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.
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.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
It's wild to me how many replies are like this. I like X. HN, on the other hand is miserable, with censorship through down votes of unorthodox thinkers (PG would be completely down voted if he were to post here anonymously).
Turns out that even with the limited self-curation power X gives you it's not too hard to customize an experience you'll mostly enjoy; some people enjoy being miserable though. A large fraction of my "For you" feed is just neat artwork/fan artwork, which is peaceful. HN gets in "moods" with what gets to the top and I end up ignoring it for a while. Maybe one of these days I'll try one of the wrappers around HN that try to let you self-curate more. But despite that, for topics I do feel like engaging with, HN still wins by many miles. The "censorship" here is also very light-handed, whether from the staff or from fellow users; downvotes signal to authors that maybe their point of view is unwelcome and they'll be less inclined to post similarly, but they aren't outright removed even if downvoted/flagged to death. I've always had showdead on. I can also easily find stuff that's many years old, and read discussions from many years back that aren't full of "[deleted]" or other nonsense. (I got in the habit with old twitter to automate saving copies of images I've "liked", just like I save copies of videos on youtube I put in a "likes" playlist, because I hate it when things disappear out from under me.)
I have been disappointed that "Not interested" seems to have very little influence over anything on X, it does add some friction on shaping the experience to be what you make it. I pretty much never used the block (or mute) function pre-X, and now I've used it so much. Not just for the never-ending bots or blue-check click farmers either, sometimes it's just "that was such a stupid comment about Y; I'd prefer to deprioritize showing things related to Y, but at least by blocking I can ensure I won't see further remarks about Y from this person, or further dumb remarks from this person about some future Z". I have a little Tampermonkey script for HN that gives me similar functionality, "blocking" (more precisely muting) by username those I've decided I'd just rather not see comments from again for a variety of reasons. I never needed/wanted it before [insert date] but the HN decline has been real. (It just replaces the comment content with an "[unblock]" clickable, so it's cheap for me to give them an nth-chance to see some particular comment, and re-block if as usual it was also undesirable.) Staying out of certain HN threads entirely is the best self-curation one can do anyway, there are topics that just don't get reasonably discussed here yet keep being brought up.
Isn’t the whole point that they don’t want you to use the website - they want you to install the app. Why would they make the website an enjoyable experience?
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.
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.
I’m on X only for my business (AI, tech, startups) and stick to only my Following feed. But the second I accidentally click on the “For You” tab it’s a complete, utter, bot primed shit show.
That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.
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".
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.
> 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 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.
That's a fair perspective of before/after. And yea, possibly this was just me curating my feed to a point where it's kind/pleasant. It truly is though - mine is free from politics and dinguses, it's just design and ai people I follow.
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.
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.
Same. I just skip verified posts because the ones at the top are LLM replies. Unless I'm missing something, that should be easy to detect. Instead I've got ghost banned for a week+ now, no reason given and no way to appeal. X now is the place if you want to check for yourself the dead internet theory.
HN is downvoting you for expressing an opinion they don't like / don't agree with. There are other comments here with upvotes that are expressing much lower effort opinions, but they're expressing the right opinion.
I need to quit this place. It's a total echo chamber these days – arguably worse than X because at least when you express an unpopular opinion there people can't just flag and burry your post.
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.
I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.
If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.
His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.
His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.
He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.
In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
Daytime television was intermediated by tv producers.
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
It's not even about wrong-think. So many people I know just drifted away--or cut contact and nothing equivalent replaced it. It was a fairly important type of social media to me and many of the the people I knew/know but it really isn't anymore.
The town square concept has never made sense. The idea that you have a place where everybody goes and scream at each others insults non stop is completely insane in the real world
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.
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.
the fact that this recently changed on twitter means it has not, in fact, "always been this way across every platform"
Except that it hasn’t.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
Man this guy was obnoxious. Even his farewell post is dripping in annoying quips.
What an absolute miserable experience Twitter is now, even more than before, I can feel my cortisol spiking every time I open that website.
Maybe stop?
It's wild to me how many replies are like this. I like X. HN, on the other hand is miserable, with censorship through down votes of unorthodox thinkers (PG would be completely down voted if he were to post here anonymously).
Ironically for you, the HN guidelines recommend to not complain about the voting system:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Now read the rest of those guidelines and then other comments in this thread.
Agree totally. X is pretty open. I like reading the stories her more but it's an extreme group think of only one position
I find I get a lot more hacker news from X now than HN.
AI, database tech, etc I find I read about it on X much earlier and the comments are a lot less negative.
X is what you make it. It will feed you with more of what you read and interact with.
Turns out that even with the limited self-curation power X gives you it's not too hard to customize an experience you'll mostly enjoy; some people enjoy being miserable though. A large fraction of my "For you" feed is just neat artwork/fan artwork, which is peaceful. HN gets in "moods" with what gets to the top and I end up ignoring it for a while. Maybe one of these days I'll try one of the wrappers around HN that try to let you self-curate more. But despite that, for topics I do feel like engaging with, HN still wins by many miles. The "censorship" here is also very light-handed, whether from the staff or from fellow users; downvotes signal to authors that maybe their point of view is unwelcome and they'll be less inclined to post similarly, but they aren't outright removed even if downvoted/flagged to death. I've always had showdead on. I can also easily find stuff that's many years old, and read discussions from many years back that aren't full of "[deleted]" or other nonsense. (I got in the habit with old twitter to automate saving copies of images I've "liked", just like I save copies of videos on youtube I put in a "likes" playlist, because I hate it when things disappear out from under me.)
I have been disappointed that "Not interested" seems to have very little influence over anything on X, it does add some friction on shaping the experience to be what you make it. I pretty much never used the block (or mute) function pre-X, and now I've used it so much. Not just for the never-ending bots or blue-check click farmers either, sometimes it's just "that was such a stupid comment about Y; I'd prefer to deprioritize showing things related to Y, but at least by blocking I can ensure I won't see further remarks about Y from this person, or further dumb remarks from this person about some future Z". I have a little Tampermonkey script for HN that gives me similar functionality, "blocking" (more precisely muting) by username those I've decided I'd just rather not see comments from again for a variety of reasons. I never needed/wanted it before [insert date] but the HN decline has been real. (It just replaces the comment content with an "[unblock]" clickable, so it's cheap for me to give them an nth-chance to see some particular comment, and re-block if as usual it was also undesirable.) Staying out of certain HN threads entirely is the best self-curation one can do anyway, there are topics that just don't get reasonably discussed here yet keep being brought up.
Isn’t the whole point that they don’t want you to use the website - they want you to install the app. Why would they make the website an enjoyable experience?
Stop using it! It is like an oxy addiction and we all just need to stop - it isn't good for us.
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.
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.
I’m on X only for my business (AI, tech, startups) and stick to only my Following feed. But the second I accidentally click on the “For You” tab it’s a complete, utter, bot primed shit show.
That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.
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".
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.
> 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.
Isn't the same true of hackernews though?
What do you mean? HN doesn't have a social graph. It's an entirely different beast as far as I'm concerned.
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.
That's a fair perspective of before/after. And yea, possibly this was just me curating my feed to a point where it's kind/pleasant. It truly is though - mine is free from politics and dinguses, it's just design and ai people I follow.
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.
maybe the tech trade deadline is this week (baseball's was on monday)
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.
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.
Same. I just skip verified posts because the ones at the top are LLM replies. Unless I'm missing something, that should be easy to detect. Instead I've got ghost banned for a week+ now, no reason given and no way to appeal. X now is the place if you want to check for yourself the dead internet theory.
There's has been a noticeable improvement in bots for me since the new Android app rolled out a few weeks back.
Not exactly sure how that changed anything but I see a lot less bot slop now.
I'm a supporter of X but even I admit I see non-stop AI bot comments
HN is downvoting you for expressing an opinion they don't like / don't agree with. There are other comments here with upvotes that are expressing much lower effort opinions, but they're expressing the right opinion.
I need to quit this place. It's a total echo chamber these days – arguably worse than X because at least when you express an unpopular opinion there people can't just flag and burry your post.
The reddit crowd has found HN
"I don't see bots on Twitter anymore" "I keep seeing LLM content all the time" How is one of these a "lower effort opinion"?
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.
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.
> We've climbed 70 spots in the App Store since this time last year.
Shows how valuable the Play Store is to them
I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.
Nikita was always a bad hire.
If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.
His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.
His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.
He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.
The first SpaceX stock lockup expiration is tomorrow, timing seems nice assuming he had some in his pay package.
In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214903
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964
He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.
Elon was well on top of what AI was capable of. That sounds less luck and more well played.
How is this guy who keeps starting or taking over and fixing wildly successful companies always this lucky?
It has collapsed. It is just bots and racism that have collapsed it, not a technical failure.
It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.
>It has also collapsed
>There are rumors
Interesting methodology you use to make concrete assertions.
The HN discussions you linked to:
1. 10 points, 15 comments
2. 9 points, 17 comments
3. 44 points, 84 comments
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
(471 points, 512 comments)
Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.
> X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history.
A little cocky.
Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
> the telegraph, the telephone, the television
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
Daytime television was intermediated by tv producers.
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
It's not even about wrong-think. So many people I know just drifted away--or cut contact and nothing equivalent replaced it. It was a fairly important type of social media to me and many of the the people I knew/know but it really isn't anymore.
I guess.
If the town itself is an aids-ridden, nazi infested bunch of child-porn-creating yobs.
They can keep that town and its square. I'd nuke it from orbit, only way to be sure.
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions
Onlyfans was included under "almost every single aspect of the internet".
The town square concept has never made sense. The idea that you have a place where everybody goes and scream at each others insults non stop is completely insane in the real world
Yes that would be insane, but that's not an accurate depiction of my x feed at all