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- Hacker News
- Whenever Meta is mentioned on HN, there will be HN users asking why people are still on Facebook or Instagram when we all know Meta hired psychology PHDs to make their products addictive yadda yadda. Usually you will just see people tell each other that they have gotten off Facebook before it became uncool. You hardly see anyone accusing each other of virtue signaling or having any kind of political slant.
But Twitter or X comes up, someone will say they don't use it, and people will start calling out their supposed virtue signaling and making wild speculations about their politics in no time.
Why?
by pibaker - Musk and his supporters project a lot. They have some neural condition or notoriety as popularity strategy or something that makes him/them hate everything, and they performatively state that "___ hates Elon"(often verbatim) out of that. It's not exactly organic.by numpad0
- I've never really noticed a difference in the trends for either. For the most part, all of the comments are about how anywhere but HN is complete shit and even HN is not as good as it used to be. There are always a few saying "but that's where everyone is". Inevitably, someone will post a link to something we all hate on constantly, be it one of these kinds of sites or a paywalled news article or whatever, and we're all just supposed to either know the currently working proxy or hope someone has already posted the link in the comments.
One thing I have universally noticed is it doesn't matter what it is or how many sides there are to it, someone always thinks HN is unfair to one side in favor of another. Usually multiple someone at the same time, and usually not even from the opposing side as each other claims.
And I don't know, maybe there is an 80/20 bias or something. I just don't know how I would or wouldn't reliably know that on intuition/things I notice rather than running the numbers on comment data.
by zamadatix - Believe it or not but outside the USA there are over a billion people who use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp services daily to conduct their daily lives and business. You do not speak for the average Indian or Indonesian and the world does not revolve around America.by veeti
- Edit: OK, I think I see your question.
Elon is much more explicitly/publicly on one side of US politics than Meta is. That's why people accuse his critics of playing politics (a convenient scapegoat).
- What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.
Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.
by NoboruWataya - Companies and celebrities are a major use case here. Lots of them (especially ones from non-English speaking countries) still use the site as their primary means of communication. For example, Nintendo doesn't have an official presence on Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, just Twitter.
There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/X.
by CM30 - Depends on the algos. My jp account sees none of that, mostly news, jokes and some random what’s happening in parts of Japan.
NA tuned account has more of what you said.
by tokioyoyo - From what I can tell, most Twitter users outside English speaking countries don't care about who is the CEO at all. Business as usual.by fg137
- In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).by frereubu
- It's deplorable, but our president in Mexico recently was asked about some current affairs a d her answer was "ive written about it in X , go see it there" ...
As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.
by xtracto - I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more.
On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.
I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.
by kyle-rb - >What is the main use case for X these days?
I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)
I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...
It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).
And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all!
>Is it still as popular as it used to be?
A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.
by Brendinooo - This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms.
So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.
by dwedge - Ex-x account holder here. Even if the world is going to fall and details about this even will be accessible exclusively behind X login wall, I am not setting up the account there again, NO WAY.
I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it. Almost certainly you won't miss it, as I didn't miss it. And there is a big chance you will get a big sight of relief, as I did.
If you really must, use https://twitterwebviewer.com/ which imo has better interface than Nitter.
by matesz - by jamedjo
- How come twitterwebviewer.com is still up? What do they do differently? Or is it official?by teiferer
- Fortunately it is almost impossible to set up a new account. The sign-up process is totally broken, links in the docs are stale and everything looks vibe coded. And they want a phone number and possibly an ID.
Nitter is good software, I have no idea how Twitter users put up with this garbage fire.
by rbwkap - Thanks for the site - Whac-A-Mole it is, then
Fortunately their URLs aren't obfuscated, so it works with Redirector
by arprocter - > I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same - remove your account and forget about it.
I'm not sure this is a great idea, if you have a somewhat unique username or you use that same username elsewhere.
Multiple times, me and others have changed usernames on some platform, and either immediately when you rename, or few seconds afterwards, some squatter will grab your old username, and most platforms don't care about helping you recover anything, so suddenly you've opened up phishing/spam venues associated with your old username.
Personally I'm not sure what the solution is to this, I've resorted to just not deleting accounts where this might happen, but leave the account inactive and unused.
- I do want to remove my account there.
But when I was doing it, I got a big warning that anyone could come up and register that handle for themselves. So I instead ended up just deleting every post, my personal details, and left the account alone (not using it anymore).
I know they do this intentionally (it's bad intentions all over the place on social networks nowadays, except HN, of course).
I'm terrified of somebody else just creating the account with the same handle I used to have, and impersonate me across old friends and contacts.
What do you suggest?
by 0xblinq - I disagree. Nitter's big pull was lightweight SSR, this site is not that. Nitter also actually _looks like_ Twitter more than this site!by Banditoz
- Twitter has gone from relatively open to instagram / facebook level of closedness where I can't even share a video with my friends because it asks them to log in. I had to rely on nitter and xcancel for that... Now that no longer works either
I have one niche that I use twitter for. If it wasn't for that - would have deleted my account long time ago. Things like this push me towards that direction, though.
by expedited123 - Someone should be putting AI to the test and make it walk the talk by making a viable alternative to Facebook/Twitter etc :)by Razengan
- I know it is Meta-owned and is just as algorithmic, but Threads is a breath of fresh air in terms of access - the website is pratically the same in terms of UX as the app, and it does not require an account to browse at all. Just thought it'd be worth mentioning.
- It's glorious. We no longer have to stumble into a blog post split into dozens of tweets.
- I actually paid for their dumb monthly subscription only so that I could download videos within the app to share with my friends who don't use X. Only after paying did I realize that by "download videos" it means "cache videos locally inside the app for offline playback". It still would not allow me to save the video to my local device. Misleading, tacky, possibly even desparate.by yuck39
- Just go ahead and quit! I had a niche use case for FB, but I decided to quit nevertheless because I didn't want to support the platform anymore. Today I don't miss it a single bit. (I never had a Twitter account in the first place.)by spacechild1
- I really don't think this is going to have the effect that X thinks it will have. I've always said that if XCancel and Nitter get taken down, I'm not going to suddenly decide to make an X account--I'm just going to stop reading their content.
Same for old.reddit.com. If they kill it, I'm not going to give in and create an account--I'm just going to stop visiting.
by ryandrake - But a few other people will make an account to continue readingby eviks