| ▲ | robinhood 2 days ago |
| I find it so sad that Twitter still gets traffic at all. Even if we put aside the super shady content on this platform (free speech, lol), the app, either on the web or mobile, has a sub-par user experience. I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform. |
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| ▲ | boringg 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective. |
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| ▲ | bpavuk 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there. | | |
| ▲ | ndr 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Who is using Bluesky in the US? Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends? | | |
| ▲ | chairmansteve 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I am.... For what it's worth. There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me. And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem. Believe me, you can live without Twitter. | |
| ▲ | madeofpalk 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've never received a x.com link from a friend. Maybe we run in different circles with different people. | |
| ▲ | toyg 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Who is using Bluesky in the US? A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness). > Is it just my friends? If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely. | | |
| ▲ | csallen 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The fact that the left defined Joe Rogan as right-wing for not adhering to very specific far-left tenets (e.g. de-platforming personas non grata and cooperating with cancel culture) only served to push him and his listeners rightward, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy. | | |
| ▲ | djeastm 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >only served to push him and his listeners rightward Kind of takes the agency away from full-grown adults, doesn't it? How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh? | | |
| ▲ | csallen 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You're right. Change the words "they were pushed" to "they chose". There's your agency. > How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh? You assume that "having principles" means having your principles, and that for someone to disagree must mean they are unprincipled and simply chasing money/audience/fame. This kind of attitude comes across as incredibly arrogant and un-self-aware, and people/voters en masse want nothing to do with it. The reality is that many millions of people are principled, and they simply have different principles. For example, "opposing views should be aired and discussed" is a principle widely held by many millions of voters that the left has had an incredibly hard time understanding, respecting, and digesting. | | |
| ▲ | amanaplanacanal 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I suspect the people that really think that are a small minority. "The South was right, black people are subhuman and needed to be taken care of by slave owners" is not going to be a popular discussion topic, for example. Or suggesting that Hitler was right about how people should be treated in Europe. |
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| ▲ | Levitz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | For a communicator, no audience means you lose everything. Why would he, or for that matter, anyone do that? Look at JK Rowling. Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left. Say Rogan sticks to his guns. He would face similar, never-ending attacks, no left-leaning figure could attend his podcast without becoming guilty by association, so he'd end up interviewing basically the same people as he does now, only he wouldn't cater to some people that, given somewhat recent events, would most probably celebrate him getting murdered. I reckon we shouldn't take away the agency away from the adults who made purity testing a common practice, given the utter disaster we are experiencing as a consequence. | | |
| ▲ | chownie a day ago | parent [-] | | > Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left. This framing is laying on the narrative a little bit thick don't you think? It makes it seem like she's hated for being wealthy, when it is actually because she has been funding hate groups and calling for trans people to be physically attacked. The "standing up for women" rhetoric is a little bit hollow in the face of her non-existent feminism when the subject isn't physically attacking trans women, she didn't make a single comment during the recent uptick in abortion debates taking place in the UK for example. | | |
| ▲ | wastle 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > she has been funding hate groups and calling for trans people to be physically attacked She has done neither of these things you claim. Please refrain from spreading misinformation. | |
| ▲ | Levitz 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You are just proving my point. Statements like this show that it's worthless to engage. Can you provide any source for her "calling for trans people to be physically attacked"? Because you seem fixated on it, and I've just spent the last 15 minutes looking for one, and I can't find it. What I can find is her spending so much goddamned money on philanthropy that she stops being a billionaire, while not dodging a dime of taxes precisely because she considers it her obligation. A fortune amassed in what is probably the most ethic way possible, through exploitation of nobody, writing books. Related to this I can find the foundation of the Volant Charitable Trust, "a grant-making trust to support charitable causes in Scotland, helping vulnerable groups with an emphasis on women, children and young people." I can also find a comment of "every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them". And that's the point. You want to paint her as some lunatic who would like to hunt trans people down for sport, when it's crystal clear that she has the "radical" (standard 2018 radical leftist) notion that trans women are not the same thing as biological women and that the definition of women shouldn't be changed to appease to them. But again. It's not worth it to engage, because we both know I can spend 20+ minutes working on this reply and you are not going to change your stance. An apostate is worse than a heathen, which is why people complain about Rowling rather than anyone who is actually right wing. Because you are scared that if you defended her, you would face the same judgement. Making the world a worse place through and through. | | |
| ▲ | chownie 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I posted that earlier without checking and recalled wrongly, rather than calling for people to physically assault she instead called for her following to take photographs of trans women in public toilets and disseminate those photos to the public[1]. That was my bad, I knew that she had done something abhorrent and indefensible but it was 5 months ago and I'd forgotten which kind of hatred she had been producing specifically. I'll cite the source first next time. 1: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPG5DlIFIz/ -- I don't have a twitter account to forward the original, but there are news stories about this from the time if you're unsatisfied with that link. | | |
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| ▲ | afavour 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | “My views are everyone else’s fault” is such a prevalent and baffling claim these last few years. If you have a belief, own it. |
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| ▲ | itsoktocry 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a year ago. It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine. | | |
| ▲ | delecti 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I suspect our politics are just too different for my attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky. You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls"). If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity. | | |
| ▲ | whimsicalism 2 days ago | parent [-] | | i consider myself left-wing and found it very toxic. the ubiquitous blocking features are also a pretty big negative as i found myself blocked by a considerable portion of the site simply for following people in AI site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos | | |
| ▲ | _djo_ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Honestly, getting on those blocklists is a benefit in and of itself, it means anyone who is radical enough to follow blocklists that block people just because of whom they follow won’t cross your path. There is an extremely toxic component to Bluesky’s user base, unfortunately, with the many attacks on the CEO for not banning Jesse Singal being testament to that. But for what it’s worth in the circles I’ve cultivated there I now see very little of those toxic people, and I don’t see any support for their behaviour. So I hope in time a more open culture will win out. |
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| ▲ | Levitz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely. I reckon there's more of a correlation between this type of statement and being a Bluesky user than being right-wing and using X. I mean X userbase is enormous compared to that of Bluesky, you can't be serious. | | |
| ▲ | toyg a day ago | parent [-] | | It's also dropping like a stone, which is why they are resorting to these tricks to inflate one of the few metrics that can be observed from outside (how much traffic they send to other sites). Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation. |
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| ▲ | digianarchist a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Other platforms are over-policed and Twitter is under-policed. There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022. | |
| ▲ | whimsicalism 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I consider myself left-wing, but bluesky is pretty casually toxic in a way that turns me off. | | | |
| ▲ | greenchair 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | bluesky is mostly populated by fringe elements and that's putting it nicely | |
| ▲ | Kye 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most embeds I see on Discord are Bluesky. Bluesky seems to have taken over for social media links on sports subreddits. It saw a huge spike during the last game of the World Series. https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/ Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base there after the election spike that it's still growing toward the peak after dropping to a little less than half. | |
| ▲ | jasonlotito 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Who is using Bluesky in the US? Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes, if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky. > Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends? I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming that everyone is using that same site is silly. It doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other people are using other sites. | | |
| ▲ | randallsquared 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky. I would Press X to Doubt (perhaps ironically, for this X...). Searching around, it seems like Bluesky has about a tenth as many total users as X has active users, but it's definitely growing at a faster rate, and X might be declining in active users. Anecdotally, lots of people I noticed leaving for Bluesky very loudly and publicly quietly returned to posting on X after a while. | | |
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| ▲ | jeroenhd 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder. | | |
| ▲ | _whiteCaps_ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this out to my local government. | | |
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| ▲ | codingdave a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It certainly doesn't. About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above. So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form. (And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.) | |
| ▲ | 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's network effect, same as Facebook | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But X doesn't have a lock on live information. What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back) X will tell you to invest in <Scam> X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire. People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate. X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron. |
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| ▲ | Uhhrrr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have a great user experience on it. Here's what I do: I follow people who are consistently interesting and don't post too much. Then I only use "Following". "For You" is an algorithmic attention vortex for the proles. |
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| ▲ | pie_flavor 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The app consistently shows me things that I want to see from the social circle around the people I follow and the topics they talk about. Alternative platforms like Threads are worse at this; the platform I hear the most about, Bluesky, brags about not having this. Maybe the Twitter experience varies by which topics you are interested in, you might get served more slop the more mainstream topics you follow. But the reason I have not quit due to unusability is because there isn't any unusability. |
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| ▲ | spankalee 2 days ago | parent [-] | | BlueSky brags about not having what, exactly? Nazis? | | |
| ▲ | delecti 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Charitably, I assume they mean it brags about not having an algorithmic feed. Bluesky does actually have an algorithmic feed ("Discover"), but it isn't the default. |
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| ▲ | nkohari 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky, but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons. BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my feed enough that I don't usually see it. They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better off not using either, but I still find myself going back to Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about Reddit, honestly. |
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| ▲ | myko 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Interesting, BlueSky's non-algorithmic feed makes it really easy to avoid political ragebait and focus on tech accounts imo Really depends on who you're following | | |
| ▲ | nozzlegear 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem (if you want to call it that) with following a person on sites like Bluesky or X is that people aren't machines and won't stay "on topic" regarding the reason you followed them in the first place. You might follow them for software dev, biking, birding, or whatever, but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs. IMO, Reddit/HN-esque sites are better for following topics, and Bluesky/X/Mastodon are better for following people. Maybe hashtags are a good middleground but I don't have enough experience using those sites to say. (Disclaimer: I don't use any social media except for HN.) | | |
| ▲ | l33tbro 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs. Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting). Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick. | | |
| ▲ | nozzlegear 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't think you're being confrontational, and I don't think it's a problem either to be honest. My point was more that, try as one might, you can't build the ultimate curated list of non-political follows because somebody will eventually write something that you consider political. It can't be avoided, which I think is what you're saying too. I personally think that people try too hard to avoid politics and shame those who "make things political" – especially in tech. We live in an inherently political world, and our industry is increasingly political as it's co-opted by political figures and even dictators across the world. Trying to avoid talking about it is like stuffing our fingers in our ears and pretending reality isn't real, imo. |
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| ▲ | nkohari 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'd love to give it another try and be proven wrong. At the beginning it felt like "old Twitter", before it became mainstream, because it was almost entirely software engineers who had left Twitter. After Trump took office it felt like a constant deluge of hand-wringing and people shaking their fists at clouds, and it was tough to immerse myself in it. | | |
| ▲ | myko 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Make sure you stick to your "Following" feed and not "Discover" or even the feed dedicated to what your friends are into |
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| ▲ | jandrese 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If someone is feeding you ragebait on Bluesky you should just unsubscribe. The feed is what you make it. Twitter can be kind of like this too, but the trolls haunt the replies on there whereas people can shut trolls out of their replies on Bluesky. That's the big difference, is someone comes into a thread just to stir shit the original poster can shut them down. The danger that this creates an echo chamber has to be weighed against allowing trolls to run unchecked, or worse be like Twitter where these people get promoted to the top because ragebait generates big engagement numbers. Ultimately, the entire social media world needs to admit that maximizing engagement is a bad idea. They have to somehow convince the advertisers that having their product next to content designed entirely to enrage the reader is not good. | |
| ▲ | the__alchemist 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would try again, but not use discover, and aggressively mute/block. | | |
| ▲ | chairmansteve 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep. I ruthlessly anyone who induces the slightest negative emotion in me, be it annoyance, fear, anger etc. You are what you consume. I check the mainstream headlines once a day, kind of like checking the weather. There may be something I need to know. But then I move on. Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless. The problem with that attitude is that eventually democracy itself suffers, when people don't care no more. The word "democracy" itself points that out - "demos" means "the people". |
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| ▲ | nkohari 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think what's disappointing is that so many people that I've followed for years now routinely engage in daily political slapfights, or at least retweet ragebait. In the blogging era, it would have been really weird for a software engineer to sit down and write several paragraphs about their political views, but the friction of hitting "repost" is so comparatively low that everyone does it. Myself included, honestly, although I've been trying not to. I don't have any problem with people having and voicing thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations about politics, especially with people with whom they disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of what's happening on social media, but that's a different topic.) I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow topics, not people, and there isn't a great way to do that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber. And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated the site is at this point. | | |
| ▲ | sjsdaiuasgdia 2 days ago | parent [-] | | To follow topics on Bluesky, add feeds for those topics. The "Following" tab is literally that - chronologically ordered posts and replies from accounts you follow. The "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" tabs give you algorithm-sourced stuff that is somewhat connected to who you follow. When I click on the tab for the Game Dev feed, I see nothing but posts about game dev. When I click on the Astronomy feed, I only see telescopes and pictures taken with telescopes. | | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The reality is that microblogging, whether it be on X or bluesky or mastadon or even facebook posts, will ALWAYS be lower signal, lower value than real, curated or effort filled content. I like John Green a lot, including his vlogs that are just him speaking about stuff he doesn't know for half an hour, but I still do not go read what he posts on Bluesky, because it's as low quality, low signal, low intent, and low effort as comments here on HN. It's just not useful. It's not a good use of my time to read random tweets from people. When I first got a twitter account in like 2010, I very very instantly recognized it was not for me. If something is important, someone will take the effort to make an actual piece of real content about it, like a blog or video or essay or book. Hell, even a thorough reddit post is better than microblogging. If it's not worth going through that effort to get the message out to people, why should I consider that a valuable message? It's emblematic of the past 20 years of social development in my opinion. If the only thing stopping you from getting the word about something super duper important is that writing a page essay is too hard, nobody really needs to care about that, because writing an essay is so easy we make children do it It's all noise. The signal doesn't go on twitter, it goes on real platforms where you might make money from good signal, or like, a freaking scientific paper, or the front page of a news org. | | |
| ▲ | HeinzStuckeIt 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Earlier, I would have agreed that microblogging pales next to long-form blogging. But then so much long-form blogging moved to Substack that has an overall culture as full of pathologies as microblogging: post regularly even if you don't have anything new to say, hustle a brand that can be monetized, accept a comments section with a broken UI full of people shamelessly trying to hustle their own brand. People doing long-form video content will often speak openly about how they feel forced to change their content in order to avoid being punished by the YouTube algorithm. Personally, I'm pessimistic that there are many remaining sources of substantial discourse and discussion at all. I just pirate a lot more university-press books from Anna's Archive. | |
| ▲ | the__alchemist 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I noticed the same thing with Angela Collier. I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training. | | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It's because it's a microblogging platform. That's just what it's meant for, low effort swipes, shitposting, retweets out of context etc. It is notable that in order to actually accomplish their "We want a platform where a celebrity says something and you instantly get that something", Twitter had to do a lot of work and pain curating who "celebrities" are. The alternative is everyone getting a waterfall of shit, because the vast majority of people do not have PR agencies between them and their tweet button, and do not have anything important or meaningful to say that is better said fast and short than long and naunced. The entire point of microblogging is to eschew nuance. That's absurd full stop. Why would you ever want to know whatever low effort comment sparked thanksgiving dinner arguments at other people's thanksgivings? > I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training. Please tell me which of "Water fluoridation is a well understood treatment, and people who are telling you it's bad for you are just lying", "<Knitting trivia>" or "Target is doing poorly as a business right now" or "ICE doing gestapo things" is "unsubtle", or why any of that should be "subtle", which is a strange choice of word. | | |
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| ▲ | maxlin 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's good people like you who consider free speech some laughing matter don't lead the conversation. I don't even want to think how dim the situation would be without him having taken over. |
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| ▲ | platevoltage 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh god are we still pretending X is a free speech platform. | |
| ▲ | rcruzeiro 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened. | |
| ▲ | nkohari 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell you. | | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Seems to me to be more possible than on a manually curated platform where any whiff of a differing opinion gets downvoted, [dead] and [flagged]. |
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| ▲ | morshu9001 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I like the new Twitter stance on speech and some of the new features, problem is the UI is super annoying. It was actually kinda bad before too, but it got way worse. |
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| ▲ | rc_kas 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You like the X.com stance where it bans speech from liberals and leftists? | | |
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| ▲ | nomdep 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The algorithm is a mirror: it show more of what you interact with. You see “shady content” because you pay attention to it. But you can also follow people and read only what they write, reply to them, and write yourself. |
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| ▲ | edent 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That isn't true. I signed up for a fresh account for a project I was working on. Despite following no-one and not having interacted with anything, all I was pushed were racists, bigots, and extremist political content. Oh, and the owner's account. | | |
| ▲ | degamad 2 days ago | parent [-] | | While this is an interesting data point, the main thing it tells us is that when the algorithm has no information about your preferences, that it skews racist. This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences. Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the algorithm. The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed? | | |
| ▲ | afavour 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Or you can just leave the platform. We don’t always need to interrogate the exact reasons why something happens, we can just see it, document it, then go elsewhere. | |
| ▲ | int_19h a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences. ... of people actively using Twitter, yes. Which is precisely the point. |
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| ▲ | btown 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Even if you believe that Musk and team don’t “touch the scales” of the algorithm, the inevitable consequence of the decision to prioritize comments of people willing to pay for blue checks, is to discourage users not in that segment from engagement at all levels. The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to weight the input to the algorithm away from “what does an average user pay attention to” and more towards “what does a paying user pay attention to.” Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO short-sighted, business goal. What it is not is a way to create a fair and impartial “mirror” as you have described. | |
| ▲ | toyg 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The discussion over X is always the same: "It's gone to hell" "No, it just reflects your tastes" "That's objectively false: create a new account and see what happens." "..." | | |
| ▲ | gertop 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The same can be said of bluesky. In fact I think that you've said it yourself and recommended that people stick to manually curated follows! | | |
| ▲ | dutchCourage 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it's good advice, the main difference is that Bsky encourages you to do that by giving you the possibility to customize your feeds (and set whatever as the default). You can have a combination of personal lists and custom algorithmic feeds (your own or someone else's). Even ignoring musk's takeover, I think it's a better model that reduces doomscrolling, ragebait and generally low quality interactions. | |
| ▲ | toyg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | uh, where...? |
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| ▲ | chairmansteve 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | MrOrelliOReilly 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I find this a bit disingenuous. If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as the best worst option. Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash. | | |
| ▲ | cloverich 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You can take your analogy further. The buffet noticed you pausing on unhealthy food, and begins replacing all the healthy options with unhealthy options. People shame your criticisms and note you could easily put blinders on and intentionally look longer at healthy options anytime you accidentally glance at an unhealthy one. the alternative would be an absolute repression of free speech after all. |
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| ▲ | redman25 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A whole lot of machine learning practitioners use X. Makes it difficult to avoid if you're interested in the news. It's definitely a network effect issue. | | | |
| ▲ | thrance 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Open a private tab, navigate to x.com. All you see are heinous neonazis casually discussing the jewish question and fantasizing about race wars. | | |
| ▲ | nalak 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If you do that all you get is a login wall. Have you actually done this or is this what you imagine it to be? | | |
| ▲ | gloflo 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, I can confirm that this is the case with a brand new account. | |
| ▲ | GrinningFool 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I created an account, picked "pets" as my interest. I was suggested several pet-related accounts to follow, and followed none. I went to the home page and "for you" was populated about 80% from known right accounts and angry right-flavored screeds from people I didn't recognize. The other 20% was just a smattering of random, normal stuff. None of it about pets. |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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