Hacker News Reader

Comment by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I'm a nostr user first and X is lurk only but I seldomly see anything by or about Musk and so does everyone else I speak to who actually uses it.

I suspect this has become more of a meme by Mastodon/Bluesky users than anything real.

I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.

Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.

I don't really use X but I'm in a chat where I'll often follow links, and man do I see a lot of racist stuff in replies. It's gross.

No different than an uncurated Reddit profile. You’ll get bombarded with garbage until effort is placed into the curation.

I made a new reddit account for a side project a few months ago and I couldn't believe how terrible reddit is when you don't have 10 years of subreddit curation. The default experience is to be dumped into what basically amounts to "Facebook boomer slop" mixed with a ton of hustle / small business / get rich quick content.

It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.

Their "open source algorithm" (Which is actually a random code dump that does not constitute the algorithm) contains enough evidence that Elon posts are massively boosted, though no smoking gun. It also classifies politics as democrat or republican and then acts to maintain echo chambers.

Weird, we must have very different definitions of "fascists".

I'm not talking about conservatives.

I mean I went from fresh account to unprompted groypers posting hitler hype edits and white nationalists posting happy merchant memes about the great replacement.

This is uniquely an X thing. It wasn't like this when I used twitter, and it isn't like that on any other socials I know.

The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.

But that's the US first amendment for you.

The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform. That content is there because the users and owners of the platform want it to be there.

> The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform.

The First Amendment (largely) prevents the government from choosing what a private company hosts on their platform for them.

A version of X hosted in Germany would look quite different.

In countries without the first amendment, private companies are required to block nazi content when they see it and ban nazis when they see them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com