch over to my following tab for just the more sober and sane accounts I follow and then it's basically back to the more old style Twitter feed of just accounts your interested in following.
Most of the other similar platforms tend to conform to a more politically correct, consensus enforcement style of a certain narrative, which is fine for the more fragile minded who dislike anything that might challenge their world view, but those places just ultimately become boring echo chambers full on a small ingroup that tend to become increasingly weird and unfriendly to outsiders and divorced from reality over time.
You, and many other people in this industry, are cooking your brain on a website owned by a literal white supremacist, and you think you're too smart (or whatever the opposite of "fragile minded" is) for it to happen.
Where you spend time shapes your thoughts, whether you like it or not.
Ah yes, an artisanal menagerie of choice cuts from the most popular brainrot.
Blended just for you to normalize the worst parts of the internet. Add a drop of fascism into every feed and soon enough you don’t notice how down the rabbit hole you are.
But, no, you are too smart to get addicted to it. Not you. Everyone else, sure, but not you.
This is a tired gotcha trope people repeat but it's not really true. The purpose of these algorithms is not to give you content that fits you the best. It's to give you content that encourages the most engagement.
You know what causes a lot of engagement? Unhinged conspiracy theories and obvious rage bait posts.
I guess I should say I shared this here to see how people would react, as it is pretty much the converse of the Daring Fireball piece.
I want my work to be seen as much as anyone; I currently post to bsky and mastodon, and I've stayed off threads and twitter. I often wonder how much I'm sacrificing by not doing everything possible to maximize my social media footprint in the name of sleeping at night.
Claims that Musk is a Nazi, or at least sympathetic, are strange because his mother is Jewish and he called himself ‘aspirationally Jewish’. He also has spent time with genocidal war criminal Netanyahu, having been part of the October 7th propaganda post show, then gave him a tour of the Tesla plant in Austin. He also allows Israeli firms tied to the military intimate access to X, such as handling user verification and another builds a score of each user on how friendly or hostile they are to Israel. We haven’t even touched on the valid propaganda and misinformation campaigns being waged against Palestine on his platform.
And yes, these are are super valid points to forever boycott everything and anything he has something to do with.
There are a lot of ways to scrape the content you want into a different interface, or filter ads and the content you don't want to see.
I mostly scrape and use a different interface, but when I view the actual site, I use https://imbue.com/blog/bouncer (I work at the company that makes this, on other projects).
Regarding Twitter, the larger issue isn't your own filter; it's that social media trades on popularity, and merely interacting with it is boosting its popularity.
This is a problem because as we've just seen as a result of the drone strikes on the data center in Russia... A huge chunk of Twitter is anti-western Russian propaganda. Well crafted anti-western Russian propaganda. Several noteworthy influencer accounts with significant following of Americans appear to have gone completely silent in the wake of the attack.
Twitter has the resources to know those accounts are fake. They make the business decision not to pull that thread. And there are consequences to pumping oxygen into the propaganda machine.
Food for thought for folks who are in favor of Western style democracy, essentially.
I've been preferring Bluesky lately. It's much more open so you can write your own feeds to consume it however you like. I currently have one that runs every post in my following feed through a cheap LLM filter to throw out ragebait and topics I don't care about. It requires some initial work to curate your experience but after that it's pretty good.
Nobody cares. The left overs have no moral high ground to stand on and judge anyone. If you demand stability( by conservating social order or nostalgia for the past) in unstable times by your own making you are disqualified. Somebody disqualified does not get to choose the people, the platform or the social order.
So... Yuu don't like the guy who bought Twitter and renamed it to X? Thats fine. You dislike him so much that you want to boycott the platform he bought? Fine! Go ahead, show how prinicpled you are, and actually don't use the platform for anything. Neither post to it, nor read anything from it. Thats all fine. But... I am soooo done with this "I want to get clean, so everyone else has to stop, so that I dont feel alone." attitude. I don't care that you don't like X. I haven't used it since almost 10 years. Deleted my account back then, and NEVER looked back. I haven't read a single tweet since, because the web interface is basically unuseable with a simple browser. Thats fine, I am used to being excluded from most of the modern internet. Do I write blog posts asking people to stop using Firefox and go back to lynx? Maybe I should, but nah, its too hilarious. I like it when people have prinicples and stick to it. I learnt to absolutely hate activists, those people that seem more concerned to influence the people around themselves, then their own actions.
>His point, as I see it, is that yes, Elon Musk is awful, but the X algorithm no longer shoves his posts into John’s feed, and new Apple CEO John Ternus is posting there (along with other Apple executives), and that there are interesting people who post on X and not elsewhere.
>That all may be true. But it’s not the point.
They are talking past each other.
"I like this technology because it's good" vs "I hate this technology because I hate the people behind it"
It really comes down to how much conscious decision do you do every single time you buy a product. Or as the meme says we live in a society.
Having the used market get flooded with perfectly serviceable vehicles is bad for a brand for a number of reasons
Why would I buy a new one when used prices are rock bottom due to inventory?
Word of mouth is bad when you have owners abandoning their cars.
Just in general the prestige of teslas as a luxury EV is totally shot but that’s not a new thing. It’s just irrecoverable at this point when they’re so common and plain, and anyone can pick one up for next to nothing
I’m more interested in the folks continuing to use and benefit from the products of Elon’s companies while simultaneously condemning other folks for using products from Elon’s companies.
Their defense would presumably be something along the lines of it being too expensive at that moment to sell the car and get something else. That is the price they are willing or unwilling to pay for their moral position.
He makes an entire list of how horrible Elon is as an indictment of Gruber for using X, and then explains that he is still driving his test as he had for the last nine years without even a shred of irony.
such a weird position. recognizing something is not the same and lieing about the sameness to try to help one group of people can and is harming another group of people is not hate. its being a reasonable and intelligent person.
Why? Everything except his political views (to some people) is awesome. Bringing launch costs down by a factor of 100 is awesome, bringing electric cars forward several decades in adoption is awesome,paypal was awesome for the time, even the boring company and neuralink are starting to show promise. Have to give him credit for taking business ideas thatlooked really stupid at the time and making them work well to our great benefit. To me he has earned benefit of the doubt the size of the ocean whenever he is doing somethibg thatlooks stupid
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 34.3 ms ] threadEdit: I can't reply so, here's why I think so:
Algorithm is much improved. Just way more interesting content reaches me now.
WAY less censorship. Like an unbelievably reduced amount of censorship. That's the biggest thing for me.
Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see. The fact that they send you a notification on posts you liked that get noted is awesome.
Better bot control (still a problem, though the bigger problem seems to be foreign sockpuppeting by humans, which is about the same as always)
More responsiveness to technical issues.
And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.
I can't see anything past all the blue checkmarks who pay for visibility. I've had to run the "block the blue" userscripts for hours just to make the site usable.
> WAY less censorship.
You could power a datacenter with how fast Orwell is spinning in his grave. But I guess letting Grok undress children means "less censorship" for you specifically.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...
> Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see.
This is the only thing I agree with.
> Better bot control
Elon just crashed out when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center, and right-wing account activity dropped on Xitter.
> More responsiveness to technical issues.
Things breaking and then getting reverted isn't better than things not breaking in the first place
> And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.
It probably would have been better if Twitter itself had moved to AT Protocol, as it's the future. But I'm happy to leave the people using Grok to undress pictures of children on Xitter.
Because the censorship on old Twitter was so wildly effective, people can't even fathom it was happening, despite the extensive documentation.
Maybe you don't know about the Grok deepfake story because you don't see far outside your filter bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal
It's just not government censorship.
I'm sure this would become extremely obvious to you if your political viewpoint suddenly started getting "moderated" off of every major platform.
It says a lot that the only "free speech" you care about is the hate speech that infringes on others civil rights and creates a chilling action on civil participation for minorities, yet you seem to not care one bit when Erdogan cracks down on opposition to his authoritarianism and Musk helps out, you welcome that government censorship.
Twitter was already bad. Jack found himself accidentally in control of the world's message board, one of them at least... And decided his plan to be responsible for that vast power was to have no plan. Selling to Musk should have surprised nobody because Twitter was, in that sense, extremely traditional startup company work... And the goal was always to sell out.
I left Twitter when they responded to the United States electing a Twitter troll President by changing their policy on what trolling looked like instead of enforcing it. Because I suspected that nothing good would come of an organization whose top-level leadership had already shown that much of a lack of integrity.
I am disappointed to have been proven right with depressing consistency.
It's more than that. Musk tried to back out and was forced in court to finish the deal to buy Twitter.
What a relief that it's just another pants-shitting opine over the trillionaire.
I'd argue it's really the author just saying out loud for themselves, like they need to cast off this old, and always stupid idea, that interfacing is condoning, that if you don't performative turn your back on "$THING" for "$Reason" that means you are for "$THING", even if not doing so has zero material impact at all. Me shitposting on Twitter (you can still call it that, X is a dumb fucking name and everyone knows what you're talking about, if you want to do the performative thing) is not why Elon Musk holds the shitty views he does nor why he has a trillion dollars in net worth. Me tapping "like" on a picture of an old computer on there does nothing. I own no stock in any of his companies. I buy none of his products. I make basic text API requests to a website he bought and block ads on it. So why would I leave just because he's a twat? Fuck him! I was there first!
Twitter/X never stopped being the place where people who have something interesting to say or show stopped hanging out; conversely, the big Bluesky migration really just meant a lot of annoying people left. I'm glad some of the more interesting ones are figuring out what a lame idea it was to leave in the first place. Come on back! It's worse than it was but it's no worse than anywhere else!
Like, you have to first prove anyone should care if you turn your back on them before you make a big show of turning your back on them. Otherwise it's just cringe. And just like "it's not an airport, you don't need to announce your departures", you don't need to announce your return either. No one who matters will judge you for looking at Twitter.
People who want a nice succinct "list of awful things Elon has done". Perfecto!
The bumper stickers are worse, unfortunately. They read as self awareness without moral conviction.
We'll have to give it at least another decade to assess whether Musk is a hero or villain, but nothing in TFA pushed me toward the latter.
Most of the other similar platforms tend to conform to a more politically correct, consensus enforcement style of a certain narrative, which is fine for the more fragile minded who dislike anything that might challenge their world view, but those places just ultimately become boring echo chambers full on a small ingroup that tend to become increasingly weird and unfriendly to outsiders and divorced from reality over time.
is it mostly the rightie conservative stuff or evenly distributed?
to me the problem is not if the algo censors things for craziness of views, it's more if the algo censors things for political direction of views.
Where you spend time shapes your thoughts, whether you like it or not.
The "For you" tab is based on Your interests.
Blended just for you to normalize the worst parts of the internet. Add a drop of fascism into every feed and soon enough you don’t notice how down the rabbit hole you are.
But, no, you are too smart to get addicted to it. Not you. Everyone else, sure, but not you.
You know what causes a lot of engagement? Unhinged conspiracy theories and obvious rage bait posts.
I want my work to be seen as much as anyone; I currently post to bsky and mastodon, and I've stayed off threads and twitter. I often wonder how much I'm sacrificing by not doing everything possible to maximize my social media footprint in the name of sleeping at night.
And yes, these are are super valid points to forever boycott everything and anything he has something to do with.
I really miss the Elon Musk from before 2018, he was completely different :(
I mostly scrape and use a different interface, but when I view the actual site, I use https://imbue.com/blog/bouncer (I work at the company that makes this, on other projects).
This is a problem because as we've just seen as a result of the drone strikes on the data center in Russia... A huge chunk of Twitter is anti-western Russian propaganda. Well crafted anti-western Russian propaganda. Several noteworthy influencer accounts with significant following of Americans appear to have gone completely silent in the wake of the attack.
Twitter has the resources to know those accounts are fake. They make the business decision not to pull that thread. And there are consequences to pumping oxygen into the propaganda machine.
Food for thought for folks who are in favor of Western style democracy, essentially.
I've been preferring Bluesky lately. It's much more open so you can write your own feeds to consume it however you like. I currently have one that runs every post in my following feed through a cheap LLM filter to throw out ragebait and topics I don't care about. It requires some initial work to curate your experience but after that it's pretty good.
>That all may be true. But it’s not the point.
They are talking past each other.
"I like this technology because it's good" vs "I hate this technology because I hate the people behind it"
It really comes down to how much conscious decision do you do every single time you buy a product. Or as the meme says we live in a society.
Why would I buy a new one when used prices are rock bottom due to inventory?
Word of mouth is bad when you have owners abandoning their cars.
Just in general the prestige of teslas as a luxury EV is totally shot but that’s not a new thing. It’s just irrecoverable at this point when they’re so common and plain, and anyone can pick one up for next to nothing
Their defense would presumably be something along the lines of it being too expensive at that moment to sell the car and get something else. That is the price they are willing or unwilling to pay for their moral position.
He makes an entire list of how horrible Elon is as an indictment of Gruber for using X, and then explains that he is still driving his test as he had for the last nine years without even a shred of irony.
Yeah. OK.
He's done lots of amazing things, too, and yet I'd still get my name soiled by association. Because he's a horrible human being.