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Comment by unshavedyak | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me how hot and cold descriptions are of Twitter. You get posts like these, but then someone chimes in about how much better the conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over.

I'm not on Twitter so i can't really make sense of it. I feel like i see more negative than positive.. but still.. it's bizarre to me that there's people in both camps. More than likely some of them are biased.. but still, i find it "interesting".

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There are a lot of people for whom everything Musk touches is the worst thing ever created, then a lot of people for whom everything he touches is gold, then some people who just like a pretty reasonably stable social media site that's not overrun by bots and pay-for-engagement morons.

IMO it seems objectively true that the bot problem is worse than it's ever been. It's definitely objectively true that boosting paid-for comments above organically high-engagement comments means your signal:noise ratio is way, way worse.

Please share some examples, I never see crypto scams anymore and pre-acquisition you could go in the replies of any popular account and it would be nothing but that. I'm guessing it's still there but I don't see it because I don't scroll for hours on end and verified posts being boosted at the top suppresses the visibility of any bots. Either way considering how bad the bot problem was before the change in ownership I feel like people have a very selective memory about this problem. I did get a handful of catfishing bot accounts following me a few months ago, but that's about the extent of what I've seen as far as spam goes recently and feeds are much cleaner than they were a couple years back. If you're comparing to how it used to be several years ago then it's a different story.

> It's definitely objectively true that boosting paid-for comments above organically high-engagement comments means your signal:noise ratio is way, way worse.

I'd like to see an objective proof for this alleged objective truth.

The bigger problem that I see constantly nowadays is cherry-picked information and people outright lying about a picture or video that they're sharing, but thankfully the community notes help a lot with that.

Go ahead and flag this comment for not being prefixed with "Grr I hate Elon Musk!"

I don't care about Musk one way or the other and I don't see any evidence to support your claim. The level of bot activity is no higher than before in terms of comments on tweets by accounts that I follow. But why bother reading comments anyway? That has always been mostly a waste of time.

my dude, you're in a comment section right now, replying to a comment, with a comment

To be fair his comment was a waste of time

It's not really clear at all to me, since, eg some people here are talking about getting several bot account follows daily, while for me it is the opposite, where I used to get a lot more bot follows than I have gotten over the past year or so (down from 4-5 per week to less than 1 per month).

On the other hand, I do see a lot more bots in replies (haven't had any reply to me yet though).

Overall my opinion has been slightly positive, my usage of the site is up and I'm hearing far less of people I follow (or those they follow) who have been unreasonably suspended or forced to delete tweets. It feels a lot "wilder" than before, but that's kind of what I enjoy anyway.

But I also don't really engage with political Twitter, I only use it to keep up on space related reporting and weeb stuff. The worst part has just been a lot more engagement farming through dumb statements from content creators who are circling the drain.

Yeah, I also engage little on Twitter, but so far I’ve seen no notable worsening of spam. When I clicked to see popular announcements (from HN or somewhere else) I also saw crypto spams and other stuff but from my perspective, it’s not much different from the situation on FB, for example. When I replied to some interesting GTP-chess posts, I still got replies clearly from humans (ask questions, do some follow up etc.). Thus, I don’t have a clear feeling whether it got better or worse.

The most striking change I have seen is the percentage of Musk’s tweets on my feed. It looks like he is everywhere now! That was definitely not the case before. But yeah, he is the owner and he likes to tweet :)

> someone chimes in about how much better the conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over

I always assume these types of comments are some kind of dog whistle

As opposed to the “twitter was so wonderful before Musk and now it’s a wasteland”?

Please. It’s always been a wasteland.

To whome and why?

> to whom and why

To the Nazis that were kicked off or fled when Twitter had decent moderation to let them know Nazi conversations are flowing like wine and they're welcome back.

Lots of nazis these days from all corners of the world. Fuckers are back with a vengeance

I think the largest increase in Nazis is due to the complete, and rather disgusting, misuse of the word.

Rephrasing for people who will react negatively to that. You're making an important point but "dog whistle" assumes some things:

Those are people speaking abstractly about how much more free their speech is*.

I've never heard that common phrasing used, in any setting, to refer to a change in Twitter user makeup, or it becoming a kinder place. Whether I'm in the company of team left or team right, and coding as same team or opposite team.

* yr humble author refuses comment and does not endorse this viewpoint, or that anything changed on this front

The "It's better now" comments are always of the same form, and never any examples of some great discussion. That's lazy, even for a bot.

I ended up in a really unfortunate position, pre-elon I never really "got" twitter and so barely used it. When he took over I'd log in every now and then to see how much it was plummeting, and in the process of doing so found the (ever shrinking) value of the platform, so I only started enjoying it when it started going downhill (for me at least).

I guess though that's less the platform or the people running it and more the users. There's nothing particularly unique about twitter that I like other than the other people who use it

For me the Twitter experience is roughly the same as before, except ad density increased.

It might be that the majority of Twitter changes mostly affect only English content, which I mostly do not follow.

Is this based on the kind of politics you are into? E.g. if you are from US you either have one side or the other where one side likes it and the other dislikes it?

For people with interests or opinions that were heavily censored by pre-Musk Twitter, the end of this censorship alone compensates for the countless new annoyances.

This seems vibes based. Twitter censored in the past and continues to censor. If you were in the out group and now are in the in group you’re happy even tho you were unlikely to have been censored

I've always found Twitter to be kind of dumb, most of my interaction with it is when twitter bullshit gets plastered over UFC PPVs or "news" articles report on what people say on twitter.

I used my account to (mildly) troll some guy who shared my same name until I got banned a few years ago. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605212

But despite what some people claim, they did not unban everyone, I checked and I am still banned.

outgroup to outgroup lol

Still hoping the site collapses so the two cases mentioned above stop happening.

Also an extra lol @ people learning why user-content sites need moderation, even 4chan is moderated.

Does it?

Does it account for the 13 new sex bots following me every time I log in, or my DMs full of crypto scams?

Great point, I guess.

For people into sex bots and crypto scams it's a massive improvement, in fact.

Censorship hasn't ended, it is simply impossible not to censor.

There is obviously illegal content (child porn, ...) and copyright infringement, you have to censor it or you will get sued and lose. Related is libel, doxxing, harassement, revenge porn, etc... that may also get you in legal trouble. And there are countries other than the US with different laws, for example many European countries ban some categories of "hate speech", and if you want to do business with them, you need to follow their laws.

And there is spam, if you let all of it pass, it will simply drown everything else.

And at some point, you may want to make money. Usually, you start with advertising, and if you want people to advertise on your platform, so you have to be at least somewhat socially acceptable. You also have to please payment processors, if you bring the wrong kind of people, Visa and the likes won't want to deal with you. On that last part, considering Elon Musk past, he may have workarounds, but the reason Visa has a problem with porn is not just because they are prudes. That's because there is a lot of fraud happening here, and it will happen too on a socially unacceptable network.

And yes, even 4chan is censored.

I somehow doubt that the audience that's going to make Twitter money with subscriptions or advertisers are Nazis, MAGA, Crypto Bros, and OF performers. But you do you.

Look, some people _like_ talking to sex-robots, alright? Nothing to be ashamed of.

yeah, i'm having a great time

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