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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

If all Nitter instances get shut down, that's another reason for people to stop putting information into the Twitter/X walled-garden.

Nitter has had the effect of a pressure release valve, for the people who object most to Twitter/X.

Without the Nitter compromise, more people will stop linking to Twitter/X threads, indulging people who still post there, etc.

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I'm with you that this is disappointing, but folks who use these sorts of tools tend to be a bit naive about the impact of them going away. It's a little silly, to be honest. Best numbers I could come by is X does something like 100B impressions/day and x.com saw 1.2B visits in the month of December. Will some people stop seeing X posts on Nitter? Sure, maybe. Will it matter to X? I doubt it.

Exactly. Even the reddit blackouts etc did nothing really - sure a few people left in a huff and all that jazz, but Reddit is still trucking along happily. The only time I've seen the "eff it, we're leaving!" thing actually work was with Digg v4.

I have seen a considerable degrading of quality on reddit since the blackouts. I use reddit for quality subject discussion in topics ranging from pressure cooking to circuit design but I also use it for general crappy banter and time wasting, and the people who would contribute useful content in the former have decreased in number while the latter have increased making the signal to noise much worse.

It doesn't help that they have started placing content from more obscure subreddits onto people's front pages seemingly randomly, so people wander into places and have no idea what the culture is they are contributing to and add content which is wildly out of place.

To get subject matter discussion which is reasonable I have been wandering back to bespoke forums, which isn't necessarily bad, but they still have a lot of issues. A lot of other content has moved to discord, but I won't get into how I feel about that.

Although, I'm surprised how often I'm seeing the key comments I was searching for deleted. I haven't been keeping stats, but maybe around half the time.

Some Reddit metrics might've hardly noticed the blips, but if they had metrics for early-Reddit qualities, such as for smart (or clever) comments, helpful information, humor, or goodwill... I suspect those would be bad. Where they're not bad might be non-frontpage subs that are still cruising along with their earlier communities. But those communities started in earlier Reddit, and I suspect that today would not have started there.

> metrics for early-Reddit qualities

Those had already tanked before any API changes.

Nah, the blackouts definitely hurt Reddit. Deleted posts are the norm now. This was not the case before the API changes.

Fair point, I have myself noticed a lot more deleted posts. I doubt their bottom line has hurt much though.

Deleted and overwritten posts were a thing for long before the api change.

"A thing" is substantially different from what they claimed, that it's now the norm.

Not in my experience.

yes, but they are every other post you find on google now.

i certainly didn't help; i used shreddit to overwrite then delete my posts.

Tumblr with their NSFW removal change as well.

It's created a reverse eternal September. The masses stay confined to one place. Other places can flourish with the old school smaller community kind of feel and quality. Let twitter live in its current state if it means other places won't be taken over by influencers and other bullshit.

Will the other places resist to VC money or other shenanigans though? That's the question...

There's too many other places. VC can't find every tiny community out there, or even any noteworthy portion of them. Places small enough to still have a coherent sense of community are beneath the notice of VC.

This is nice in theory. I haven't used any twitter alternatives but others seem to report that their content is more or less the same as twitter's.

We're all sharing the same links, articles, jokes, memes, ideas, cat pictures. What differentiates a place is its sense of community, not its content. It's easy to forget that because Twitter long ago stopped being a community.

Speaking for the fediverse only, the experience is what you make of it. Stay on the largest, averagest instance and your experience will be bland; get on an instance with people who share your values, an instance that connects with other instances OK with you, follow accounts posting content you want to see and the experience will be much better.

Mastodon reminds me of 2007 Twitter, and it would be great if it stayed that way.

> Twitter/X walled-garden

I think the MIME type should be `X-Walled-Garden/Twitter`

Internet media types (previously known as “MIME types”) with “X-” prefixes are now discouraged.

For many in this thread, X is now discouraged as well. /s

I don't understand, how is this sarcasm?

They mean that X the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, is now discouraged, since Nitter is no longer a viable method for accessing it.

Don't despair. I've never heard of this Nitter, and I'm living quite a successful life.

I think leftists who are losing their minds over Elon Musk's Twitter are a loud minority. If Nitter goes down, nothing at all will change. Twitter will continue to thrive and people will continue to use it and link to it.

I hate that Twitter is a walled garden but I understand why it is like that today as the well has been poisoned. To be honest I gave it try and it looks like today Mastodon/Bluesky are worse and Twitter better due to the migrations.

i agree.

Redirecting proxy for Nitter instances (alternative)

https://twiiit.com/

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

I am quite sure the people who use Nitter or otherwise detest Mysterious Twitter X are a vocal minority of people.

I do not think that people without account are minority.

They just aren't the ones posting on the platform.

I have misunderstood you/OP. In this case you are right. I was commenting from perspective of someone that do not have account but came across the twitter links on sites like HN.

I'm struggling heavily to find the traffic statistic that I read a year or so ago, but it said that point seven to point nine percent of all Twitter traffic came from Nitter. Considering that at the time there were three different third party front ends that is no small amount, I think somewhere around thirty million visits daily.

Comparing traffic, pre sale, of logged in twitter users vs traffic generated by those without accounts would give insight into what percentage of users have to take action to continue to use twitter normally.

I spent a 1-2 minutes googling and could not come up with numbers though.

I know I am part of the percentage of people that used to read twitter without an account, or at least not logged in, and now read twitter a trivial amount.

I use Twitter, and I detest it. It's mostly spam.

This actually came up in a conversation yesterday, funnily enough: I'm mostly using Twitter because I'm curious as to how much worse it's going to get. So far, I've seen them allow NSFW paid-for advertisements, doxxing of well-known figures, daily crypto mention farming spam (with highly suspicious, easily-detectable patterns, spread across ~10 accounts per day), obvious engagement bait to benefit from ad-revenue sharing, fake interaction spam, and plenty more.

As an excerpt, the @support account on Twitter is completely dead, too -- if I remember correctly, the last reply to an issue was around August / June of last year. So clearly they don't have the staffing needed to support... well, the support, and they seem to have issues admitting that.

That becomes even more clear when you look at the spam on the platform: obvious spam patterns are completely ignored, with reports going to the wayside, and crypto / NFT spam being left up to victimize someone who doesn't know what it really is. It's quite grotesque.

Even though a lot of people may use the platform, quite a substantial amount of people also speak out about how much worse Twitter has got since the acquisition -- while I have nothing against Elon Musk, I find it quite amazing how badly the platform seems to be doing ever since he's been at the helm.

None of what you said contests what I said.

I find it quite useful, with the exception of the porn ads.

But I strictly follow python developers, bsd people and retro computing enthusiasts. None post any politics.

I think any social media platform can be good/bad just like people in general, it all depends who you interact with.

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