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Comment by jezzamon | Hacker News Reader

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

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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".

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

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.

Then make that two times.

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

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