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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher quality and much more balanced.

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Community notes predate Musk. They're a lot more common now, but they're needed more than ever too. Meanwhile spam is everywhere (except in the "probable spam" section) and all ads are scams.

Community notes by themselves do not do much if the network administration has severe bias vs one side of political spectrum.

It's pretty undeniable that the bot problem is significantly worse than it was before Musk. (I'm not going to take a position on the value of any of the other changes to the product.)

It is interesting that they appear to have solved or at least dramatically reduced the porn spam. Still cant open a post though without seeing 10+ posts about something completely unrelated in the comments

I'm mostly reading political tweets, and for the last year or so I have never noticed that - the comments can be of very varying quality, as always on an unmoderated forum, but I don't remember too much offtopic. Maybe it depends on who do you follow and who the bots are targeting - except Musk, my follows are usually not celebrities, so maybe bots don't bother targeting them.

I don't recall ever seeing porn spam in my ~8 years of using the site pre-Musk. Probably a few incidents here and there, but nothing notable enough that I remember it happening.

If the skeleton crew has finally managed to fix it more than a year after causing it, I guess that counts for something.

No, they haven't. I have at least one porn bot start following me every day. In any thread, a porn post can just randomly appear. TBH, the rate at which it's getting worse is increasing.

I don't think porn spam reduced at all, but indeed “engagement spam” has skyrocketed which makes porn spam less visible on popular tweets (but it's still prevalent everywhere else). And there's also much more sex workers than ever before advertising their onlyfan…

The reply section of posts with any reach has become unusable on purpose, and they're making it even worse. Great!

Nor really. It used to work for all people with browser now it is only for logged-in.

That was already the case before Musk bought it.

What? No it wasn't! You used to be able to view entire Twitter threads without being logged in. It was also possible to go to someone's account page and see their posts in reverse chronological order. The latter went away shortly after Musk took over. The former took a little longer, but is now gone as well. In many cases you can't even view a single tweet without the site trying to get you to log in.

I clearly remember it wasn't, they would pop up with a login page as soon as you scrolled down.

Maybe for you, but not for most of the rest of the universe.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/twitter-public-access-re...

I remember it being the case before too. It wasn't unconditional like it is now. For example, I distinctly remember being able to scroll through someone's profile in a normal browser window without being logged in, but in an incognito window, I was immediately told to log in or create an account.

They may have had other heuristics too that led to inconsistent behavior between users. So it should not be so surprising if some people report that that happened even though it didn't happen to others.

There was a feature flag for this that rolled out in 2021 or so.

You forgot this already, I see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33769715

Selective memory perhaps?

Yes, but you could bypass the login page.

No, it wasn't.

Wrong. I don't understand why people attempt to make corrections like this.

Anyone could browse Twitter anonymously, since the beginning.

There was briefly a log-in nag popup that would appear on scroll.

That disappeared and Musk got lots of praise for it, probably entirely unwarrented but it was basically the only thing that improved post-Musk. Then it came back with a vengeance.

Mate, you're wrong, as many others have said.

Here's proof right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33769715

Funny that people also found ways to criticize Musk back then for doing that :D.

Do you understand now why we make corrections to patently wrong statements like yours?

No, it was much more possible to consume without being logged in than it is now, though sometimes tricks like closing a login popup were needed.

That must have been a very long time ago.

~October 27, 2022. So yeah, about 2 years ago.

I have to admit, I have a loose understanding of what's going on with twitter or even how to use it. But my personal Mandela effect is that it didn't work right if you weren't logged in for a lot longer than that.

I'm probably mis-remembering.

You used to be able to look at people's profiles, tweets and entire threads without being signed in. If you go to my profile today signed out you see tweets from before 2022. If you click on a tweet signed out, you only see that single tweet without context. Some of those changes are only a few months back.

Community notes sometimes provide useful context I'll grant you that... but often they are just a popularity contest to see which side can upvote which community note.

* No ability to browse the site without logging in

* Hundreds of spam account followers

* Sponsored content inserted in replies masquerading as real content

* Random bugs with video content constantly

* Twitter blue boosting replies to the top, making conversations effectively pay to win.

* Bot account spam comprising ~50% of the replies to any popular tweet

Despite the above, Twitter is still the best place on the internet to get the latest news and a feel for the zeitgeist. This to me is a testament of the incredible product created by Jack.

Every day I get 5-10 new followers bot followers. I haven't gotten a real follower in months, I don't use the account that much.

Other than that, the fyp shows me a lot of right wing content (and particularly Elon Musk posts) that I ignore, but they do show them.

Regularly as I'm scrolling down the page, it'll randomly refresh or insert/disappear posts that I'm viewing. Yeah, the site is functional, but it is not better than its ever been. Not by a mile.

I see much more right wing content boosted by the algorithm now, and the paid checkmarks ensures every tweet's replies have low quality and bot replies filtered to the top.

The bot problem is also infinitely worse now, I rarely post anything so I have about two dozen legitimate followers, mostly people I know, and then I have a few hundred obvious bot account followers.

I think it's because Twitter doesn't bury and ban moderate and conservative opinions now. It feels like there's more balance today. I'd say in my experience I've seen more of the far left voices I follow move away from the platform (although many moved back) and they're not as powerful not that the Twitter team isn't backing them exclusivly.

Balanced? Only if you like mob rule. Which maybe is the point.

Readers added context they thought people might like to know:

Twitter misinformation about a tragedy started far-right riots in the UK the other day.

And Musk commented approvingly that civil war was inevitable.

What are you talking about? Open any twitter link and there is a pretty good chance it just doesn't work lol. And even if it does work hopefully it isn't a thread because you won't see any of the parent comments or replies.

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