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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Do you use Twitter? Even at the best of times, you learn to flip though fairly quickly skimming over the nonsense, and since the ascension of naughty ol’ mr car bluetick replies get promoted to the front of the queue, so you have to scroll past a sea of bullshit to get to the real replies.

Twitter with 600 tweets a day is clearly unusable. That’s one large thread, and you’ll scroll past most of it anyway.

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I don't use Twitter. (Or haven't since ~2006).

That sounds like a miserable user experience in general, what compels you to seek out that experience?

I don't use twitter either but I guess it's the same reason many of us come here. We find it interesting and/or entertaining. I know I've had days where I killed hours on HN. I try to avoid it, but still probably spend more time here than I get in compensating benefit. Very little of what is discussed here is really important in a significant way if you take a step back and evaluate it honestly.

HN is very different in the sense that HN moderation and culture encourages users to be civic. Twitter incentizes for the opposite.

Oh, I’m essentially off it since naughty ol’ mr car took it over; it used to be better (though even then, there’s a reason it was affectionately known as the hellsite).

Twitter is extremely addictive and bring the worse in people. There's a constant flow of information, lots of arguments, lots of famous people (also addicted). For some reason, HN likes to pick on Facebook, but Twitter is by far the most toxic social network.

By your logic, everyone with a paid subscription constitutes "a sea of bullshit" and the "real replies" are at the back of the line? That's the most hipster-esque description of Twitter I've ever heard. Underground Twitter, it's where the cool kids hang out and vape behind the gymnasium.

This sounds more like unresolved personal grudges rather than an issue with the platform itself and the masses that use it. If you have a problem with the 600 tweet limit you can pay $8.

Everyone seems to forget that Twitter was bleeding money under the previous leadership. Unlimited free shit has its practical limits.

This is incorrect, Twitter was profitable 16 quarters of the last 20 quarters under the past leadership. Elon tried to rewrite some of Twitter's history, suggesting Twitter's financial problems were always this bad... but the financial situation only really became drastically worse the moment he bought Twitter, saddled it with 13 billion high interest rate debt, and advertisers fled, cutting Twitter's revenue in half. Neither firing 80% of employees nor shutting down multiple datacenters & skipping rent can compensate for this.

Thank you for shedding light on this. Twitters biggest financial problem prior to Elons purchase was growth. There loses were mainly them spending money on try to find an avenue of growth.

In general, yes. Those who have to pay for attention are very rarely worth paying attention to, and the bluetick option doesn’t get you much other than artificial attention.

This isn’t theoretical; look at any high-traffic tweet (well, you can’t now; it’s broken. But if it comes back.) The top replies these days are virtually guaranteed to be nonsense.

Again I must ask, have you actually used the bloody website? It’s hard to imagine a regular user not being aware of this; it’s hard to miss.

The sea of bullshit is the fact the page is laid out like this

Interesting Tweet Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 Related Replies x 20 Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweet x 20 And so on.

The sea of bullshit to me is the huge chunks of Entirely Unrelated Recommended Blue Checkmark Tweets that are thrown into the reply chains.

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