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Comment by photonerd | Hacker News Reader

Twitter absolutely is. If it’s not bots, article spam, or ads, it’s the crazy MAGA-crowd jerking themselves off over their fake-outrage of the moment.

It’s an absolute ghost town in terms of engaging, original, content. Their user numbers are obviously buoyed by absolute junk accounts and it’s been obviously so since Musk fired most of the company.

FB is a boomer & genX meme-pocalypse that’s absolutely slathered with ads and most millennials & genZ seemingly using it as a glorified contacts list. It’s a shadow of what it was.

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I disagree. Personally I still think Twitter is a goldmine for following the latest relevant releases of AI-papers (@_akhaliq), the current Stock market buzz (several accounts), and the Ukraine war from an OSINT and serious journalism perspective (@maxseddon).

You get what you decide to follow.

I won‘t use it anymore since the third party shut down and the inferior product they themselves provide. And the heart of the Apple community migrated to Mastoton and it doesn‘t feel ethically right to use it right now due to right wing people being catered there.

I'd argue that Reddit is even more ideologically biased, especially on the largest subs. Personally, I quite enjoy both sites although they do have different types of content.

A lot of people on the left basically can't imagine a social media platform being good unless it heavily restricts right-wing speech/expression.

Gonna need an example here. Otherwise this looks like low effort right wing fauxrage.

Example: Someone just talked about an alleged "crazy MAGA-crowd" on Twitter just because censorship has decreased. That sounds more like "low effort left wing fauxrage" than the opposite.

Enforcing terms of service is not censorship. However stochastic terrorism is and you seem fine with that.

The irony.

Literally every series study—and meta study—shows that social media platforms have a strong right wing bias, and have for years.

The right lives off a fictional persecution complex tho so… your comment is hardly a surprise, or original.

My impression on Twitter is completely different. It's been actually quite nice lately.

Yes, with "blocktheblue" installed it's easier than ever to block trolls on sight. Unfortunately some of the trolls are catching and choosing not to get "verified" by lord Elon.

you have blinders on. Tucker Carlsens videos have tens of millions of views on Twitter. Heads of states and scientists from around the world still communicate via twitter. Even tumblr-weirdo types still post there. You couldn't be more wrong.

> you have blinders on. Tucker Carlsens videos have tens of millions of views on Twitter.

Twitter misrepresents views and impressions. The "views" you see under the video are impressions. Presumably reached 24ish M views, 110ish M impressions on first episode.

Episode 3 has, presumably, 90M impressions and < .6M likes, < 0.170M retweets etc. The metrics (likes and retweets) are not particularly good for a supposedly high engagement video, are they?

You think 600,000 likes is low engagement?

No. I think that in the context, 600k likes is low engagement.

We are speaking about 2-3 orders of magnitude difference.

For comparison, MKBHD video [1], 1.2 orders of magnitude difference between views and likes; Adam's video [2], 1.4 orders; 40 minute long video essay on House Md [3] (1.5M views with subscriber count of 0.15M) , 1.7 orders of magnitude.

Carlson's engagement has 2.17 orders of magnitude difference, while being as long as [1], longer than [2], and far shorter than [3].

All of the videos above are supposed to be far less "entertaining" and are expected to have far less engagement value, yet outperformed Carlson's thing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvN5_GXlg2Y

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK5PzV35UPA

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwbB7XkjwHw

The voting culture on YT and Twitter could be different.

Everyone kept going on about pressing the like button and smashing the subscribe button on YouTube for years.

I would not be surprised if people on YouTube use the like button more actively than people on Twitter.

Besides, is 1.7 orders of magnitude (from one of your examples) even significantly different from 2.1 orders of magnitude enough to draw any conclusions at all?

> Besides, is 1.7 orders of magnitude (from one of your examples) even significantly different from 2.1 orders of magnitude enough to draw any conclusions at all?

10^(2.1) / 10^1.7 gives us about 2.5x lower engagement in Carlson's video over some unknown guy's 40 minute long video on House Md.

This is mostly nonsense.

Carlson's show averaged 4.3 million viewers on fox.

His latest episode on twitter has almost 16 million.

I wouldn't really trust the numbers twitter is putting out.

They have no obligation to any shareholders not to lie.

Can you, in good conscience, accept that 1 in 8 people saw this tweet [1]?

http://web.archive.org/web/20230616134055/https://twitter.co...

Yeah I'll take Twitter's metrics with a metric ton of salt. They cannot be trusted. A "view" could be two seconds of autoplay with the video half-in-view when it shows up in the "for you" tab. Not real engagement.

I agree with you on all points, except to nuance your last:

(1) This may not be true of other parts of the world, and in particular, it may not be true of countries outside the 'anglosphere'. (Anyone care to report on international FB health?)

(2) Even within the Anglosphere, there are still very specific pockets of FB which are viable. In my experience, they are usually attached to queer community and/or leftist organizing. FB activity has in fact picked up since the Muskpocalypse. I imagine it will pick up again now that the Fediverse is hitting the scaling wall imposed by using a protocol that is arguably exponential-ish big-O with federated server count. (https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/110198847653604631)

I'm sort of hoping that Nostr takes off before BlueSky figures out a way of owning the fediverse. Or even Secure Scuttlebutt! Now that would be a weird timeline.

SSB was horribly unusable last time I gave it a try.

Nostr is great of course and everyone should just build on that.

Yeah, that’s all absolutely fair. That is, however, a problem for most platforms as—generally-the Anglosphere (or at least that plus Western Europe) is the paying customer.

Pivoting to cater to/exploit that market is not really possible for most of them now either.

"Ugh. This place is such a ghost town that it even has Republicans and old people."

But you repeat yourself.

No, it’s mostly just those. If you want to spend all your time in The Villages, feel free. Most sane people do not.

This is not true in developing countries. From my experience, the poorer a country, the more likely you are to see extensive, serious use of Facebook. And the revenue growth opportunity is huge for FB in these places. It is already flat or slightly negative in highly advanced countries.

Kind of, but GDP per capita is way lower. It would take 35 average Nigerian users to replace one average American. Which still isn't exactly true, since there are high-margin items that are impossible to cross-sell that way. E.g. a $1k iPhone is affordable by a $70k american but not by any single $2k income Nigerian.

Sheer quantity of users doesn't replace higher GDP cohorts.

That’s a fair point, but losing one to gain the other (which is what’s happening at Twitter) is not a good strategy either.

What do you think the major politics and news subs are on Reddit? Or is it only bot-ridden, ideological fake-outrage when it's right wing?

The running joke in /r/politics is it’s all bots anyhow. That’s not the dunk you think it is.

Twitter seems perfectly healthy. I came back after years away.

It sounds like you’d just grown used to the previous manufactured consensus.

There are a LOT more MAGA "verified" troll bots on there on anything to do with politics. Why are MAGA people trolling on the Bernie Sanders feed for example? Anyway, it's okay if you only follow mostly "fact-based" accounts and don't bother with any political or news sources.

If someone has the words "manufactured consent" in their comment it's a dead giveaway that MAGA bullshitting is what they want, thinking it somehow represents "free speech". So, from the perspective of the GP Twitter is probably now more healthy than ever.

People being free to say things you disagree with — including “MAGA bullshitting” — is representative of a return to free speech principles.

If you have the understanding of a 14 year old, sure.

Meanwhile, the understanding of the rest of us has moved to understanding that hate sketch, & toxic environments resulting from it, restricts the speech of minorities.

But you’re ok with that as long as no MAGA racist is told to shut up, apparently, so don’t pretend you’re pro-free speech. You’re simply pro-racists.

I direct you to Twitter's valuation. So, I take it you're a communist and don't approve of capitalism or a marketplace of ideas showing its preferences by financial support or lack thereof?

In fairness, both the MAGAs and the tankies are pretty happy, but then there's precious little difference (or none).

Free and healthy forums don't value as well as curated and highly controlled ones.

The previous "highly-curating" management at least fought politically motivated government takedown request from questionably democratic countries. The current management just rolls over and claims nothing can be done.

I wouldn't call this state of affairs "free". More like spineless.

> The previous "highly-curating" management at least fought politically motivated government takedown request from questionably democratic countries.

The opposite is true, old Twitter colluded with the FBI in suppressing political information like the Hunter Biden laptop case, where the FBI falsely labeled accounts as Russian propaganda. There was a lot of stuff like this in the Twitter files, yet the media conveniently failed to report on it.

The Twitter Files showed nothing of the sort. Can tell you just bought the lies others sold about it through.

God, you lot are so easy to grift…

>I direct you to Twitter's valuation.

That's an imperfect correlate of user experience. A lot of sites have banned NSFW content for the sake of their valuations in ways that have obviously agitated their userbase.

Twitter is bearable just 1) never use "for you" tab, only "following" 2) don't follow trolls 3) mute reply trolls and llm autoreply accounts 4) maintain a biiiig blocklist of words.

FB: don't know but I surely see almost no ads. I use mbasic.

There have always been both liberals and conservatives on twitter, and they have always had fun socking it out. The only difference today is that there's no more orchestrated censorship of conservatives going on, since Musk bounced most of the crybullies out of the company, and put an end to the FBI payments for banning things the government doesn't like. The same cannot be said for Facebook.

Tons of left leaning Twitter accounts were banned under the old regime. If you are a right winger, you might not be aware of this.

Example?

Your experience of Twitter and mine are very different. I suggest following people who produce threads and tweets you enjoy and blocking, muting and unfollowing others.

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