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- Hacker News
- one recent UX change that sucks is app reload always shoehorning you into the "for you" feed instead of your own timeline -- something that previously worked since the beginningby gegtik
- That has always been a recurring issue on Twitter's mobile app for the last decade. They are forever trying to balance the algo feed with the following feed. The clear separation between the two is the correct course IMO. I remember when old Twitter removed that option and tried to merge the two and it was far worse.by dmix
- There's a lot of negative about twitter here, especially related to timeline being shit.
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.
by jjcm - The algorithm is not a neutral one. It pushes conservative talking points, and toxic content.by Vasbarlog
- I want to echo this point. My X feed is not full of politics either. It tends to just be a mix of stuff I engage with, and I tend to engage with stuff I find interesting or funny.
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.
by kypro - That sounds like bad design.
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.
by AlienRobot - Quite the opposite - the fact that the default assumption of "what you (will) engage with" is a radioactive dumpster fire that you need to fastidiously Mute / Block / Not Interested / Less Like This / Not Relevant through to eventually "train" the algorithm to give you a consistent window into "really isn't as bad X" - that's proof that the default/average content and experience is every bit as bad as people make it out to be.
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".
by blargey - I disagree with your assessment. My twitter feed pre and post Elon’s takeover changes dramatically.
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.
by dagmx - My issue is that you can't exclude yourself from the algorithm. You post something even tangentially political, it immediately pops up in the feeds of people that have no connections with you at all and have the extreme form of views opposite to yours. The only way to prevent your tweets from being recommended to random people is to lock your account, and that makes it pointless to reply to people who don't follow you or to like their tweets because they don't see anything you do.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.
by grishka - imho Nikita did a good job and I wish he stayed on.
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.
by interleave - I'm aldo using x more than ever. I nearly stopped in the 2019-2021 era, always confused when people are complaining about it these days.by seany
- That's been my experience too. I left twitter a few years ago, but when I created a new account (only following AI and startups and people MAKING things, and movie and show clip accounts), it's been so awesome to keep track of all the stuff going on.by atonse
- I'm a supporter of X but even I admit I see non-stop AI bot commentsby unsupp0rted
- Are you paying? I see an endless stream of AI or bot-like posts in the replies of basically every tweet I see with any traction, but i'm not a paying user so I may have the bad version of the platform.by andrewingram
- https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/2085105586966827343#m
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.
by afavour - it has always been this way across every platform.
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.
- Well, anything you monetize it will turn to shit, period.by tamimio
- It’s been pretty clear for a while that Nikita has been looking at the ways twitter is bad- foreign accounts stoking hatred in the west for cash.
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.
by SilverBirch - Interestingly Nikita has made several negative comments about monetization, which have been publicly rebuffed by Musk, so they clearly had different visions for the company.by WatchDog
- I haven't been following it closely, but Nikita posted recently that they were running experiments to de-monetize the top accounts found to be reposting spam content. I don't know where it went, but he did say that in the A/B test the people who were no longer seeing content from those accounts were showing better interest in the site.
He seemed to get it. It's too bad he's leaving.
by Aurornis - The first SpaceX stock lockup expiration is tomorrow, timing seems nice assuming he had some in his pay package.by Aboutplants
- I forgot twitter is part of SpaceX.by rr808
- Maybe it is me, but for a random Wednesday in August there have been a strange amount of big moves today. Normally you expect quiet or nonsense.by mosura
- maybe the tech trade deadline is this week (baseball's was on monday)by neko_ranger
- It’s Q2 earnings time so likely people leaving after a quarterly vest.by etrautmann
- I will give him credit for launching country-of-origin. I'm really curious if it's been effective at all for users to get signal. I don't use X anymore since Musk bought it but though it was an interesting choice.by HaloZero
- Was the account origin feature removed soon after release?
- I recently had my account hacked - it was a pure lurker account, I only scrolled elephant videos and such, and never posted or did reactions or anything.
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.
- There are some of us who are old enough to remember Twitter’s true time of “unprecedented growth.”
I miss old Twitter.
by iambateman - Long live Rabble.by mrloopex