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Comment by innocentoldguy | Hacker News Reader

How did Musk "fuck [Twitter] up worse than ever"? It has more functionality and is more stable since Musk bought it.

Source? AFAIK it is not more stable:

https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/internet-report-twitter-to...

  Twitter appears to be an outlier in that respect. Instead of displaying the usual post-acquisition stability, ThousandEyes’ data indicates that the number and frequency of outages did increase commensurate with the acquisition. If we compare the two periods (pre- and post-acquisition), it’s apparent that there were fewer and less frequent outages prior to the purchase.

And “more functionality”… I guess time continues marching forward so there are some new things, but nothing game changing IMO. The creator economy on there is nonexistent, and changing the color of the checkmarks from blue to grey seems like a lateral move.

Nothing game-changing? How about:

• Long-form content

• Video streaming

• Grok

• Ability to edit posts

• Bookmarks

• Communities

• Better verification system

• Encrypted direct messages

• Cashtag feature

• Bold and italic text formatting

• Open-sourced algorithm

• Premium features

• Improved search

• Improved analytics for content creators

• And most importantly, less First-Amendment violations in secret partnership with the federal government

Don't forget community notes. While not perfect, it presents valuable context or counter-points. Musk's posts have been community noted a few times.

Grok is a nice feature, although for paid accounts only. It also seems slightly out of place on X. Most people are there to express themselves, not necessarily seek help or information from AI-gen. I tried it for some coding help, and it did fine.. but doing that task on X felt odd.

Community notes was designed and shipped before the takeover. It was called "birdwatch".

Never heard of birdwatch, never saw it.

I'm in Australia, explanation follows:

From wikipedia: "In November 2022, at the request of new owner Elon Musk, Birdwatch was rebranded to Community Notes... and expanded to Europe and countries outside of the US."

Most of that doesn't deserve to be called an improvement. That message encryption is one of the worst designs I've ever seen. The algorithm isn't open enough that anybody can see if what it's doing matches the code.

And instead of censoring "secretly" in partnership with the US government they do so in partnership with the Indian government as well as individual Republican politicians.

> Most of that doesn't deserve to be called an improvement.

Hard disagree. The platform is objectively much better than it was under Jack Dorsey.

> The algorithm isn't open enough that anybody can see if what it's doing matches the code.

Fair, but more is available than before.

> ...in partnership with the Indian government as well as individual Republican politicians.

Would you prefer X break India's laws, specifically Section 69A of the IT Act? I suppose they could do that and then the Indian government would shut them down in India.

Also, are you talking about X suspending Ken Klippenstein's account for doxxing JD Vance? X's rules explicitly state that doxxing people will result in a suspension, so maybe Klippenstein should have thought of that before posting Vance's home address and most of his social security number.

Here's X's policy against what Klippenstein did, which applies to everyone: https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-informatio...

Before Musk, Twitter used to fight those requests.

The platform can not be called better, with more bugs and errors than ever.

Why don't they apply those rules to Republicans? Why can they specifically post stuff like private info about Hunter?

Thanks for the reply! That's a good list. Of those, I would break them down accordingly:

  - Cool new features
    - Encrypted direct messages
    - Video streaming
    - Ability to edit posts
    - Communities (IDK what this but it sounds cool)
    - Bookmarks
    - Cashtag feature (?)
    - Improved analytics for content creators

  - Trivial decisions about policy
    - Long-form content
    - Bold and italic text formatting

  - Untrue, or at least unverified
    - Better verification system (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-confusion-and-risks-surrounding-twitters-verified-account-changes, https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/tech/musk-twitter-blue-check-mark/index.html)
    - Open-sourced algorithm (https://www.wired.com/story/twitters-open-source-algorithm-is-a-red-herring/)
    - Premium features (?)
    - Improved search (?)

  - Same shit different day
    - Grok

Which, tbf, is a lot more cool features than I was giving them credit for! I still think the whole 'nazi' and 'arbitrary moderation' thing outweighs those changes by a lot, but they did add stuff.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Nazi" and "arbitrary moderation." Can you clarify?

Musk is reposting actual neonazi accounts

Like Facebook, it does not really work for people without account. It did before. So for most people on the internet it has less functionality (if any).

To give just one example, sometime in March of this year, a bug appeared in the Android app that prevents loading of new posts for several minutes after the phone is plugged in to charge. It's now been 7 months, and the bug has not been fixed.

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