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Comment by mackatap | Hacker News Reader

Other than a bunch of people complaining about how Twitter is changing, I haven't seen any change at all.

Musk's drama posts if anyone you follow follows him. Stopped Twitter partially because I'm tired of reading whatever his current emotional outburst is.

No one forced you to read Elon.

The question is what changed which in this case Elon shows up on my feed a lot more and his posts are a lot more annoying. And as I said I stopped Twitter to not see his posts.

edit: I could block him but then there's the second order posts about his drama with screenshots. Realized I don't care enough about Twitter to bother and prefer a calmer life.

> The question is what changed which in this case Elon shows up on my feed a lot more and his posts are a lot more annoying. And as I said I stopped Twitter to not see his posts.

His follower count grew by ~70% so far this year (from an already high number). His engagement numbers are also very high. It would be weird if he didn't show up more on your feed.

https://www.speakrj.com/audit/report/elonmusk/twitter/summar...

> edit: I could block him but then there's the second order posts about his drama with screenshots. Realized I don't care enough about Twitter to bother and prefer a calmer life.

You can use advanced twitter mutes to block words and hashtags

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-twitter-m...

Because of algorithms, even if you don't follow him, you can still see his quotes or likes by people you follow. Although not forced, but hard to avoid.

My ads have gone from mainstream brands to dregs, degens, and grifters. This doesn't seem great, unless Elon's intent is to replace advertising revenue with other sources.

So just like YouTube and Reddit ads then.

I'm still getting the same tech company and video game ads. Haven't noticed a difference. I block all the accounts that are ads but even then I still get ads from mainstream companies I haven't blocked. Theres still plenty of companies advertising. I have yet to encounter anything sus apart from some rando paying to promote a meme or shitpost.

A lot of people are complaining about Twitter … on Twitter. Pause and reflect.

It's a pretty deep rabbit hole!

I guess, traffic is great. I bet a big fire on a busy street leads to a bunch of gawkers too -- but maybe the restaurant next door is not getting any value from that foot traffic.

In the case of twitter's business model they have lost a projected 300-400MM of ad placements for the forecasted year -- so each of those visitors is consuming cost but twitter is unable to collect the impression charges as the buys are lower than the inventory.

So yeah traffic is great -- but not always profitable (especially when you insist on peeing in the pool).

I browsed it recently and the major change was the checkmark. So many trolls have them now. And it seems their content is boosted higher. It’s pretty bad.

It seems?

Yes it seems. It’s an observation but I don’t have access to the model.

Before, the checkmark was mostly held by people who work hard against my interests and the interests of my people.

Openly admitting racism is pretty brave

Literally this. Any examples of what exactly has changed?

They let you browse recommended content and user profiles now without getting a fullscreen "please log in" modal covering the web client, which is nice.

Haha. @realGeorgeHotz said he was gonna remove this as one of his first Twitter-intern priorities. Guess he did!

but a huge hit to acquisition AND value add targeted ad impressions (IE expensive impressions). It allows Elon to wave the "hey look at the huge traffic" flag around while self sabotaging the business model further.

Not really. I didn't have a Twitter account before, and I still don't have one. The only thing that's changed is that I find myself using Twitter more...

Moderation seems to have changed by a lot. More gory videos stay up, nsfw pictures stay up, etc. It will slowly go out of control if this is a trend, I would guess.

I’m seeing a lot more nazi-era antisemitic memes

I'm a heavy reader/average writer on Twitter, and I've never seen anything like that. It could be your followers that retweet/like things like that

I can confirm. Used it daily before and after Elon take over and haven't seen any of those. Usually it's visible why auch content is shown on your timeline

I don't think moderation has changed at all. I'm not in the gore-y scene but I wouldn't be surprised if it has always been on Twitter, just marked as sensitive. Most social media sites have that 'dark reality' content scenes.

Same goes for NSFW stuff, that stuff has been on Twitter long before Musk bought it and it will still be available just marked as sensitive (like it always has). I doubt they will go the Tumblr route and kill a giant part of the userbase.

Well, my account has quit bleeding follows and my tweets "feel" as though they have more reach, although that may just be more conservatives returning to the platform.

>Any examples of what exactly has changed?

It's not cool anymore to be in it. In fact it's cool to your aspirational peers to say you dislike it now.

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