Hacker News Reader

Comment by seventh12 | Hacker News Reader

> Twitter has long been declining

Why do you think so?

Isn't it obvious? The news feed is full of spam from people I do not know and do not follow. Meanwhile the posts of people I follow never reach me!

I remember twitter being like this in 2020 when I stopped using it.

That can certainly be true, too. But different people will have different thresholds for how much enshitification is too much. So, you hit your threshold in 2020 and OP hit there's today.

Yikes. Replying because I noticed my egregious typo: "theirs", not "there's".

This is Facebook's death spiral. People came to Facebook for their friends. Then FB inserted ragebait and ads in the pursuit of engagement metrics and monetization.

But then eventually Facebook is just a stream of ads and slop with no activity from friends.. And then you wonder why you're even there.

Twitter is clearly executing the same playbook.

It does its best to divert your attention from your following feed.

Ads. Sidebars. Political rants. Threadbois. Engagement bait.

No more APIs. Can’t easily export your data. Your likes. Your bookmarks.

It’s overridden with engagement bots that perform post, reply, and follow campaigns. AI posters and commenters.

And not the worst: but it’s likely nobody will read your posts, even if you have Premium, unless you game the algorithm and boost your standings. This requires you to act like an influencer.

The most interesting and intelligent people have left.

Fair question, if you live under a rock (and don't talk with anyone who reads U.S. national news, or the only people you talk with think Twitter is great!), so I upvoted. I don't know seventh12's motivations or current understanding, and while they could be trolling, why assume that? I suppose I could read their other posts, but I didn't. I'm mostly reacting to the downvotes, which I feel are unfair against a plain, if not tone-deaf, question.

Always has been. People on here just act like it's new because opinions they don't like don't get shadow banned anymore.

It is new. Elon has intentionally redesigned Twitter to surface right-wing and extremist opinions, which no longer get banned, in order to purge the "woke mind-virus", and the platform is flooded with bots.

Claiming that the platform is exactly the same as it's always been and then pointing out one substantial change from the way it's always been, is an insane degree of cognitive dissonance.

It might be more of a case of "if you're accustomed to left-wing bias, a balanced media feels like right-wing bias..."

The quote you're appropriating, "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” doesn't really apply in this context because we're talking about actual right-wing content, which many people find offensive on its own merits.

And many people find actual left-wing content offensive "on it's merits".

Not sure what point you are making?

You're likely going to refuse to understand the point I'm making, but to anyone reading this thread in good faith it should be obvious. It is simply incorrect to claim that extremist right-wing content on Twitter is a counterbalance to some equal and opposite amount of extremist left-wing content, because said extremist left-wing content has never existed in the same quantities, nor to the same degree, as extremist right-wing content does now. Despite the narrative, there never was a "woke mind virus" on Twitter. No, the "Twitter Files" didn't really prove anything of the sort. Even before Musk, Twitter's algorithms tended to prefer conservative content because that drove engagement. After Musk, that has been dialed up to 11.

And the "left-wing content" some people find offensive is anything as banal as the mere existence of non-white characters in media, or the use of pronouns, or any number of entirely minor triggers most people don't care about. This simply isn't in the "same but opposite" category as open racism, misogyny and hate speech to most people, when simply not being a nazi counts as "left-wing" in modern parlance.

I think what you've said in your comment exists for the most part inside your head. You create these caricatures in your own mind in order rationalise the fact that you are, in fact, what you accuse others, a basic hater unable to accept the fact that people can disagree with you (and also the concept of freedom of speech in general).

>intentionally redesigned Twitter to surface right-wing and extremist opinions

"Surface"? At least we agree on the censoring because before it was only left-wing extremism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com