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- Hacker News
- Does this mean an attacker can turn any impression into any GET request?by gcr
- Not sure how much of an attack that is. FWIW the preloading is nice as a user.by stillatit
- It'd be an interesting way to count how many impressions your tweets get: add a URL to every tweet, put a tracking "pixel" in the webpage (assuming the webview loads all assets; if not, then just add the "pixel' URL to the tweet..by netsharc
- The new behavior is much better from a user perspective. When you tap on a post, it'll start loading the link in the background so once you are done reading the post the link will load immediately and the post will shelve on the bottom of the screen. It is very fluid, especially with blog posts / news articles.by porygonz
- What about links to malware or other illegal content that will be downloaded without me clicking on it...?
Is it only in the app, or also with the browser?
Crazy.
by mk89 - You don't get it. It's worth it for the sake of UX.
/s
by phoronixrly - > also with the browser
Browsers have been doing this forever: you make a request to a server (A) that you choose to interact with, and it could respond with various things (a redirect, a page with a meta refresh, a page with a frame / iframe, etc.) that result in your browser automatically making a request (and rendering the resulting page response) to some other server (B) that could get you in trouble.
However, in this classic scenario, when A starts sending you to B, you stop trusting A. This is simple when A's behavior is entirely determined by A's owner. What if it's determined by other users (not just A's owner)? Typically, A would be careful to not serve a redirect (etc.) based on user input, as that would be considered an "open redirect" vulnerability (with an exception for link shorteners, I guess). Interesting how the webview preloading that we're discussing now commits essentially this same offense.
by hunter2_ - I find it so sad that Twitter still gets traffic at all. Even if we put aside the super shady content on this platform (free speech, lol), the app, either on the web or mobile, has a sub-par user experience.
I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.
by robinhood - The algorithm is a mirror: it show more of what you interact with. You see “shady content” because you pay attention to it.
But you can also follow people and read only what they write, reply to them, and write yourself.
by nomdep - I like the new Twitter stance on speech and some of the new features, problem is the UI is super annoying. It was actually kinda bad before too, but it got way worse.by morshu9001
- It's good people like you who consider free speech some laughing matter don't lead the conversation.
I don't even want to think how dim the situation would be without him having taken over.
by maxlin - The app consistently shows me things that I want to see from the social circle around the people I follow and the topics they talk about. Alternative platforms like Threads are worse at this; the platform I hear the most about, Bluesky, brags about not having this. Maybe the Twitter experience varies by which topics you are interested in, you might get served more slop the more mainstream topics you follow. But the reason I have not quit due to unusability is because there isn't any unusability.by pie_flavor
- I have a great user experience on it.
Here's what I do:
I follow people who are consistently interesting and don't post too much.
Then I only use "Following". "For You" is an algorithmic attention vortex for the proles.
by Uhhrrr - There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky, but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons.
BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my feed enough that I don't usually see it.
They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better off not using either, but I still find myself going back to Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about Reddit, honestly.
by nkohari - X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective.by boringg
- I've been a long-time Twitter user. I don't hate Elon, so when he bought it I was cautiously optimistic.
I deactivated last week. The platform is bad and getting worse. It's scammy and spammy. Everything is designed around garbage engagement, so that the X team can brag about how good the product is doing.
by itsoktocry - I mean his personal lack of ethics, bigotries, greed, and ignorance is what directly made twitter what it is today. Maybe you should dislike him and hold him in low opinion.by zoeysmithe
- I am honestly curious what Elon would need to do for you to dislike him. That ship sailed for me long agoby alpineman
- Only last week is shocking to me. People were saying this about twitter for like 10+ years as soon as it was commercialized and was no longer just user content.by kjkjadksj
- I prefer the X now. Unlimited stream of unhinged, unfiltered thought stream from strangers straight into my feed.by vachina
- I just use the "Following" tab (and not the "For you" tab).by moduspol
- It's a full PvP server now. Old Social media outrage algos + paying people for posts further broke itby dayvid
- I follow a couple of writers on X through Nitter on a desktop browser. These writers inevitably draw bot comments whenever they touch on something relevant to some or another powerful country’s politics. For me, it’s easy to verify that these commentators (who often have convincing-sounding fake names and photos) are bots by simply ctrl-clicking on the commenters’ usernames and, in the tab that immediately opens, seeing at a glance that they post weird single-issue material at an unusually sporadic pace, and often in tellingly flawed English.
Do I suspect correctly that in the way most people consume X, though the official website or an app, this is not so transparent? Whether because opening new views is so slow on a phone screen, or because the official interfaces probably intersperse content with advertisements and other visual crap? I don’t think state actors would be so active in trying to manipulate discourse if the platform hadn’t degraded to a point where their activity isn’t obvious to most users.
- On a related topic, I've been following with some amusement the outrage on Reddit/r/Grok because Grok will no longer make porn. Apparently Grok was trained on all the NSFW material on X and Twitter before it intentionally so Grok could have a "spicy" mode. And spicy it was. Some of the stuff it made was really good and people loved it. But (allegedly) Musk changed his mind to go after enterprise and government accounts so spicy mode was killed and now there a lot of angry users complaining on Reddit.
My interest is this: It appears that it's not possible to over-ride the training effectively since NSFW material bleeds into normal image requests. Musk had this problem before trying to over-ride Grok's training, so at one point said he would have to retrain Grok. It's interesting to me that LLMs can't be steered effectively, which makes me wonder if they can ever really be aligned ("safe")
by labrador - I mean isn't this just considered data poisoning?by elpakal
- I think the more general issue with all AI and "safe" is that AI 'learned' what it knows from human content ... and we object to the content we as humans created.
Hard to avoid that problem.
by duxup - Why do so many supposedly smart humans think that we can make an artificial mind that is capable of AGI (or even something close to it), but from a completely detached evolutionary history and biological needs, and somehow force it to "align" to our human/biological/societal priorities?
Have none of these people ever had or been a teenager? At least teens have some overlapping biological requirements with non-teens that will force some amount of alignment.
- They're also doing something very scammy with ads - if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it, whereas it's much less sensitive on ordinary posts and behaves like any other app. This is clearly to increase click-through artificially.by noodlesUK
- The Tumblr app does this and it’s infuriatingby doawoo
- I noticed that too, it's so annoying.by lossolo