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Comment by Lolaccount | Hacker News Reader

* moment in movie when the group look up and see the birds migrating *

* add ominous movie soundtrack *

Twitter (as a useful platform) is over.

Pretty much. It was rather shocking to me that Twitter was so thoroughly broken by rate-limits and the login gate that it was easier to get updates about Twitter on Mastodon than on Twitter itself.

I was on holidays that week and I didn't even noticed the drama. Is Twitter then doing just fine?

Looks like Twitter is just easy to bash nowadays, I'm not that a big user but I see, especially in the OSS / computer related profiles a lot of people putting their Mastodon address in the nickname and yet still tweeting, retweeting, liking in the same compulsory manner as they did before.

Unregistered users can't view user profiles any more. Tweet embedding works again. I would not call that "just fine".

I just checked out a tweet in an private window. Looks like that works as well just like before.

Unregistered users can't view user profiles. That worked before. This means that apps like fritter don't work any more.

Sorry, misread the "user profile" part, I thought it was the lone linked tweet/thread

I was also never that big of a Twitter user, and it's my observation that my former Twitter-using acquaintances bemoan that Twitter's use as a social space has pretty much died. They still use it, but only as a glorified RSS feed.

Most of them don't like Mastodon either due to not liking defederation drama, but instead they moved their socializing to Discord and Instagram, with a few chomping at the bit to get into BlueSky.

For what it's worth, this is a trend I observed long before Twitter introduced rate-limiting and the login gate, it just made it much worse. Ironically, clicking through on Twitter links other people posted was the one use case I ever visited the site for, and now that that doesn't work I simply rely on the vxtwitter summary or a screenshot.

I'm on Mastodon (et al) and I did often go back to Twitter to check on things.

But now they blocked checking things when not logged in, inertia has set in and I cannot even bothered to make the effort and don't feel like I've lost anything. Even for those accounts I followed.

I just think of paid blue checks spouting off nonsense while paying to do so and think to myself: "No ... that's not the bullshit I want to consume. I preferred the relatively democratic bullshit from before"

... and then I think: "Let's just cut the bullshit"

It is a shame, as it was entertaining.

I think that bullshitting is just part of human nature (or at least of the current global society/ies). You just need a critical mass to see it properly. When a community/social network is small, it's either bullshit free or completely full of bullshit. When it's big enough, the bullshit quantity will converge regardless the initial value.

I'm calling bullshit.

Hasn't answered yet.

To what should I answer? To what people you know do on Twitter? I stand by my opinion: the platform doesn't have a word in the bullshitting level, unless it strictly moderates the content in a way that would be basically dictatorial.

Just community notes alone make Twitter a far more useful platform than it was before.

How are community notes helpful to a fictional illustrator or their followers?

And they already existed before the purchase.

Maybe for you, but for many of us it’s almost as if it was just released. A censored platform was of little use, but now you can see all kinds of ideas there. I know I use it more now.

Twitter is more censored than ever. It just censors different things now.

One example: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/im-nobody-calls-employer-elon...

Another: https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-says-terms-like-cisg...

> A censored platform was of little use

it's still very blatantly 'censored', just with different ideological front shouting about it.

What censorship was bothering you? The censorship against transphobia? Because that's the only thing I'm seeing censored less. Other forms of bigotry are still getting accounts locked, and we're far enough from 2020 now that nobody really seems to be bothering with election denial anymore.

Meanwhile, besides its stability issues, there's the new problem that the top replies to every popular tweet are... well, pretty awful, because they're chosen by blue-check instead of popularity. That's a huge downturn in reading enjoyment.

I don’t like any censorship, but COVID as a topic was bonkers while it was all propaganda. The problem with a platform you know is censored is that you can never know what is missing - that’s the nature of censorship.

Adam Schiff putting his fingers on the scale is something I’m not interested in either.

As far as I know, only COVID misinformation was filtered out on Twitter. The GOP is suing on the basis that they went too far, but the GOP has not been acting in good faith in years.

Mind to share what new ideas that was censored before you find interesting?

COVID stands out as a topic.

You've replied to this, but not to anyone mentioning that the platform is still censored, just in new and silly ways (e.g. the Tesla critic who got shafted). Perhaps we're skewed ... you're just skewed in a different way. It's useful to recognise this.

The only mentions in my replies about current censorship are about a petty beef between Elon and some Tesla critics and one about Elon not wanting cis used on the platform. I'm not a fan of Elon and I wouldn't have done either of these things, but their impact seems inconsequential compared to the number of people affected by censoring a topic like COVID. Seems more like evidence of a spoiled rich baby used to getting his way behaving exactly like I'd expect him to, which I don't think is nearly as threatening as the previous pattern of elected government officials spanning multiple administrations and parties and an entire department of people at Twitter working together (standing meetings!) to spin a yarn for us plebes. Maybe this is the skew you speak of - I tend to judge things from a utilitarian perspective of how many people are impacted.

An interesting thought, considering the barometer which Musk used to measure his commitment to free speech, shows he is not committed to free speech, and "censorship" is still rampant. Literally, using Musk as the context here, Twitter is literally more censored now than it was before.

Cool story, bro ...

https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-...

And the story about the guy criticising Tesla who had their account suspended.

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