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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

It absolutely isn’t functioning the same.

Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year.

…but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows or likes.

It’s a mess and a fantastic example of why anonymous and free communication platforms absolutely need professional moderation.

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>every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots.

Remember when we were told Elon was going to unleash AI on the bot/spam problem and solve it in a month?

It's worse than it ever was. I hardly ever saw bots or spam. Now I have 100+ spam followers, and on the very rare occasion where I reply to something, it gets 90% spam likes. Ads are also crypto, soft porn games and drop shipping companies.

I don't think it even technically works as well as before. The iOS app seems mostly fine, but on web the feed or tweet fails to load and shows the blue retry button probably 1/3rd of the time for me now. Combined with all the bot issues you mentioned, that has dramatically reduced my Twitter usage. It's become incredibly frustrating to use. I only use it now when I click on a tweet link that's been shared with me.

If you're logged out, you can't see any Tweets unless you're directly viewing a specific Tweet, and even then you cannot see any other Tweet apart from the one you're directly viewing.

This was one thing we had tried on Twitter before Elon, and had found that it is detrimental to the platform and engagement. So, had to roll it back. But now it is a thing again. This drives down the popularity and overall usage of the platform, but some people will still claim it works the same (or even better).

At least this was an intentional change, not something that just broke down out of sudden.

On the other hand, I love it now and hated it before. Guess it depends on what you're looking for. Me - I like little to no moderation and government interference and don't find much offensive and have no problem just ignoring anything I do find objectionable. All worth it to be able to speak honestly.

I don't post a lot and I also find Twitter really annoying these days. I am used to getting pinged only by my friends to talk niche tech stuff, now I get porn/crypto bot spam... Trying to follow technologists I like, but their discussions are also mired in dumb blue checkmark takes and bots... OK maybe those blue checkmarks are speaking honestly but I'd rather have intelligent speech over honest speech at this point

>I like little to no moderation and government interference

My personal politics better align with based Elon than the previous regime, but let's not pretend there's no moderation happening. It's just different.

Surely, but I don't notice any less insane progressive takes, rather I also now see insane conservative takes. Appears additive to me.

True enough, but I'd rather take chances with the guy who proclaims he loves free speech, even if he turns out to be a hypocrite occasionally, than with the censorship regime whose only constant worry is they don't censor enough and need to find more ways to censor more.

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