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Comment by petemir | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree that Twitter/X is a shit-show since the not-so-recent change of hands. I am only providing an explanation to what OP sees.

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To be fair, Twitter has began pushing algorithm mess onto their users far before the Musk take over. We really can't blame him for that. I was kind of hoping he would have at least tried to reverse it though.

Yeah but only after Muskover they started to first block unlogged users, then started showing them random tweets on profile page.

Nope, they’ve been blocking un logged in users one way or another for like 4 years. Musk removed that for a few months, then made it worse.

Twitter profile pages showed all Tweets linearly from inception until about 9 months into Naughty Old Mr Car's tenure; he can absolutely be blamed for that.

The algorithmic stuff was only ever for users' feeds, not Twitter profiles.

Exactly. We could always see a user's own tweets in order by going to their page.

It's made the whole business of status updates completely unusable. If I want to find out why the fire helicopters are out, I can no longer see that on the fire department's Twitter page (even though they do post it!). If I want to find out if my local lake is closed due to algae, I can no longer see it on the park's page (even though they do post it!).

Pretty soon all these organizations are going to realize that their pages are worthless and leave Twitter.

You can do all of those if you're logged in.

Just an aside, some of recent changes seems intended to mimic Reddit. Not that it matters much.

We can blame him for two decisions which have made Twitter almost unusable:

a) Favouring blue-tick comments and post over those with higher engagement.

b) Paying people to comment which has meant more click-bait, hate etc. content.

> To be fair, Twitter has began pushing algorithm mess onto their users far before the Musk take over. We really can't blame him for that.

I don't think this is a very fair and honest take on the toilet flush spiral where Elon Musk placed Twitter. Screwing up the timeline made available to non-registered users is a recent development, and one that lands squarely on Elon Musk's rule over Twitter. So does the shitshow that was the verified badge policy changes and opening the floodgates to racist and anti-semitic content.

In fact, I dare say that there was not a single change to Twitter that spawned from Elon Musk's takeover that had any positive or neutral impact on the company in general and service in particular.

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