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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Twitter still exists. Renamed. Same exact thing. You can create an account and post whatever random things you want. Some people might follow you. Some might not. If you see something that makes you sad, you can block the person who posted the sad thing.

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> Same exact thing.

It very much is not. No third-party clients; can’t see threads without an account; owner inserting himself and his ideology at the centre; fewer and less diverse participating people; diminished trust in the platform; more spam; different verification rules… Even the character limit is different.

"no longer developer friendly" referring to them re-pricing their API to make aggregating data for fun monetarily infeasible.

Not just aggregating data for fun. It made third-party clients like Tweetbot impossible. Similar to non-old.reddit.com, the web interface has been crappy for a pretty long time, but was easily worked around by using better clients.

No more.

It's a walled garden. Unless you are logged into an account it's basically a private network.

All social media have to be walled gardens or be free-prey for ravenous AI bots. Evolution at work.

or be free-prey for ravenous AI bots

Have you recently been on X?

I think your parent comment is talking about AI bots consuming the content, while you seem to be making a point about AI bots posting content.

There are thousands of bluecheck AI bots that just copy-paste/regurgitate or just make up stupid content and post it continuously to get engagement views and money.

It is really worse than before.

Why are you following them?

You don’t need to follow someone to see their content. When you open the app the default timeline is the “For You” one. Sometimes you don’t even notice that the app has switched back to “For You”, X definitely doesn’t really want you staying on the “Following” tab.

"Popular" tweets (of which these bot accounts often fall into, because they're propped up by bot responses and engagement farming) are pushed into your feed even if you're not following (or engaging) with them.

The regurgitated content is often in the form of comments in popular threads.

I'm not following them, I just see them in any damn mildly interesting thread out there.

Even blocking has changed!

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