> Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another shot.

This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error, does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb oversight in the funnel

I avoid most Twitter/X content after I deleted my account but it's helpful when it gets linked in HN.

  Source                           |  Destination
  -----------------------------------------------------------                                 
  ^https?://x.com/(.*)             |  https://xcancel.com/$1
  ^https?://twitter.com/(.*)       |  https://xcancel.com/$1
  ^https?://instagram.com/(.*)     |  https://imginn.com/$1
  ^https?://www.instagram.com/(.*) |  https://imginn.com/$1

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector...

   ^https://x.com|https://xcancel.com

  ^https://instagram.com|https://imginn.com

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-cont...

Not being updated any more, but might be useful to someone.

    ^https?://(?:www\.)?instagram.com/(.\*)

Most sites serve a special version of the page to visitors with "googlebot" in their UA string and/or coming from an IP range google controls with more SEO'd contents too.

The search --> visit --> immediate redirect to login results should be de-ranked.

It's just not scalable into the exploitative cash cows that VCs drool over.

Quality has never been synonymous with monetization for as long as I can remember. The primary driver of low quality or harmful content is greed. Guess what fuels the most greed in modern society?

> A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.

Are you suggesting that including Twitter in search results would mitigate propaganda?

I would much prefer if Google just stopped showing inaccessible information completely.

If the search engine orders by relevance, than I can make the decision for myself of where to trade-off with paywalls.

I don’t want a search engine to make the decision for me because it cannot: what if the only answer to my question is behind a paywall?

I didn’t make that claim, i am contesting the claim “Only relevance should decide ranking”. I am arguing ease of accessibility should be a factor.

Google is doing the correct thing in not discriminating against content which is paid or behind login walls. Some of the most important content are on social media, and most of them only serve logged in users.

If you want to decide yourself how search results are presented to you, you should try Kagi for a search engine.

Is that the same as the fail whale era?

Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to create an account, or log in.

Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.

Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the same dark patterns you described too.

> Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.

The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon.

> Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform.

In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in.

I'm getting downvoted because people are either to young to remember the web in the 00s, or just misremembering what the web was like.

> The big platforms were accessible without login a few years ago, now they're not. That is literally a recent phenomenon.

I gave examples of big platforms that weren't accessible without a login. And modern platforms were also heading this way long before LLMs existed.

Redit and Twitter didn't restrict their API use because of LLMs. Meta haven't locked down Instagram because of LLMs. they do it because they need people locked into their ecosystem. LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before. And before then, it was just people leeching off other people's work. This is a tale as old as the web. And I remember it well, having been both a web developer and user of the web since 1994.

Lets also not forget all the attempts that Microsoft took to try and control the internet and how AOL had their own walled gardens too. Yahoo had a plethora of cool features, most of which weren't available without a Yahoo account. And so on and so forth.

Walled gardens are not a recent phenomenon.

> In the past, I've often looked at Facebook posts without logging in.

You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)

For example this archived page from Facebook. Notice how there's no way to advance without signing up? https://web.archive.org/web/20070630190243/https://register....

---

I know people want to blame AI for everything that goes wrong these days be that simply isn't the reason that platforms lock down. They do it because thats how you make money. You either:

1. lock down and charge people for access

or

2. lock down and sell your user data

(or, depressingly too often, both)

Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.

What AI has changed is the increase in invasive bot detection on sites that don't monetise anonymous access.

Yet the recent wave of API & public site lockdowns were mostly kicked off when Musk took over Twitter, and he publicly stated that a big reason was using the data for AI training. Similarly, platforms like Reddit have started selling access to that data for the same purpose.

> LLMs are just the latest way to scrape data, but the practice isn't new. Search engines did it before.

LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data. When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.

> You're misremembering. Literally the only reason I have a Facebook account because I needed to check someone's profile and couldn't without signing up. This was back in the early to mid 00s (I can't recall exactly when, but it was long before Facebook was a household name. Back when MySpace was still cool and before Twitter was launched)

It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature. Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.

> Giving people free and anonymous access isn't profitable. It wasn't before and it still isn't now. AI hasn't changed that.

Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data. This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.

Exactly. LLMs aren't the cause of that change.

> LLMs aren't used to scrape data, they're trained on that scraped data.

Clearly I know that. My point wasn't that LLMs are literally scraping the sites but instead making the differentiation between scraping that happened before LLMs and scraping that happened after.

> When search engines did it, it was useful for the sites, since it lead people to them. With LLMs they no longer have to visit the sites, which is why the platforms want to monetize their data directly.

Actually, that's not always true. Search engines have included snippets from sites for years and that's also been a well-discussed point of contention.

Then there's also Google's attempt to switch people to AMP to further lock people into Google's walled garden. I accept this isn't quite the same thing but it's still an example of how search engines fight to prevent people from leaving their ecosystem.

Some sites, like MSN, literally host news articles from others sites on their own site too. I'm sure Microsoft has an agreement to do this, but it's yet another example of how companies try to lock visitors into their own site.

I accept the AMP and MSN examples are tangential, but they do still illustrate the same point I'm making about how it's not a new thing for platforms to use dark patterns to keep people from navigating away from their platform. This isn't something new that's happened in the last couple of years.

> It's a bit ridiculous to tell me I'm misremembering when you're talking about a different feature

Would you rather I just said you were citing falsehoods like you accused me of?

Also I'm not talking about a different feature. I'm talking about the exact same stuff I was talking about from my original comment in this thread.

> Yes, to look at most profile data you needed (need?) to be logged in. But you could view public posts without logging in as long as you had the link, I used to do that for various types of communities explicitly after I'd deleted my Facebook account.

So you agree that platforms have locked content down and this isn't a recent phenomenon then ;)

Making the distinction between profile data and public comments is a little strained when it's clear that Facebook has invested heavily into their walled garden and the vast majority of content on Facebook has always been hidden behind that walled garden.

> Literally most of the web is open, for free and anonymously, and is profitable due to ads & selling visitor data.

Smaller sites make money from ads. But we were talking about big platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sites that make money from ads are just making small change compared to platforms.

> This is changing because 1) people are no longer visiting the pages, they're instead asking LLM clients, and 2) free and anonymous access is getting harder due to sites getting hammered by crawlers for LLM training purposes. This has been in the news a lot over the last few months.

This I do agree with. But that wasn't the statement that was originally made. Those sites will remain open or shutdown entirely. They're not going to go private ala Twitter and Instagram. Their business model is entirely different -- often intentionally not run as a business in the first place. Sometimes just passion projects with no ads and/or run at a loss.

The part I was disagreeing with was that the dark patterns seen in Instagram et al are a result of the rise of LLMs. That simply isn't true.

I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another).

At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too.

The complete firehose was expensive and paid-only.

You could get a sampling of Tweets at a lower rate through the API. It wasn’t the complete firehose, though.

And if you click on an account you just get top posts of all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's impossible to even find the context while being logged off.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365

Edit: Some more posts -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472

There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time.

What if those errors are trying to tell you to install one?

OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to where you were without having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this instance).

FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and scrolling in all directions.

That was partly due to websites being broken. You can still find some old discussions on Stack Overflow about features of their websites not working correctly in it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000708/file-upload-con...

And if they didn't, it was not for lack of trying... What does it take for people to delete this shit?

I remember that this "became news" some time ago, but it's always pretty obvious the moment it loads.

App presenting an SFSafariViewController? "Convenience" that's intended to keep users in the app.

App presenting a WKWebView? Assume it's loaded with spyware scripts.

TBF it's "only" sites with a meta pixel, and on Android. But in my book this does not matter, it shows their intentions

I'm sure there's also no user-controlled firewall to stop it on Android either.

My wife just didn't know what a web view was (she still doesn't), but she prefers using the browser after I showed her how to "escape" Facebook's web view and open pages in Safari where the content blocker and ad blocker extensions could do their work. You probably have a point about preloading pages, but until content and ad blockers start working in all web views, then I agree with the person you're replying to: nobody wants a damn web view.

Meanwhile a WebView will show whatever HTML you throw at it, but it won't do any of that other fun stuff because the app that created it can access and manipulate the content (e.g. stealing your passwords) and the OS doesn't know if content filtering is relevant in that webview (since it's just the "show some HTML in a browser-type view" control and maybe it's important to see everything as-is). Being able to access the WebView also means the app can watch where you browse, what URLs, etc. so it can see what you're looking at even once you leave the page it opened to.

So yeah, apps can have a user-friendly experience; Telegram for the longest time used a SafariWebView so that everything was nice and neat. Then they decided to change their UI to a regular WebView and suddenly everything was full of trash again and I had to set it to "open in Safari" instead.

The back button supplied by the OS is perfectly capable of this (at least on Android I have witnessed this)

They're also often very confused why they can't find links they've opened in web views in their browser's tabs or history.

I think you misunderstood. The problem wasn't/isn't that sites were mobile sized on mobile devices. The problem was/is sites that optimize for mobile, and look terrible or are hard to use on a desktop or laptop screen.

The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone linked...

Slack, Teams, confluence, jira, etc all open a pdf in a in-browser preview thing. Then if you try scrolling, it makes the PAGE contents bigger, but does NOT zoom into the pdf.

Who thought of this? Who thought it was a good idea?

Never have I wanted to open a preview of the pdf.

Twitter's handling of opening links in its own webview is a bit different, unless Slack, Teams, Confluence, Jira all open these browser instances within some sort of webview wrapper as well(I wouldn't think so). So its a little bit different

I assume they are trying to be "helpful" but 99% of the time the user's browser can render the PDF more conveniently than the app's embedded viewer (not breaking scrolling and zooming etc.)

Also, it can be useful to keep the PDF in the context of the app you opened it in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a window manager that surfaces the fact that, for example, one macOS Preview window was opened from the browser, another from Slack, another from Finder, etc. Compare to iOS, where opening a PDF viewer from an app will result in a button at the top-left corner to go back to the app you opened it from.

The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.

I agree website viewers are pointless. But most of the time I actually like the browser viewer better, if it opens links directly, than offline viewers. Because I regard PDFs as websites (similar to jpeg files), and I normally don't want to accumulate them in my download folder.

I agree though that the browser viewers are often too bare-bones.

Which tend to be, imo, even worse! I think I'd rather have a toner container explode on me than try to suffer through the experience of using Aconex's PDF utility ever again.

I didn't think IG does something similarly shady

I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.

Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?

There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.

And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem.

Believe me, you can live without Twitter.

A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness).

> Is it just my friends?

If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.

Kind of takes the agency away from full-grown adults, doesn't it?

How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?

> How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?

You assume that "having principles" means having your principles, and that for someone to disagree must mean they are unprincipled and simply chasing money/audience/fame. This kind of attitude comes across as incredibly arrogant and un-self-aware, and people/voters en masse want nothing to do with it.

The reality is that many millions of people are principled, and they simply have different principles.

For example, "opposing views should be aired and discussed" is a principle widely held by many millions of voters that the left has had an incredibly hard time understanding, respecting, and digesting.

Look at JK Rowling. Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left.

Say Rogan sticks to his guns. He would face similar, never-ending attacks, no left-leaning figure could attend his podcast without becoming guilty by association, so he'd end up interviewing basically the same people as he does now, only he wouldn't cater to some people that, given somewhat recent events, would most probably celebrate him getting murdered.

I reckon we shouldn't take away the agency away from the adults who made purity testing a common practice, given the utter disaster we are experiencing as a consequence.

This framing is laying on the narrative a little bit thick don't you think? It makes it seem like she's hated for being wealthy, when it is actually because she has been funding hate groups and calling for trans people to be physically attacked.

The "standing up for women" rhetoric is a little bit hollow in the face of her non-existent feminism when the subject isn't physically attacking trans women, she didn't make a single comment during the recent uptick in abortion debates taking place in the UK for example.

She has done neither of these things you claim. Please refrain from spreading misinformation.

Can you provide any source for her "calling for trans people to be physically attacked"? Because you seem fixated on it, and I've just spent the last 15 minutes looking for one, and I can't find it.

What I can find is her spending so much goddamned money on philanthropy that she stops being a billionaire, while not dodging a dime of taxes precisely because she considers it her obligation. A fortune amassed in what is probably the most ethic way possible, through exploitation of nobody, writing books.

Related to this I can find the foundation of the Volant Charitable Trust, "a grant-making trust to support charitable causes in Scotland, helping vulnerable groups with an emphasis on women, children and young people."

I can also find a comment of "every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them".

And that's the point. You want to paint her as some lunatic who would like to hunt trans people down for sport, when it's crystal clear that she has the "radical" (standard 2018 radical leftist) notion that trans women are not the same thing as biological women and that the definition of women shouldn't be changed to appease to them.

But again. It's not worth it to engage, because we both know I can spend 20+ minutes working on this reply and you are not going to change your stance. An apostate is worse than a heathen, which is why people complain about Rowling rather than anyone who is actually right wing. Because you are scared that if you defended her, you would face the same judgement. Making the world a worse place through and through.

That was my bad, I knew that she had done something abhorrent and indefensible but it was 5 months ago and I'd forgotten which kind of hatred she had been producing specifically. I'll cite the source first next time.

1: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPG5DlIFIz/ -- I don't have a twitter account to forward the original, but there are news stories about this from the time if you're unsatisfied with that link.

You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls").

If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.

site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos

There is an extremely toxic component to Bluesky’s user base, unfortunately, with the many attacks on the CEO for not banning Jesse Singal being testament to that. But for what it’s worth in the circles I’ve cultivated there I now see very little of those toxic people, and I don’t see any support for their behaviour. So I hope in time a more open culture will win out.

Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation.

There was a sweet-spot, subjectively speaking, for Twitter mid-2022.

https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/

Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base there after the election spike that it's still growing toward the peak after dropping to a little less than half.

Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes, if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn't showing up on Bluesky.

> Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?

I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming that everyone is using that same site is silly. It doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other people are using other sites.

I would Press X to Doubt (perhaps ironically, for this X...). Searching around, it seems like Bluesky has about a tenth as many total users as X has active users, but it's definitely growing at a faster rate, and X might be declining in active users.

Anecdotally, lots of people I noticed leaving for Bluesky very loudly and publicly quietly returned to posting on X after a while.

https://bsky.app/search?q=%22induced+operator+norm%22 https://x.com/search?q=%22induced%20operator%20norm%22&src=t...

https://social.overheid.nl/@RWSverkeersinfo is for traffic conditions

https://social.overheid.nl/@knmi is the royal national weather service

Some services have shut down their Mastodon presence because their social media team found too little interaction and they don't want to use simple forward bots that nobody responds to, unfortunately.

About 1/3 of the people in the USA use Twitter. Which means 2/3rds of us do not. Reddit's audience is larger, at about 1/2 of Americans. Mainstream media's is 2/3rds. And the true information flow happens when people talk IRL after consuming some or all of the above.

So while yes, Twitter has a significant audience, they are not holding a monopoly on live information in any form.

(And this isn't even getting into whether or not people trust each of these information platforms. People often consume media but don't trust what they hear. Which is probably a good thing.)

What people obsess over and see on X is literal propaganda

If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels, you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing an hour early will not help you

Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video several years back)

X will tell you to invest in <Scam>

X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being on fire.

People who still insist that X has good, reliable, and timely news are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out the signal from the noise, that validation takes longer than just waiting for actual news to filter out. So instead, people who get their "news" from X just don't validate.

X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and those tabloids have on occasion broken world news. But if you bought one every single day because of that, you would be a moron.

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.

Really depends on who you're following

IMO, Reddit/HN-esque sites are better for following topics, and Bluesky/X/Mastodon are better for following people. Maybe hashtags are a good middleground but I don't have enough experience using those sites to say.

(Disclaimer: I don't use any social media except for HN.)

Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting).

Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick.

I personally think that people try too hard to avoid politics and shame those who "make things political" – especially in tech. We live in an inherently political world, and our industry is increasingly political as it's co-opted by political figures and even dictators across the world. Trying to avoid talking about it is like stuffing our fingers in our ears and pretending reality isn't real, imo.

The danger that this creates an echo chamber has to be weighed against allowing trolls to run unchecked, or worse be like Twitter where these people get promoted to the top because ragebait generates big engagement numbers.

Ultimately, the entire social media world needs to admit that maximizing engagement is a bad idea. They have to somehow convince the advertisers that having their product next to content designed entirely to enrage the reader is not good.

I check the mainstream headlines once a day, kind of like checking the weather. There may be something I need to know. But then I move on.

Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless.

The problem with that attitude is that eventually democracy itself suffers, when people don't care no more. The word "democracy" itself points that out - "demos" means "the people".

I don't have any problem with people having and voicing thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations about politics, especially with people with whom they disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of what's happening on social media, but that's a different topic.)

I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow topics, not people, and there isn't a great way to do that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber. And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated the site is at this point.

The "Following" tab is literally that - chronologically ordered posts and replies from accounts you follow. The "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" tabs give you algorithm-sourced stuff that is somewhat connected to who you follow.

When I click on the tab for the Game Dev feed, I see nothing but posts about game dev. When I click on the Astronomy feed, I only see telescopes and pictures taken with telescopes.

I like John Green a lot, including his vlogs that are just him speaking about stuff he doesn't know for half an hour, but I still do not go read what he posts on Bluesky, because it's as low quality, low signal, low intent, and low effort as comments here on HN.

It's just not useful. It's not a good use of my time to read random tweets from people.

When I first got a twitter account in like 2010, I very very instantly recognized it was not for me. If something is important, someone will take the effort to make an actual piece of real content about it, like a blog or video or essay or book. Hell, even a thorough reddit post is better than microblogging.

If it's not worth going through that effort to get the message out to people, why should I consider that a valuable message?

It's emblematic of the past 20 years of social development in my opinion. If the only thing stopping you from getting the word about something super duper important is that writing a page essay is too hard, nobody really needs to care about that, because writing an essay is so easy we make children do it

It's all noise. The signal doesn't go on twitter, it goes on real platforms where you might make money from good signal, or like, a freaking scientific paper, or the front page of a news org.

Personally, I'm pessimistic that there are many remaining sources of substantial discourse and discussion at all. I just pirate a lot more university-press books from Anna's Archive.

That's just what it's meant for, low effort swipes, shitposting, retweets out of context etc.

It is notable that in order to actually accomplish their "We want a platform where a celebrity says something and you instantly get that something", Twitter had to do a lot of work and pain curating who "celebrities" are. The alternative is everyone getting a waterfall of shit, because the vast majority of people do not have PR agencies between them and their tweet button, and do not have anything important or meaningful to say that is better said fast and short than long and naunced. The entire point of microblogging is to eschew nuance.

That's absurd full stop.

Why would you ever want to know whatever low effort comment sparked thanksgiving dinner arguments at other people's thanksgivings?

> I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I would expect from someone of her intelligence and scientific training.

Please tell me which of "Water fluoridation is a well understood treatment, and people who are telling you it's bad for you are just lying", "<Knitting trivia>" or "Target is doing poorly as a business right now" or "ICE doing gestapo things" is "unsubtle", or why any of that should be "subtle", which is a strange choice of word.

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.

Bluesky does actually have an algorithmic feed ("Discover"), but it isn't the default.

But you can also follow people and read only what they write, reply to them, and write yourself.

Oh, and the owner's account.

This might be because, absent other information, the algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences.

Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the algorithm.

The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed?

... of people actively using Twitter, yes. Which is precisely the point.

The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to weight the input to the algorithm away from “what does an average user pay attention to” and more towards “what does a paying user pay attention to.”

Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO short-sighted, business goal. What it is not is a way to create a fair and impartial “mirror” as you have described.

"It's gone to hell"

"No, it just reflects your tastes"

"That's objectively false: create a new account and see what happens."

"..."

Even ignoring musk's takeover, I think it's a better model that reduces doomscrolling, ragebait and generally low quality interactions.

If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as the best worst option.

Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash.

I went to the home page and "for you" was populated about 80% from known right accounts and angry right-flavored screeds from people I didn't recognize.

The other 20% was just a smattering of random, normal stuff. None of it about pets.

> [George Hotz] I'm upset when I see PG get banned for mentioning mastodon

> [Elon] yeah, that was a mistake

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=42m14s

Meta note: it's worth listening to this historical 'space' in full (well, the first ~1h while Elon's on). The meta-pattern becomes obvious: people (esp nay-sayers) are outraged about ~20 different issues, X since addressed most of them, but the outrage-mob moved on to new issues, X will address them, and so on.

The point: the ragey mob is never satified, X moves very quickly (partly due to it's willingness to try things, and occasionally fail in the short term) but this strategy is long-term optimal.

It will be extremely interesting to re-visit this thread in 10 years. X is currently a gateway for promoting Grok (with 11-figure DAU potential), and X is acquiring financial licences in US states, with a view to becoming an 'everything app' (something which the East seems to have - in the forms of wechat, Grab - but the West weirdly doesn't). If X can be the West's first 'everything app'.. trillion+ dollar valuation isn't out of the question.

As long as pay-per-click exists it’ll always be like that. Minimally necessary action will be probed, negative feedback (“won’t buy this on principle/will bug others to raise awareness on ethical concerns”) eventually making the industry raise the bar higher.

Beats outright malware (auto-installing IE toolbars, yay!) and popup/popunders on a click anywhere eras of the past, but despite any possible illusions, the bar isn’t particularly high still (modern web is still nauseously popup-ridden), when viewed through the modern first-world optics.

Not that I like anything about this - just an observation.

They did it for Android, too. Just the other day, I tried to view replies for an ad, and thought I'd accidentally clicked the ad multiple times before realizing that the replies indicator and even the timestamp (which is the normal "just go to the tweet" valve) were behaving the same as an ad click.

Edit: Re-reading your comment, not sure if that was exactly what you meant, or if you just meant that it'll e.g. open the ad if you try to scroll on it.

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")

Hard to avoid that problem.

Agree. Even the Christian Bible has horrific content that in some communities would require trigger warnings

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.

I think the assumption you mention is, frankly, sociopathic.

(sorry i don't remember the name but there was an example with a model liking howl to showcase this)

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.

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.

In this case, it’s obvious that a lot of Russian state-actor employees, for instance, are not passing their writing through an LLM, but rather are just quickly vomiting out a comment in their imperfect English. Exposés of Russian troll factories show that a lot of these employees are young university-educated people who only want the money, and don’t have strong feelings for the propaganda they are posting, so they half-arse it.