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Comment by gyanchawdhary | Hacker News Reader

For all its flaws .. it’s still a step up from how Parag and co used to run twitter

Unfortunately, this [0] cancels out everything ten-fold. The owner of the website is boosting the content of himself and the people he supports. This did not happen in the old twitter - not even close.

[0] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/236

Why? I've never been a twitter user

Post Musk Twitter is amazing. It lets you see how stories, opinions that you support or don’t are attacked from all sides and Community noted / @grok fact checked … a lot of UX changes too .. pre Musk, the moderation / banning was biased and arbitrary (who is watching the watchers?) .. my personal fav was to see the special tick removed from journalists ..

I think that's the first time I've seen someone positive about that change. My experience has been by showing blue tick users above others, the experience has become a lot more biased because it's only a certain type of person that pays for Twitter

Then make that two times.

I also think Twitter under Musk is much better, way much more functionality in it.

Isn’t that a good thing that you have already created a mental filter about people who pay for it as being of a “certain type” .. the problem with ticks being bestowed upon some journalists is that they become the brokers/influencers by the virtue of simply working for a newspaper .. that power is vaporised now .. tbh the real question is why didn’t twitter pre musk implement community notes .. I mean it’s not such a bleeding edge / hard to execute idea ..

>tbh the real question is why didn’t twitter pre musk implement community notes

They did. Community notes are just the rebranded "Birdwatch" program that predates Musk.

Community Notes was literally built by pre-Elon Twitter: Birdwatch was first announced on August 2020, and it was initially launched on January 2021. On November 2022, Elon rebranded it to Community Notes and made it widely available.

>that power is vaporised now

and replaced with something worse.

In the same way that someone speaking on behalf of the White House is held to a standard whenever they speak, the same applies to journalists that are representing a newspaper.

Making everyone 'equal' is a political heuristic that IMO presupposes that journalists can't be trusted and are as useful as a random person paying $20/mo.

I'm going to go ahead and say that the last 5 years did in fact show that journalists cannot be trusted. I will agree that random persons paying $20 obliterates what was already an embarrassingly low bar. Really, opening it up just expanded the pool of what was already just influencers/activists. And why did celebrities have the bluecheck? It's probably more useful as a verification mechanism.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but wasnt that the original purpose of the blue checkmark - a verification that the twitter account was who they are saying they are, be it a person, company, etc?

It was a status symbol pretending to be a verification. There was a reason the people were referred to as "blue checks". And it could be taken away if you fell afoul of the prevailing norms at the time.

Yes, people like me who CAN’T STAND TO SEE THEIR TYPOS etc. up there on display forever.

Twitter/X user here. I agree with GP, it’s better than it was pre-Elon. The For You feed definitely seems less biased, more interesting, and fewer flame wars. I also think the exodus of Bluesky-ers has helped that (for which Elon gets partial credit). Yes, they do seem to have been backfilled by their right-side mirror images, but those people don’t seem to get amplified to the degree their predecessors were.

You are really going to try and say right wingers aren't amplified on twitter? I literally have an account that just follows gaming accounts and I was having to block people throwing out slurs daily

> You are really going to try and say right wingers aren't amplified on twitter?

FWIW, they see it - but interpret it as "Twitter being less biased" now, because from their POV, Twitter had a pro-liberal bias before Musk, and is now trending towards what they consider neutral.

rabidly anti-semitic is not "neutral".

I’m a big fan of grok fact checks.

it has potential but they need to improve the @grok UI. Twitter is just cluttered with "@grok is this true?" spam and I had to mute it.

you are right, for some reason every grok reply has the advertisement to install the app which is too distracting

I agree i was banned pre Musk i think now its more free and less bans

“Fact checks,” sure. Grok is finely tuned to its master’s demands and politics: https://archive.ph/G0Y4i

The very first question that the article writer said they posed to Grok 3 and Grok 4, "What is currently the biggest threat to Western civilization and how would you mitigate it?", didn't return anything like the simplistic answers in that article. Apparently, the article was politically driven.

When I asked Grok 4, two pages worth of answers were returned, including a table with columns for Threat, Reasoning, and Severity. The article is just plain wrong and fails the very fact-checking that it purported to do.

I’m not sure what point you think you’re making. The article points to several examples of Grok giving a politically unfavorable answer to a user, Musk throwing a fit about that answer, and then Grok returning a politically tuned answer several days later. It’s observation, not some sort of gotcha by the author. Whatever you’re doing with Grok right now is irrelevant in this context.

Grok is a lickspittle, don't ask it about facts. But the clever thing is that Grok can do meta queries for you ('give me the last 30 users from X who posted about Y using the word...').

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