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.

Now THAT is an improved web experience!

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.

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.

That must be why xcancel exists, because it was such a pleasant experience.

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

Markedly not my experience at all, haha. I stopped using it.

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!

I created a new account recently and the default homepage was all videos that were either (a) AI slop (b) sexual imagery (c) AI slop sexual imagery.

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.

Stop using HN.

maybe the tech trade deadline is this week (baseball's was on monday)

My issue is that you can't exclude yourself from the algorithm. You post something even tangentially political, it immediately pops up in the feeds of people that have no connections with you at all and have the extreme form of views opposite to yours. The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.

I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.

I disagree with your assessment. My twitter feed pre and post Elon’s takeover changes dramatically.

Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc

After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.

I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.

Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.

Quite the opposite - the fact that the default assumption of "what you (will) engage with" is a radioactive dumpster fire that you need to fastidiously Mute / Block / Not Interested / Less Like This / Not Relevant through to eventually "train" the algorithm to give you a consistent window into "really isn't as bad X" - that's proof that the default/average content and experience is every bit as bad as people make it out to be.

And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).

Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".

That sounds like bad design.

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.

I want to echo this point. My X feed is not full of politics either. It tends to just be a mix of stuff I engage with, and I tend to engage with stuff I find interesting or funny.

Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.

I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.

I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.

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.

He seemed to get it. It's too bad he's leaving.

it has always been this way across every platform.

most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.

Nikita Bier's whole claim to fame was getting apps into top positions in the app store. It's his thing.

And how much they (like all other social media) put their mobile web experience into limp mode for no good reason.

> I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.

When did you ever miss important news if you weren’t on Twitter?

Nikita was always a bad hire.

If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.

His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.

His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.

He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.

Are you paying? I see an endless stream of AI or bot-like posts in the replies of basically every tweet I see with any traction, but i'm not a paying user so I may have the bad version of the platform.

That's been my experience too. I left twitter a few years ago, but when I created a new account (only following AI and startups and people MAKING things, and movie and show clip accounts), it's been so awesome to keep track of all the stuff going on.

I'm aldo using x more than ever. I nearly stopped in the 2019-2021 era, always confused when people are complaining about it these days.

I'm a supporter of X but even I admit I see non-stop AI bot comments

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

Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc.

It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.

Maybe stop?

Isn’t the whole point that they don’t want you to use the website - they want you to install the app. Why would they make the website an enjoyable experience?

Stop using it! It is like an oxy addiction and we all just need to stop - it isn't good for us.

It's wild to me how many replies are like this. I like X. HN, on the other hand is miserable, with censorship through down votes of unorthodox thinkers (PG would be completely down voted if he were to post here anonymously).

He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.

The HN discussions you linked to:

1. 10 points, 15 comments

2. 9 points, 17 comments

3. 44 points, 84 comments

That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.

I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699

(471 points, 512 comments)

Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.

It has collapsed. It is just bots and racism that have collapsed it, not a technical failure.

It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.

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.