Ask HN: What changes to X/Twitter have you noticed in the last year? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What changes to X/Twitter have you noticed in the last year?

10 pointsriadsila14 comments

There's been a lot of chatter about the decreased performance of the platform. I would love to hear about what trends or changes you've noticed.

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It used to be that if you followed a link to a twitter thread, it would show you a random post from the thread followed by 10 unrelated posts twitter thinks maybe you'd rather read. Now it just shows 1 post from the thread, so I guess that's an improvement.

When you click a tweet that is part of a thread and is several tweets down from the top, it goes into that tweet's page. Then when you press the browser back button, it should (and used to) save the scroll position of the tweet you were last at. But now it always resets you back to the top starting of the thread. Super irritating when you want to read replies for specific tweets in a tweetstorm.

Seems like the biggest differences I've noticed were in the content and lack of spam prevention more than anything particularly technical or performance related. I used to get the odd spam message before, but now I get tagged in all kind of random scam posts, and get likes from obvious bots posting NSFW content.

Not much in my case, but I use it 5 minutes a day, and I stay away from anybody debating politics.

Two things I've noticed myself and have been thinking about recently:

- It seems like there's a lot fewer miserable people being miserable on Twitter.

- There's more... openness to merit, science, free discussion about controversial topics (eg DEI) with less risk of being cancelled, no matter which side of the debate you sit on. I am having my beliefs challenged and being (slightly) offended far more than before. Which is good.

This isn't to say there isn't any of this on Twitter, but for my feed, it's died down considerably and other people I talk to seem to think the same.

That said, while I continually try to see things from his point of view, my personal opinion of Elon Musk has really nose-dived. He really seems like a hot mess.

Stopped supporting old platforms such as Blackberry in some pesky way last winter. Instead of giving me a raw txt which is what twitter post has in its essence, it gives me another 1MB webpage which tells me to consider upgrading of something.

Also there is significantly less Twitter posts on HN since last winter which I appreciate.

They're currently rolling out Grok, which is the Xai LLM. It's just getting started and might have weaknesses compared to other LLMs out there today. It does have a "Fun Mode" with a different communication style.

I've had an alt account specifically for porn for a while. Prior to 2023, most porn clips were only 20-30 seconds. This year, I've noticed the bot accounts regularly post full 30 minute scenes, or even 2 hour long movies.

Lots of crypto ads and bot p*rn accounts likes (I wish I wasn't serious). Interaction plummeting after 1k views on non paid accounts

Most of the automated bot accounts shut down because the API is now insanely expensive. The bots that are still working have deeper pockets than the rest and can afford to still operate. I miss the bots that can no longer operate. I don't mean troll-farm disinfo armies, I mean the humorous bots done for fun.

Nitter doesn’t always load images or movies but it makes up for it with lack of garbage and clutter

Bots are back big time, at least in the last few weeks

The owner retweeting Nazis.

Can you link to an example?

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