Coffeegeek is leaving Twitter / X | Hacker News Reader

Coffeegeek is leaving Twitter / X

coffeegeek.com

24 pointsdonpott11 comments

For those who just want their Mastodon account info

    @coffeegeek@flipboard.social

https://flipboard.social/@coffeegeek

They seem a bit confused on which platform to use: the logo in the "Follow Us on Mastodon" box is that of WeChat.

All of their actual links point to Mastodon, so I think someone just used the wrong logo. There doesn't seem to be any actual confusion.

OT: written as X/Twitter seems better--when spoken as it can be "X / Twitter" or "ex-Twitter".

It shortens nicely to Xitter. With the x lending itself to a gentle "sh" sound.

I like that Xitter (sh/zhitter) has a Chinese ring to it.

Good for you!

I'm not into social media in general, but I did join Mastodon recently in an effort to make new friends. It's fantastic! With no inscrutable central entity in control of the system it's... I don't know how to explain it. There's no algorithm.

As a side effect, now when I visit Youtube the recommendations seem to screech like the tabloid newspapers at the supermarket checkout line.

Nobody, ever, seemed to care about what was going on in Twitter until "leaving it" became a virtue signalling beacon. Of course we can pretend that a) this is not true and b) we are being intellectually honest at the same time \o/

What? The entire reason people are leaving Twitter is because they care what's going on on it, and they've cared what's going on in the west's largest social media platform for the greater part of a decade at this point.

I don't understand this take at all. Do you use Twitter, or is this conjecture from reading headlines?

E: the article has a great list of reasons why they've dropped Twitter, it's well justified, I think it's unfair to accuse them out of hand of "virtue signalling" and being intellectually dishonest in light of that.

I’d say the opposite. People who criticize those who don’t like Twitter are just virtue signaling in the opposite direction and are just ignoring the obvious red flags of the new Xitter leadership:

- the policy of suspending accounts that link to competitors like mastodon or threads - the secret throttling of traffic to sites with viewpoints that Musk doesn’t like (eg NYT, substack) - raising lawsuits against those who publish negative reports about Twitter (Ie the ADL) - trash talking former employees of Twitter - refusing to pay contractual severance packages of former employees of Twitter - the removal of headlines from external URLs (probably done to prevent users from clicking out of the app) - displaying ads that aren’t labeled as ads - using spammy low quality ad networks - putting even the most basic features of the API behind a paywall that starts at 100 USD a month - the subjective yet real change in atmosphere of Twitter. You don’t have to be around long to notice an increase in the number of trolls and toxic white supremacists who will jump into your threads.

The zeitgeist was already on the fence about whether they wanted any single company to have so much of their data. But Musk has made it pretty clear that his business and ego is more important than being a company that independent thinkers and conscious users want to be tied to.

They still have a Twitter link from the top bar; clicking on it, at least for me, brings you to their Twitter profile, which blinks and reloads about twice a second without showing any tweets. I assume that the infra for running the paywall for non-logged-in users has broken down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com