IsMyXFeedFucked – Analyze How Your X Feed's Impacting You
ismyxfeedfucked.com
ismyxfeedfucked.com
My feed was tech-only. Real people publishing real stuff.
Last year X started occasionally showing some random content like Reddit, I'd mark them as "not interesting" and move on.
Since last month there's no tech content by tech people, there's exclusively junk worse than on Reddit's homepage. No amount of "not interesting" will fix it. Oh, there's porn now too.
I stopped opening X altogether.
Side note: It's annoying how many tech people started posting their political hot takes since ~2016. I unfollowed everyone who tweeted about politics.
A discover feed that’s not adversarial isn’t strictly necessary but it’s a significant selling point.
I still do this on Twitter and the "For You" feed works great.
With the US going full into homophobia, Christianity and xenophobia it's time to divest from American social media.
X prefers randos with checkmarks donating money to Elon over people with interesting opinions.
I don't post about politics on my social media feeds, but... I spend increasing amount of time feeling that I should start.
Context:
1. I come from a country that was torn into horrible civil war by populist leaders spouting exactly the same tactics and phrases as some of the North American elected leaders do now.
2. I don't believe in manifest destiny, I'm not religious, and so I don't believe that the average well being in USA and Canada is God given, inevitable, or guaranteed.
3. All it takes for evil to win is for good people to do or say nothing.
So... Is covering my head under the sand like the mythical ostrich and going LaLaLa over next 4 years the polite thing to do, lest somebody unsubscribe? Or do I have all but duty to try to encourage tolerance, bridge communication between my polarized friends and neighbours, speak of my past and hope for the future?
Isn’t that basically Russia
You have to use Google Translate or something, because the page is unavailable in other languages.
The key point is that Russian activists have been trying to influence the large scale politics locally since about 1880 to zero effect.
Based on what you've written, you are choosing between polite self interest (unsubscribes), and vocal group interest (speaking out).
Essentially a choice between helping and staying out of the way.
The real question is your values, the reason you want to speak up in the first place.
In addition, it doesnt look like you want to speak up for the sake of it, but to prevent a dangerous outcome.
For a situation like this, its safe to say you will always be conflicted if you don't speak out.
What you will rue, is speaking out ineffectively. So speaking out without a plan, alienating people - NOT achieving the goal that motivated you in the first place.
At this point, i typically try and come up with a diagnostic question. Something that puts two values a persons holds in conflict.
Eg: If someone gave you a clear set of topics that would prevent this outcome, would you immediately speak up on them, even if you may not agree with the words? (I guarantee that these words prevent the outcome you foresee, and have no hidden knock on effects)
This asks how far you would go to achieve your outcome. Would you be willing to say things you dont like, to prevent populism?
If no, then there are conditions to your goal, or your goal is slightly different.
Knowing your motivations (just want to speak, want to achieve a goal, want to achieve a specific outcome, want someone else to handle it), helps you figure out what you want, and the limits of how far you are willing to engage.
A few years ago a bunch of folks I followed started adding politics to the list of things they would regularly talk about, which I fully support. But I don't owe them my attention and when the topics start to just become a steady stream of undifferentiated ranting about political topics I'm out. Then they would invariably take a self-righteous position to explain the drop in their numbers as people that 'can't handle the truth' and that they are better off without them, when the reality is that they mostly just spammed themselves out of an audience.
Do what you like of course, but for me unless the person is bringing new information or context to the conversation I'm out.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkh...
That is the real problem nowadays, he destroyed the system to make it a self promotion tool first. I'm quite sure that always on feed tweets of him can easily brain wash hundreds of millions of people.
"Latest" is still exclusively people you follow, in chronological order (and content explicitly marked as sponsored if you don't have premium.)
X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this. You don't like the algorithm? Don't use it, and use X just like everybody else for the first 10 years of its life.
Speaking as a non-X user, doesn’t YouTube offer essentially the same thing with the “subscriptions” tab?
(Not counting the ads and specifically-paid-to-be-promoted posts, but those are clearly marked, and I’m pretty sure twitter has as many in-line ads)
Threads and BlueSky both offer this.
And so there is no literally zero reason now why anyone should stay on X.
Unless the people you're interested in hearing from are mostly or exclusively there.
Even from people I admire that are exclusively there.
The push to generate a constant stream of content means that their good stuff is long past anyways.
Facebook has this: menu -> feeds -> friends
Why would you emphasize that point when it's clearly wrong? Is it ignorance? Is it to push a particular narrative? I'm confused.
After having looked further, I agree with your claim, but it wasn't "obviously true" to me. I only use a small subset of social media and thus the knowledge from which I operate is different from yours and different things are obvious to me.
Fortunately about 1/2 of the smart people have shown up on Bluesky, and we can have technical conversations now. I'm hoping all the energy eventually comes back.
Who the hell is "Vivek" and why do I care at all? And since when did I ever express interest in "confirmation hearings"? And does Musk have his account hard coded to be every 3rd post? Jesus
It has finally become the kind of content Elon Musk fans love so much.
My Twitter feed got similarly FUBAR from organic causes in 2017. Everyone started tweeting politics all day.
I ended up getting constant alt-right posts no matter how much I marked them as not interesting.
Not that anyone should go back to a dead website, just that not blocking is too nice.
And often non-premium users are simply flagged as spam and hidden.
Which actually means that if Elon removes your blue checkmark (as happened recently with Asmongold) then it is akin to a shadowban.
The problem comes from the default sort order shown to everyone though, not just you as you're reading it.
The hypocrisy is absurd. Like telling everyone to go fuck themselves, and then hours later, pleading for users to post more positive content... or making a big show of being worried about using AI untruthfully, and then repeatedly posting AI-generating images smearing people he doesn't like. Pretending like no one had "free speech" until he bought the platform, and then selectively banning vocal dissent he doesn't like.
He's a child. Such a waste.
Which is something he has obviously done with his grind-centric videogame accounts and actual livestreams of him not knowing how to play on those accounts?
I was pretty tired of Mastodon and thus happy to return when Elon bought it.
ETA: I use a preferred subset of my follows for my main feed, a few subject-delineated lists for particular research, and occasionally my "following" feed to branch out.
Do you remember this story??
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/report-musk-had-...
I had to block his account to not see one of his posts at the top of my screen every time I logged in. I was a casual user and didn't follow anyone (only started logging in when it was impossible to see anything otherwise), so I had what could be called the "default" experience.
Thus I was wondering why people were always talking about hate and racism on x.
Bluesky is a different story, there I exclusively see left wing content. Full of hate.
But when the US election came around all of our business For You feeds switched to political, far-right content even though we are not in the US nor political. And the fact that the EU is investigating X for its algorithm changes means at least some other people have had the same experience.
You're either PiS/Konfederacja supporter, or PO/Left/P2050 parties. There is no chance of any other coalition, and everyone knows this.
Choice is - do you want to dismantle democracy, or would you rather not. Sigh.
That's the trap of politics on social media, they give you the illusion that you get a pulse of what society is thinking, when you actually just see a very vocal minority repeating the same arguments over and over again.
What does that mean? Twiter doesn’t switch my tabs on its own, neither on desktop or mobile.
>and even then you also have all the random notifications from people you don't follow.
I only get notifications from people I don’t follow if someone likes my tweets or they reply
He's telling you your experience is outdated.
????????????
> He's telling you your experience is outdated.
No, they said what I said was simply not true.
And my experience is from using the new stuff. There may be technical reasons why it wasn't sticky however in my experience it wasn't as sticky as it should be and I ended up on the crappy feed all the time.
I've never knew been switched since the acquisition.
That experience no longer exists.
I have no idea who made this tool or what their biases are, why would I believe their analysis any more than I'd believe a stranger on X? I can't find any information on who is behind this.
The different axes that they uses for analysis (health, political balance, "vibe', etc) are all inherently subjective. How are they measured?
I have a stroooong feeling this is just a wrapper around Gemini, as it has video input.
Just define topics you don't want to read about and the AI filter will hide them from your feed.
Technically is just passing the text to Gemini Flash 1.5 with a simple prompt to detect if the tweet is from a forbidden topic.
You can try it here: https://twitter.cercaapp.com
Is the source available? Can this be ported to FireFox?
Server side code is just some Go to handle calls to Gemini Flash, auth, tracking quota usage...
To be honest even the prompt used is quite simple, the fun part has been optimizing it using promptfoo for running the evals.
Not sure analysis is needed. Algorithmic feeds are fucked and impact you negatively. All of them!
You have no real control over what you see, they're ephemeral, nobody has a shared experience, and that's _only a few_ things that are fucked.
If you have attempted to use this previously without success, please retry - it should work fine now :)
Thanks! Will work on a fix
Is that really the only way to get hold of someones feed? It's neat from a tech perspective & very AI...but seems rather cumbersome
This way is clumsy but I appreciate that you have absolute control over what you are sharing.
Secondly, I tried a chrome extension, but these don't work on mobile devices (80% of social media users) so it was redundant (plus very brittle as it depended on specific DOM elements). Also, a lot of content is video/audio, which isn't well captured by static analysis.
A video is a bit annoying to take, but yes, it was the only solution I found!
I rarely or ever see any promotional tweets.
My takeaways are as follows. First, I would take these with huge grains of salt. Second, the political leaning distribution is super weird, it is super polarized with a clear lack of "centrist" takes. Third, can someone please explain to me what "non-violence" is in this context (even the guy who only follows are got like 50% on violence??). Fourth, I wish the "vibe" section was expanded upon, my issue with the For You Page is that it hits the middle point of "slop" and "rage-bait" that lulls you into a passive doom-scrolling brain-emptying mooch. The "Vibe" here doesn't seem to capture that, and I can't really put my finger on what the difference is except for "I know it when I see it". Anyways.
PS: You should probably install browser plug-ins that remove the for you page! PPS: You should probably switch to Bluesky.
1. The open, "town-square" nature of Twitter meant that it was easy to run into each other again, and she was feeling uncomfortable sharing space with me.
2. This was taking a huge toll on my mental health at the time, because just being on Twitter (or any of the many Twitter clones, for that matter) was reminding me of my relationship with her, just because of how the algorithm worked.
I still think Twitter provided value for me as a startup founder, for marketing and networking purposes. But It wasn't really matter of if it provided value or not; Twitter was driving me to death in the most literal sense of the word possible. To choose life, I chose to leave Twitter.
As someone whose startup builds social platforms, I am extremely turned off by the idea of "public square" models for the internet, after these incidents. We shouldn't aim to get everyone into a single feed, where you are given a curated feed, designed to engage you for as long as possible for the whims of advertisers, as opposed to the utility of the users.
My card: https://files.catbox.moe/t8rzlb.png
There may only be a couple of ads per 'sample' though, so maybe not enough to be interesting.
I'm curious about how you process the video feed; Do you stitch it back together as one long image and then perform OCR? Or just look at every N frames?
I've been looking for an open source library that helps with taking a scrolling video and then stitching it into an image but I haven't had much luck.
Twitter has a perverse financial incentive to capture and hold your attention, and negative attention is far easier to provoke.
When you open a link in the webview, it doesn't show the icon to open it in your preferred browser.
When you close it and open it again, the button is there. Clearly they are scared you'll leave and won't come back. That's also why they are downranking links.
A forum like HN is much more of a town square because pretty much everyone sees the same content in every set of comments, with just one toggle ("showdead") to modify that.
One scenario where chronology is confusing is when a reply to an earlier tweet takes its chronological place in the timeline but also includes the earlier tweet for context.
If you are following 0 people, the "Following" feed acts similar to the "Discover" feed. As soon as you follow a single person, it works as you'd expect (only showing content from people you've followed).
Are you maybe seeing things that have been reposted by people you follow? There's a lot of that, but those still count as "posts from people you follow". If you want to exclude those, there are settings at the following link:
https://bsky.app/settings/following-feed
Also if you just want to not see them sometimes, there's a feed you can add called 'OnlyPosts':
And that only-posts feed is even stranger. It only shows 3 days. People I follow have months of posts.
I found 1-2 minutes was decent (30+ sample size on average), and a tradeoff for convenience. Background sampling would be ideal but privacy concerns and technical limitations (especially on mobile devices)
The first bit of scrolling was relevant content from artists i follow on youtube but not twitter. Then suddenly all I saw were Elon Musk doing the Nazi pose. Wtf
Where's section that tells you what percentage of your feed is Elon spouting contemptible nonsense, non-Elons raging at Elon's contemptible nonsense, or the muffled whines of even other non-Elons as their contemptible reguritations of Elon's contemptible nonsense squeezes past Elon's sphincter?
He cheats at video games, lies about it, and knee-jerk abuses his power over twitter to ban and personally attack people who point this out.
America bought this shit, and now it's going to pay for it.
If you think your feed worked before, you’re a fool and lying to yourself. Fools everywhere, as far the eye can see. Fools as CEOs. Fools as engineers. The amount of foolery in the world has reached meme levels and I love it. I love watching you turds scream and wretch. I love watching you be autistic. It puts money in my pocket and provides endless entertainment. When you know it’s not an honor society but just a lolz society it’s easy to make the big bucks on all these fools, and I love it.
lol. Twitter is trash in 2025, you fuys crack me bulp