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Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

Boy this would be nice! X have obviously decided that using the law to take down people fixing its issues is more profitable than fixing them. I'm really curious though, are they right? (Ignoring ethics etc)

I used to glance at Twitter when it was less hostile, now I don't bother since it tries to force you to sign in before viewing content and I don't have an account. But now my interaction is 0, nothing is going to get me to make an account. If other people are like me, X will just continue to lose users without gaining any. Which the limited available data on use suggest is in fact happening.

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Is the point really to be profitable? Or could perhaps its owners be willing to risk losing money for more power over the information landscape?

Yeah, that's a really good point that I hadn't really considered. Although, maybe the same argument stands? If X's lockdown leads to less users, then doesn't that translate to less control over the information landscape too?

Well, if one of the big social media platforms is now a far-right playground, that changes the political landscape.

Elon Musk is using twitter to create a global far-right platform that right-wing politicians can use to experiment with talking points before watering them down and bringing them to the public.

All media orgs have X accounts, and see such things. And posts on X are in the news regularly.

So I don't think experimentation is an angle.

Then you are not thinking very much.

Media does report on far-right output on twitter sometimes, but not often. And when they do, it often boosts the message instead.

It's the same mechanism as how Donald Trump originally got elected.

...and at the same time, they are focus-testing extremist messaging.

Stop with the personal attacks. You can disagree with my assessments, without claiming I "dont think much".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

I'm sorry.

The purpose was to underline that catering to the far-right and providing them with a space try out messaging is not a very hidden aspect of X.

I didn't mean to imply that you don't think in general.

Thank you.

Thank God there aren't any other media companies like that

Yep precisely it. Worth it to control the narrative, even if it's for his own vanity. When you have that much money what else do you spend it on. X is a toy.

Reddit seems to have reversed course with making users sign in as well (or my adblock has updated and removed the forced login modal or something.) but my thought was simply: "Well, I guess I just won't view Reddit content anymore, big whoop."

I actually wish all social media companies would do this aggressively so I have no choice but to stop using social media

> "Reddit seems to have reversed course with making users sign in as well (or my adblock has updated and removed the forced login modal or something.)"

I don't know if Reddit are doing it less now or not, but it's worth noting that it's always been somewhat hit and miss.

I suspect a mix of very data-driven testing (to try to show it to people who will login, and not show it to those who'll just bounce), and technical debt confusing things. But often it will vary not only from one person to another, but even for the same person between two different web browsers, or connected through two different IPs, or whatever.

Oh, interesting that might explain it!

Not exactly. They only require login for old reddit. The reason given is that AI companies were still scraping old reddit.

(I'm not necessarily agreeing with this; after all it's trivial to make an account for an AI company. I'm just saying that's the reasoning behind it)

Last week I was getting hit with the login requirement constantly, not at first but after scrolling a little bit or clicking on a link. This week, haven't seen that once.

you can set the redesign_optout cookie to true to get old reddit back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576815

There's the dichotomy of the walled garden, how to minimize scraping/bots/inauthentic amplification etc. Is a town square a town square if you can't hear what's going on from the public lawn on the edge of the square? I feel like HN does a better job, and the ecosystem of external views, LLM/human summary, HN search etc. Is quite exciting! but the scale between the two is one factor and the moderation we accept here also comes with a constraint on topics discussed and restrictions on speech (tradeoffs that I feel are worth it in our context here) So worlds apart and yet adjacent!

Well, Twitter/X is also a service with very large network effects. So many people I knew at some level tuned out that it became a very optional thing to glance at--and none of the replacements really took off in my estimation. The bottom line is that I just stopped using that whole category of social media.

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