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Comment by johnyzee | Hacker News Reader

The free speech thing is a red herring. Musk said 'freedom of speech' but not necessarily 'freedom of reach', which seems reasonable. This is not the problem. The problem is that the algorithms simply don't work. The sewer analogy is good - shit seems to float to the top, rather than the other way around. Places like HN and even reddit nailed this a long time ago, but any given X feed just looks like an append-only list of trash. Or a quick-moving stream of turds, to stay within the analogy.

View on HN

HN is heavily moderated by very knowledgeable people and that's part of what makes it continue to work well.

It's like if you go into a bar and there's a guy screaming a bunch of curse words and racist crap in the corner at everyone near him. Normal people are going to leave if no one kicks the guy out.

Anyone can unfollow those people. Nobody on my timeline is screaming curse words or racist crap.

The real reason X is being attacked is because the Following tab doesn't inject propaganda like every other social media / news website does, other than ads of course.

I think a big part of the problem is the 'For You' feed, which has been trash since the day it was implemented (on practically every social media platform). I remember it being a big pain to get to the chronological feed years ago when they first implemented the curated feed as a default. It may not have been quite so full of ignorance and hate back then, but it was still full of things I had no interest in.

I still use X/Twitter weekly and I don't have any problem with the posts I see. My problem is with comments, which are usually where I will see hate and spam.

Yeah replies are a mixed bag. Some are funny, some are sad, some are just downright scary, but I like being treated like an adult and being able to choose which I spend time with, something that Americans haven't enjoyed from any other social media site in many years now.

HN posts/users are flagged/banned all the time - that's part of what makes it work relatively well. But the removed content is often exactly the kind that Musk et al argue should be allowed on Twitter.

> The sewer analogy is good - shit seems to float to the top, rather than the other way around

There are two distinct twitter feeds: 'for you' feed and 'following' feed. The former's like a sewer, but there's no excuse for the 'following' feed being anything but pristine (since it's curated by the user).

Something Musk discussed when he bought twitter was how users didn't always know the difference between the two feeds since the labelling was not clear - there was a 'stars' (?) icon to switch between the two.

The other problem (and where I see the worst content) are the replies to any tweet that has achieved significant popularity. Twitter preferentially surfaces subscribers in these replies, which tend to be diehard Elon fans who often behave badly.

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