People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
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.
"aaaaaaaahahahahahaha"
[translate to english]
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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
I’m not sure exactly when that changed, but it completely destroyed what little use the platform had left to me.
It has become completely unusable.
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.
Do you have a citation on that?
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.
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.
People notice because some loud proponents of https://helloquittex.com/ came back, sometimes quietly.
Personally I think X & BS impact is over exaggerated anyway.
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?
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.
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.
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.