I'll be stepping back from leading product for X
twitter.com
twitter.com
The flipping robots underneath this post which have nothing to do with his message demonstrates to me the ridiculousness of X, that is a reminder of the cess pit that these social media platforms have become.
Not to mention the crypto scams, sensationalised untrue “news” etc.
I think it's ultimately a positive thing to have a mechanism for users to flag content as being questionable and have that flagging be subject to some kind of court of public opinion.
If anyone spends much time on Wikipedia they're familiar with this kind of public debate. Community Notes are a bit like a less sophisticated Talk page. Obviously it's imperfect and obviously ideological shades leak through, but it's still better than forum-style god-mod autocracy.
Every once in a while I get a notification that says "the community needs your help."
I usually never weigh in unless it's something I know intimately.
Who are the flipping robots you're talking about? Do you mean HN posters or X users?
It's a shame you've had such a poor experience on X. The site isn't perfect by any means, but it's become one of the only places online for new humor. The fact that reddit, Imgur, and Instagram front pages are frequently just X screenshots is a good indicator that this platform still has legs.
Where did you read that engagement was down? I was under the impression the platform was getting more usage than ever.
This line is identical to what deluded Twitter users said when they wanted me to join the site. "Yes, look past the NFT features, ignore the bots and the advertising and the brand accounts, disconnect from the hustle culture and make sure to block this list of artists. Used ironically, then the site is great!"
X and Twitter are not just imperfect. They are both unprofitable and untrustworthy brands, a net-negative service provided to humanity as a mechanism for selling ads and manipulating public opinion for brands and governments. It is an extremely ridiculous website and you're looking equally ridiculous as the Twitter zealots trying to defend it's merit. X is the piss-take of social media, there's no point in trying to vindicate it this late in the game.
I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also presented as server errors and 404s for a while until the necessary error states were added, and it has had some spotty downtime. Most of these things are better now than a year ago, but not all, and that's only getting back towards what it was before.
The only notable feature addition I'm aware of is Grok, and again that's pretty debatable.
So I'm interested in what you think has improved. Maybe I'm missing things, but it's not my perception.
I wouldn't be so sure about that... Translations contain a lot of telltales and signals - even perfect translations end up as translation-specific dialect separate from natural speeches - and there are significant average content quality differences between cultures. With these signals + differences combined creating a much tighter closed loop than before, it feels to me that it's introducing concept of racial supremacism/classism to a lot of previously unaware people, in which the en-US(or en-GB) culture is not at the top of the food chain.
I mostly only care about the former of ^ that, but I don't like the latter offending wrong set of people, and I think that is slowly going on over at Twitter.
"aaaaaaaahahahahahaha"
[translate to english]
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.
Most things exist for a reason, and if you don’t know the reason that doesn’t mean it’s a bad reason - it just means you don’t know the whole story.
I’m not sure exactly when that changed, but it completely destroyed what little use the platform had left to me.
xcancel does not have a login barrier, nor all the popup messages.
Redirect: https://x.com/*
to: https://xcancel.com/$1
Redirect: https://twitter.com/*
to: https://xcancel.com/$1
When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is frankly fine with me: it's a good reason to never visit a place that has become a cesspool of scams, porn, and white supremacist propaganda.
I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that.
Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).
Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).
I dropped X shortly after Elon took over. Around the time the neo-nazi spam increased. I also blocked it so I can't accidentally go to the site.
Nothing of value was lost.
Bluesky is like the early days of Twitter and I have a better control of my feeds.
[edit] I see the X bots are unhappy.
They still hate Musk though.
Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.
I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read before talking to me") is scary and genuinely interesting. For some people it almost seems like a full-time job.
We even see it in some other, non-political, social circles (knitting famously had a purity competition/obsession a while ago).
I'm still struggling to explain why this is such a focal point for some people. Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people?
I would say it’s narrower, loosely a sort of heresiology. It would be motivated by a strong internal sense of insiders vs. outsiders. Which isn’t saying much, but I think that’s that.
My (literally, and self-proclaimed) communist former partner noted left-wing infighting. The Monty Python Life of Brian scene about The Popular Front of Judea ("he's over there") are, according to her, totally accurate in spirit.
Ironic, the right does strength through unity, the left talks about it and then argues with itself about who else used the phrase; the last time the left really did it was when trade unions still had teeth.
Basically the gist of it is that if you want to be "on the left", you need to have the exact, correct, and up to date opinion on every single micro-issue or you're literally a fascist hitler paedophile and will be ostracized.
Meanwhile "on the right" as long as you agree on maybe one or two bigger things and you can deal with or tolerate the rest while you move on with winning elections.
Do you have a citation on that?
Expressing feelings and staying assertions are two different things. If you go around saying the sky is red and someone asks you for the source, it's not reasonable to throw a tantrum while desperately trying to move the goalpost by weaseling around with excuses such as "well aktchualy it feels red to me" nonsense.
If you make a statement, own it. If you are caught peddling baseless bullshit don't complain about being caught, complain about mindlessly posting baseless bullshit.
The claim seemed off, so I was curious where it came from.
A google search, it's an alleged claim by Nate Silver posted on X from a year ago. Recent post from Nate is that X is rigged.
https://protos.com/nate-silver-says-x-is-rigged-musk-cries-b...
That seems to suggest that it's Far right.
People notice because some loud proponents of https://helloquittex.com/ came back, sometimes quietly.
Personally I think X & BS impact is over exaggerated anyway.
It has become completely unusable.
Reddit is trying to push to it (if they don't already?), Pinterest does it, unfortunately user-generated content is worth more nowadays for user monetization, ads and preventing AI bot scraping. Can't fault them for it too much.
Sure, the site is still working, but to call it improved is stretching the word to its breaking point
Get this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.
(I can't call it "x", it feels like baby talk. Dignity also prevents me from ordering in Starbucks. Get off my lawn.)
This feels like a blatantly unrealistic opinion to have, which goes completely against any observable evidence.
Without a login, you can barely click on any link without being spammed by login prompts. If you visit anyone's posts tab you are greeted with a comically bad collection of posts that only show stale years old tweets that follow no discernible pattern or logic. And you cannot sort by timestamp.
This is comically bad given Twitter's sales pitch of being a microblogging site that lives in the now.
The truth of the matter is that today's Twitter is a sad clone of the glory days Twitter. Lauding these developments as something praise worthy is perplexing.
Now THAT is an improved web experience!
I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.
Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job.
you say this like it had anywhere to go but up.
What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.
Really not what Twitter used to be about.
It is possible he's done a good job at the micro level, but at the macro level the platform is a cesspool.
AI slop wasn't available then.
I miss old Twitter.
Not saying that's you. Just cannot help going down the memory lane.
There was a moment where I made genuine friends through Twitter...people I worked with, knew their families, and really got to know over time.
Now, X is a mess and HN is intellectually stimulating but impersonal.
I’m not normally an accelerationist about stuff… but now, when it comes to most social media, I’m kinda ok with the idea of it all burning to the ground.
Someone logged in to my account from a state I'd never logged in from before and posted a bunch of spam for an hour.
X perma banned my account. They told me I was banned for life, and any account I ever tried to make in the future would be banned. I appealed, explained that my account had obviously been hacked. It was denied.
So, ok.
I went and canceled all of my business subscriptions to Super Grok, and removed any business relationship I have with them. I've been banned for life, after all.
After a couple months, I have to say, it's been a total positive development. I miss the elephant videos, but I absolutely don't miss the constant background anxiety from political outrage/engagement farming. I liked grok, got some laughs from unhinged mode, but don't really notice not having it anymore, lots of good options out there. Hell, I get 90% of what I want (better search experience, summaries) from Kagi.
It's wild to think that people are going to be relying on X for financial stuff now.
Hope their accounts don't get hacked.
Twitter is eternal; musk & his worldview is temporary.
Speed and accuracy are directly opposed to each other when it comes to news reporting so the absolutes fastest “scoop” as you said, is giving up a lot on accurate reporting in exchange for getting the most eyeballs.
Technically, you don't need to be on twitter to follow him—but it's certainly easier to follow the general discourse if you are.
So be it.
Edit: updated to quote previous end to parent before it was amended
Cue Truth Social 100k/month early access plan to see Trumps tweets before anyone else.
The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.
He seemed to get it. It's too bad he's leaving.
Nikita shows up in the replies of a guy with 12k followers complaining that he doesn't get his small payout anymore, and Nikita posts a screenshot of how the guy posted the same text message 12 times in two years, and that's why the guy isn't allowed to make money on X anymore.
As if X has solved low quality reposts so well after turning on monetization that the head of product himself is doing manual demonitization detective work on the final stragglers.
Meanwhile, the biggest accounts on the For You page are zero effort repost bots raking in money, and Elon decided that you're allowed to post the N-word freely. https://x.com/search?q=n*****
Also, X is now just TikTok. Not just its video system (click any video and now you can swipe through recommendation algo), but its text posts too since the whole website is adversarially trying to post their way to a monthly payout.
HN has a lot of moderation just to keep this place a pleasant place to be. One of the most basic levers in that direction is to prohibit the worst slurs.
He started putting in ways to change it and put in better incentives (not monetizing this rage baiters, disclosing country of origin). The problem is, the people he screws by doing that are the exact accounts Elon Musk loves, do every time he wanted to make a change cat turd would go screaming to daddy. Hence why I find it so unsurprising he’s quitting.
most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
Twitter is 100% better now than a year ago. For one, I haven't gotten a single bullshit click-farm fake-ass sock-puppet follower in months. Secondly, I see very few low-effort reply guys lately, human or otherwise.
Not exactly sure how that changed anything but I see a lot less bot slop now.
The biggest complaint I've heard is about the owner and how he's using X as a megaphone.
I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things.
There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it really isn't as bad as people demonize it to be.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.
Isn't the same true of hackernews though?
An example of different communities would be subreddits. Reddit as a whole connects all of the communities with a front page, but each community is isolated from one another unless you choose to look over or someone else chooses to look into your community. Cross-community conversation happens from the overlap of subreddits followed between individuals.
A neighborhood is a community. A commercial area you choose to shop in is a community. A forum is a community. A subreddit is a community. HN is a community. Not every person in each of those locations have the same shared ideals and values, though they likely have some overlap since they each choose to be in that location.
Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc
After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.
I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.
Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.
And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).
Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".
If you get hit by a car once, that doesn't mean you want to get hit by a car more times in the future.
What ends up happening with this algorithm is that the "for you" page is dominated by posts asking open-ended questions for engagement. You want to see game clips or screenshots, but every recommended post will ask "What game do you like the most?" or "What character of game X do you like that most?" A question that the author isn't really interested in knowing, asked only to farm engagement from passerby users.
I think that's a really ugly situation all around and a failure of how the system was designed. People should be able to just tell the algorithm what they want to see without secret trackers that promote perverse incentives.
Also, for twitter in particular, buying a subscription is pretty much buying ads on the For You page. Since users can choose to hide the blue checkmark that indicates they are paying for preferential treatment, that means, effectively, that those are promoted posts that aren't marked as "promoted" like normal ads would have to be. I think that's illegal.
Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.
I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.
I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.
That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.
Shows how valuable the Play Store is to them
Just a few years ago on Show HN it was a daily occurrence that somebody would post a web app and somebody else would complain it’s broken with JavaScript off.
HN cares about things average users don’t.
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
The fine folks working in the upper echelons of Twitter have been perfectly happy with their site turning into something indistinguishable from Stormfront over the last few years. May the taint from this repulsive project follow them around for the rest of their careers.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.
>There are rumors
Interesting methodology you use to make concrete assertions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertise...
About 90% of the interesting people I ever followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky or Mastodon. They're never coming back.
1. 10 points, 15 comments
2. 9 points, 17 comments
3. 44 points, 84 comments
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
(471 points, 512 comments)
Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.
1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)
2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.
Twitter used to be profitable.
Now, it needed to be folded into xAI to survive. Then that combined mass needed to be folded into SpaceX to survive. Then that combined mass needed to IPO to survive.
Sure, Elon can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Doesn't make it not a tank.
Twitter posted a profit in only two of its eight full fiscal years (turning profitable in 2018 and 2019)
In its last year (2021), Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million on $5.1 billion in revenue.
- my feed is significantly more rage-baity both from bot accounts (to be expected) and personal accounts (assuming they get paid for engagement?)
- lots of AI slop reply comments which destroyed the fun of feeling like I'd get a real conversation under every post
- way more onlyfans / porn accounts self-promoting
- lots of genuine racism and way more gender war stuff than I remember
the story of literally every product Elon has been involved in for the last 26 years.
It became so grating, so many people turned into rage baiters.
And you get to see complete outright racism unchecked. Like comments saying the most vile stuff, like calling something a jewish conspiracy, and they don't even get ratioed. Embarrassing to see it.
In terms of UX and algorithm, X has a one size fits all algorithm that seems to favor a lot of crap that I really don't care about. If I switch to the Following feed, it's a lot more similar to other networks. That crap isn't coming from my network. It's very polarizing and it's the reason people are voting with their feet. As a product, it has stagnated. Whatever this product lead was doing, I don't think it's made a difference.
Mastodon's algorithm is basically sorting by time; I actually appreciate that but it has its limitations. It means my feed is utterly dominated by a handful of prolific tooters which is causing a rather low signal to noise ratio.
Bluesky has the most promise in terms of filtering and having lists. And it's federated nature means there are a growing number of third party things being built on top. And I like that it has multiple feeds that filter the content in different ways. It's actually very close to what Twitter was before they started locking down their APIs, shutting down third party applications, etc. It's essentially a better Twitter. And the at protocol is interesting relative to Mastodon. Its take on federation is more about interoperability and less about everybody trying to run their own private servers. You can. But you don't have to. Like Mastodon, there are also a growing number of use cases that go beyond being a Twitter clone.
Tangled is a very interesting at proto based application that is still a bit immature. It's the first take on challenging Github as a social network for developers that I've seen that might actually work.
Reality check, when there is a fire or another emergency what do you use to call the emergency services?
Never smell your own farts.
No it’s not
If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.
His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.
His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.
He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.
I haven't been more viscerally disgusted by a phrase I've read about tech in a while. Astonishing word choice.
A little cocky.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
That's not great. That's hideous.
You don’t solve this by making NY Times editors the deciders of what’s fit to be interested in.
Uh neither did "X"... She originally went viral on Tik Tok [0], and then built a following on Youtube and later in podcaster circles. As near as I can tell, she doesn't even have a twitter account. So it's pretty weird to credit Twitter with building her career.
In fact, I really can't think of anyone who originally went viral just from twitter. Lots of famous people have used twitter as a microblogging platform after gaining notoriety but by itself I wouldn't say it drives much popularity amongst the larger internet.
If the town itself is an aids-ridden, nazi infested bunch of child-porn-creating yobs.
They can keep that town and its square. I'd nuke it from orbit, only way to be sure.
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
For example, paying users get top spot in replies to tweets, which instantly meant spam bots with paid accounts posting completely unrelated replies on anything popular while real users who aren't trying to make money off twitter disappear at the bottom.
This isn't even complicated 4D chess user interaction design. Anyone with 2 neurons to rub together could see the obvious and immediate effect of such policy. If it's dropping the ball with something so obvious, how can you trust it to handle any situation more complex?
But that’s not what HN hates about X… any comment about the platform gets angry blindly political replies.
Whereas other platforms and topics get discussed in more neutral pros/cons terms.
Twitter was also not a good social media, in my opinion. Jack Dorsey was a pretty clueless leader and ostensibly talentless businessman. The platform was mostly loved ironically by jaded millennials, and the entire thing became a laconic quip-off between minor celebrities and brand representatives. It set the stage for LinkedIn-tier corporate cringe content that became a tentpole of late Twitter and now X too. Celebrities fled the site for personal use and left it as a political shit-slinging platform for C-tier online influencer personalities to rile up their audiences. The universal appeal that made Twitter interesting for bored idiots was completely abandoned in favor of this new ragebait paradigm. Worse yet, X is just as debt-ridden as Twitter was, so Elon is walking around to political haymakers just like Chris Poole did when his forum was bleeding cash: https://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/epstein-met-4chans-founder...
People like you existed back in the Twitter days too, insisting that it was valuable to ignore the site politics, trending topics, livestreams, crypto/NFT features and focus on the minority of positive content on the site. Those people were frankly deluded back in 2016, and you're equally as deluded trying to convince people that a cash-poor federal honeypot is tolerable now because the Hawk Tuah girl uses it to interact with her audience. You're the target audience for this slop, and you bit it hook line and sinker like a Facebook mom.
… I don’t eat Cheetos but I don’t get angry at the grocery store for promoting them to people who do.
Onlyfans was included under "almost every single aspect of the internet".
1. Snail-mail
2. Public cork-boards
3. E-mail
looks like someone has a pretty poor opinion of history lol
Twitter used to be a better place than this. I hope he is happy with the engagement that he brought on to the site.
And that was only a few years ago, it's all gone so far downhill :(
My experience with X is you get back exactly what you seek out and put into the platform. If you are engaging with toxic political nonsense, engaging with clickbait negativity, or try to farm engagement with hot takes that's the posts you get back. If instead you simply follow PEOPLE you find interesting, ignore the noise, block the really bad, within a week your feed is cleaned up and fun to go through.
Honestly those who are still crying about X and Elon are coming off like clingy ex-lovers who can't accept that the other side isn't thinking about them anymore. Move on if you don't like Elon or X, it's fine, be happy elsewhere... we don't need to listen to the belly aching.
Would also like to know what actual censorship folks complain about in the beforetimes, the twitter files were full of nothing, and if you complain about government takedown requests, trump round 1 had far more requests than under biden so uhh yeah.
Can't tell if it made a difference, though, as I haven't used Twitter for about decade.
I'm having a somewhat hard time understanding the world's "infatuation" with X. I never miss any important news despite having been off it for so long.
When did you ever miss important news if you weren’t on Twitter?
It may have lasted for a couple of years, a few at most, and the news clearly adapted. We (the reader/consumer) adapted.
Check out how long it takes for someone to post on Twitter they are leaving OpenAI or google or (...) and for non-Twitter users to find that out. It's minutes at best. Seconds, usually.
That moat is dry and filled in and has been for a decade
So you never missed anything if you weren’t on Twitter? And you have no idea if you’re “missing” anything now?