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Comment by dhfbshfbu4u3 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been on Twitter for 16 years now. I’m not a fan of Elon, but I have to admit my experience on the platform is better than it has been in years.

For example, muted terms stay muted and the “For you” TL is actually relevant. I think these gains are structural improvements gained by slimming down and removing advertiser-driven garbage.

Seems pretty good for a first step but the core problems moderation and curation remain. I’m not sure I see a good path forward on these points given the current posture of the company. That’s probably why exodus events like this one will continue to build over time.

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> removing advertiser-driven garbage.

All of the bluecheckmark replies that get sorted to the top of every post are a form of "advertiser" driven garbage. Those garbage tweets are being put in front of you because someone paid $8 /month for it.

It's such a funny way to destroy your own business; I mostly follow somewhat niche military / geopolitical discussion, and the top ~10 replies are usually from OnlyFans creators jumping in with...whatever, the content of the Tweets is clearly not their point. I still find it funny enough to not care but it is a comically bad experience.

> I mostly follow somewhat niche military / geopolitical discussion, and the top ~10 replies are usually from OnlyFans creators jumping in with...whatever, the content of the Tweets is clearly not their point

Is it OF people replying specifically to military/geopolitical threads (and if so, in ways that at least act relevant or just off-topic spamming?), or is it just their posts getting shoved to the top of the feed because they paid?

I use twitter only for the Deep Learning research folks.

Getting bombarded by Onlyfans types and crypto types has increased manyfold in the last few months.

They respond with relevant (if naive) content; I'm not sure if it's GPT-4 or genuine opinions and comments.

Even in the improbable non-spam explanation that they are sincerely interested and responding to the content, it is hilarious how they are consistently the featured content in an area that they clearly have no expertise in.

The threads, in order, are typically like:

- post by professional military analyst with 30 years of experience

- 10 replies by OF creators that pay for Blue

- 100 replies by other analysts and military hobbyists that didn't pay for Blue

Succinctly summarized at https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...

Blue check promotion moves the dumbest, coldest takes anyone has ever written right to the top of the thread.

Sure, but I’m talking about behind the scenes stuff that product marketing stuffed into the bloatware.

I can't agree: Twitter was never great but now it's a complete mess. The ads are worse than they've ever been— almost always some "As Seen on TV"-tier of plastic garbage or dumb crypto scams, features are breaking left and right (DMs aren't getting delivered, and notifications are sporadic at best) and the people paying to be at the top of my replies are inevitably the most insipid shitheads the web can produce. While I dislike "Block the Blue" on philosophical grounds, the fact is it's the only way to keep the site barely usable.

Even though Elon may not have had typical private equity goals in mind when buying Twitter, it does feel like a classic PE purchase where it has already been decided that the target is not worth investing in, and the new game is to wring as much value as possible from its walking corpse before tossing it in the trash.

That’s a fair assessment. He never really understood it, but thought he did. Got hold of it and entered the finding out stage of the deal.

Almost every 2 days I get put into a spam "BTC giveaway" promoted with the face of Elon and I guess that says a lot about the level of disrepair of the site

No, my experience has been pretty much the worse of my time on that platform (a bit less than your period) including tweets that I follow only showing on the 'For You' tabs (because the site is obviously overloaded)

The ads have gotten bad, that’s for sure. But then again, they have on every platform. Apple (and by extension GDPR) won the privacy wars, but the cost is that only the worst advertisers live on.

All of my ads now are weird drop-shipping products from companies with slightly different logos.

Because aside from large brands executing eyeball campaigns most DTC companies are gone from the ecosystem. Loss of tracking data killed the ROI and all that’s left are casinos and absolute bullshit.

I feel the exact opposite and have been a Twitter user for about as long, starting when it was SMS-based.

Most posts I see now are flooded with replies from Only Fans girls. There are constantly tweets in my feed from guys I don't follow with greek or roman statue profile pics, posting about how western civilisation is in decline with 20-photo threads of European architecture or other really silly examples. Half of the promoted tweets I see (a significant portion of my feed now) are for "10 ways you need to us AI or be left behind!" or similar.

It's really low signal to noise for me, but I guess if you're looking for listicles on why western culture has been ruined by "cultural marxism" it's never been a better time to be on Twitter.

Examples:

- I encounter numerous account like this per day on my "For you" tab: https://twitter.com/aitoolreport/status/1671606160313696256

- this sort of thing is constantly in my feed (I don't follow these sort of meme accounts, but I can see why the algorithm might boost them now ): https://twitter.com/engineers_feed/status/167623162488173773...

> There are constantly tweets in my feed from guys I don't follow with greek or roman statue profile pics, posting about how western civilisation is in decline

I've noticed that and I wonder what their agenda is. To radicalize western men?

I think that’s probably overthinking it. I think most of these accounts are just chasing engagement, and they’ve figured out a solid formula: post something really stupid (the tweets by statue PFPs inevitably contain basic factual mistakes), get QRT’d by people dunking on how stupid it was, boom: instant viral spread and engagement. It’s the utterly standard griefer playbook that’s been on forums since the internet began, just with new contemporary culture war material.

It's more than just twitter users, a friend sent me this for example:

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2016/04/are-we-the-last-men/

Which is part of Charlemagne Institute

https://charlemagneinstitute.org/intellectual-takeout/

Which is Koch Brothers backed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockford_Institute

Fwiw, I found that zero engagement led to a really bad experience. As soon as I began contributing content on a couple of specific topics, the TL skewed hard towards things I actually liked.

Every single day on my Twitter TL is someone having account issues, recreating or locked or hacked or combinations of. My DMs are full of "he|p us in sqam dropshiqqing sceme" messages. That state of affairs is not what I expect of a working platform.

Interesting. I’ve literally never had a problem in 16 years.

I've used Twitter for a while also. I'm more neutral on the changes. Twitter feels a bit more fresh, but the For You page for me feels more like the Trump Election style FB algo where most posts are either:

1. Edgy flame bait hot takes on an issue that will get people worked up

2. Someone saying something slightly wrong because they'll get more comments from people rushing to correct them

3. Professional quote-tweeters who will post a maybe witty take on #1 or #2

(maybe this is 99% of social media in general?)

There's still some alpha in the posts and I love the random accounts which drop info and niche insights faster than you can find anywhere else.

Outside of that, it feels more like I'm wasting time on nonsense. I'm not much of a fan of the alternatives, though and mainly use them to track a few people who moved off of Twitter.

Interesting. My flame bait noise has dropped to near zero, but then my engagement also ticked up (more posting). I have a sense that this activity may have moved the needle a bit too.

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