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Comment by slt2021 | Hacker News Reader

slt2021

old good ole Twitter was when your feed was only those you followed.

new X is when your feed what Elon wants you to see and react to.

Twitter stopped doing the "follower feed" thing for years before Elon bought the website. The propaganda has gotten much worse, but let's not pretend Twitter wasn't widely considered the worst website on the face of the planet (except Facebook) even before Elon took over

1. I think the main thing is that Elon's own tweets are almost always make it to global broadcast via For You feed.

2. This effectively makes everyone see whatever Musk personally likes/retweets

3. It is soft of correct that there is more freedom of speech due to slashing/nonexistent moderation

4. But because algo promotes whatever Musk retweets, it makes Musk chief in charge of the algorithm. Whatever Musk likes - will be shown to everyone.

5. Because the rest of the feed is noise and garbage, this effectively makes Musk inject a strong signal to a feed and makes him a moderator. If censors previously would censor by deleting posts, he censors by throwing garbage and noisy posts and sprinkling signal in a few places

You can block him and that doesn't happen. The main problem is the algorithm is wildly oversensitive and will show you 100 of any one thing you linger on for too long.

Same thing happens with competitors though. That's all Threads is. I enabled Bluesky's occasional algorithm posts in the following feed and it will not stop trying to show me hardcore gay porn I very much didn't ask for.

> the worst website on the face of the planet (except Facebook)

Very much except FB.

I see more hate content on FB (which i have to use because of other people) than I do on Twitter on the rare occasions I look at it.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Bluesky behaves like the Twitter of yore where you see only who you follow.

This is misleading.

At the top of the feed, there are two tabs: "For you" and "Following". If you select "Following", then you only see people you follow.

a lot of people use the For You feed by default, since Titter makes it very inconvenient to use Following:

  - cannot disable/hide For you
  - always default for you, and no way to default to Following

but you don't see _all_ from the people you follow in "following", some end up in "for you". So if you want to see stuff from people you follow you need to look at the rage-bait from the algorithmic feed.

Ever since they introduced that, it tries hard to switch you back to for you and has never let you stay away from it permanently.

I never used Twitter but I left Facebook for exactly that reason. I just want to keep up with my friends. I don't want to constantly see whatever narrative some corporate media entity is pushing.

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