I run an ecom store that gets a lot of its customers from Twitter. I was also shocked to see my traffic double or triple overnight and thought the algorithm had blessed me and my business. Soon realized what was actually happening. Thought other traffic-monitors might appreciate this explanation.
Meanwhile Nikita Bier is pretending they never suppressed tweets with links to begin with, offering the alternative explanation: "a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn't get a clear signal whether the content is any good"[1]. A bit of a rewriting of history since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other links/platforms, even banning people who shared profiles of other social networks (including Paul Graham for a period). They suppressed all links shortly after.
[0] https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985464687350485092
[1] https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1979994223224209709
> 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.
URL Auto Redirector:https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector...
[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.
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?
And that's different from Google, how?
A search engine which prioritizes free content, reviewed intelligently, is curation, and not Goodharted gotcha games. If you can crawl the web and index sites with human level content curation, with a reasonably performant scaffolding, you can prevent SEO style exploitation, and use natural language rules like "does this content contain text attempting to game the ranking of a site or violate policy XYZ?"
Most AIs use bing and google, so the best you can get is a curated list from the already censored and politically filtered results from those sources, funneling commercial traffic toward the highest paying adtech customers - it's just refined, ultra-pure SEO results, unless they use their own index and crawler.
I'd almost rather have a naive raw index that can be interacted with, but custom indices, like xAI and Kagi, are definitely superior to Google and Bing. Google's a dumpster fire and Bing's a tawdry knockoff, and they're both interested in gaming the surveillance data and extracting as much money as possible from their adtech customers.
Paying for a service incentivizes the quality of that service. If that service is honest curation of and effective web search with custom indices and crawlers, then the free and paid distinction don't matter - the highest quality based on the curation criteria is what gets a site surfaced. I want my search engine to return McMaster Carr over Temu or Amazon, or a local flower shop over some corporate slop. Google doesn't get paid by meeting my expectations, it gets paid by exploiting my attention and extracting fractions of profit from commercial interactions, and makes more money by pushing me into business with companies that I'd otherwise want nothing to do with.
Demonetizing the entire web - dismantling the surveillance adtech regime - sounds like an absolute utopic victory to me.
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 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
> Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover.
(And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether)
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.
I reckon there's more of a correlation between this type of statement and being a Bluesky user than being right-wing and using X.
I mean X userbase is enormous compared to that of Bluesky, you can't be serious.
Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation.
It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't even want to think how dim the situation would be without him having taken over.
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.
However the word filters (to suppress messages) does dampen it a bit.
I'm weird though. I like 4chan and find most social media today is too intolerant and authoritarian for my tastes.
Just an example ..
https://fortune.com/2024/09/25/twitter-x-account-suspensions...
(I also don't hate Elon, but I still don't like him or consider doing buisness with him in any way)
Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while he also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...
I agree with you on this. Strong emotions impede our ability to be creative and problem-solve.
The argument is like saying "criminals used this bank to transfer stolen money so the bank is bad and I'm glad they were shut down." USAID has done far more good than the harm they were exploited to enable.
I'm sure all those getting payouts from it thought so...
> Musk dismembered it, leading to untold misery, death, and the spread of infectious diseases.
Musk did nothing except make recommendations. The executive branch took concrete action.
> I think this is reason enough to hate Musk.
You do you. Those of us with a more balanced view realize USAID was largely a money laundering scheme funneling cash to NGOs in favor with the FedGov. Whatever good it did was a side effect.
> Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation of the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while he also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
The Executive Branch controls funds within itself, and USAID fell under that purview.
I'm sorry for any lives lost due to USAID defunding. That said, the USA is $38 TRILLION in debt, we must fix that before returning to massive aid to the rest of the world.
I highly recommend that those concerned about USAID immediately start making charitable donations to relevant charities. That's a sustainable approach to things, as opposed to further bankrupting the USA.
I'm not sure what you mean by "this administration". Are you including DJT's first term?
Regardless, here are the numbers per Investopedia:
"Based on total dollar amounts, Joe Biden contributed the most to the national debt, adding $8.5 trillion during his presidency, followed by Donald Trump ($7.8 trillion in his first term) and Barack Obama ($7.7 trillion during his two terms)."
DJT's first term had the excuse of the COVID pandemic. Other than the final year when that was an issue, his spending was reasonable. 0'Biden on the other hand, had no such excuse for his spending binge, which was consistent across his (thankfully few) four years in office.
The "talk of lowering debt" is necessary, since right now we're spending 25% of federal revenue (about $1 trillion) paying the interest on our current massive national debt.
The hope is that a supercharged US economy can raise revenues enough to ease the pain of paying down the national debt that's largely been accumulated since 2000. It must be done to avoid the inevitable consequences.
The bullshit is strong in this one. Yes, Musk & DOGE acted: https://www.epi.org/policywatch/doge-shuts-down-usaid
Can you think of a “recommendation” that wasn’t acted upon?
It is misremembering to frame their actions as recommendations, when they took action themselves, acted first, and asked for permission later. There were infamous public displays of being given carte blanche on the spot after employees told them they didn't have just that. They put metaphorical "heads on pikes" so that they wouldn't have to face questions again outside of court.
Sorry bud, but you’re not getting the benefit of the doubt while defending reprehensible actions by Republican leaders that are plainly obvious to anyone who watched the event
As the great poet Taylor Swift puts it, "It's me, Hi, I'm the problem, it's me..."
I hold little respect for people who skip voting and then complain about the result of the voting.
> Certain states are always red and always blue.
When I was a kid, Florida was a swing state, and Georgia was a red stronghold.
> Are you European?
No. But I wish we had Australia's mandatory voting.
Musk did a full on Sieg Heil motion repeatedly. The other people you mention without naming did not
He’s got the personality of someone who grew up posting on /b and this is what it looks like in real life.
You are either wrong or lying when you claim he didn’t do a sieg heil
Not if they want to still deny that it's occurring.
> They certainly wouldn’t be supplying them groceries and electricity.
Auschwitz provided both of those things to prisoners.
I think its entirely reasonable that an algorithm shows you things that you engaged with. It would be weird if it didn't promoted stuff I didn't engage w/.
Person B-Z: That's a horrible thing to say, why are you like this?
Algorithm: Wow, this post must be awesome, I should show it to more people!
A parallel term is "hate click", where there's a headline that's so stupid or off that you click it just to see what the hell they were talking about.
An example of this vile genre was someone tweeting about how:
"Teachers make plenty of money, and I think they should provide school supplies to their students out of their own pocket instead of making hard-working parents pay for them."
It was a message _designed_ to get people to yell at them, and for all of that, it wasn't any of the really hot-button stuff around politics, race, or any of the other divisive things that drive antagonistic engagement.
Twitter could have (and previously did) reward all sorts of other types of engagement, but the shift to rewarding divisiveness was just at another level.
Is it only in the app, or also with the browser?
Crazy.
Browsers have been doing this forever: you make a request to a server (A) that you choose to interact with, and it could respond with various things (a redirect, a page with a meta refresh, a page with a frame / iframe, etc.) that result in your browser automatically making a request (and rendering the resulting page response) to some other server (B) that could get you in trouble.
However, in this classic scenario, when A starts sending you to B, you stop trusting A. This is simple when A's behavior is entirely determined by A's owner. What if it's determined by other users (not just A's owner)? Typically, A would be careful to not serve a redirect (etc.) based on user input, as that would be considered an "open redirect" vulnerability (with an exception for link shorteners, I guess). Interesting how the webview preloading that we're discussing now commits essentially this same offense.
/s
i hope they keep ruining the experience of using it some more
As a plain webview would mean that you can grab everyone's details.
Tweet with graph: https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985852384531394916
Real traffic is estimated at 3-4x higher than before, after correcting for the preloading.
https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985852384531394916
---
It's astonishing how quickly discussion disintegrates when Musk is mentioned on HN. He really is such a divisive figure, with incredibly polarised language both in support and against him.
Normal reasoned arguments are just absent here. Sometimes when two people disagree, they can still have a nuanced conversation/argument about it. But not about Musk.
There are some opinions in this thread that I vehemently disagree with, but it's not worth escalating by adding my opinion to the pile.
It reminds me of that phenomenon where you read the newspaper and notice an article in your domain of expertise and it's riddled with errors! Then you turn the page, read an article about something else, and completely trust it. You somehow didn't transfer the knowledge that the newspaper is inaccurate to the new domain.
It makes me wonder what other discussions on HN (and elsewhere) are completely devoid of nuance and reason, but I just don't notice it.
Incompetence is obviously still a possibility, but the likely intent overcoming such issues is to make X seem to generate more traffic and thus appear to be more relevant.
Webviews are pretty quarantined from the main safari app. I don't think cookies persist, so I don't think this would be an issue.
Yes and many people think that is outweighed by all the other issues raised in the larger thread here. That's "nuance and reason". Pretending it isn't there is not "nuance and reason".
See this article from 2016: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/modernizing-oauth-inter...
So my worries are that someone is going to click a link in Twitter and then enter their username and password into a news website. When this happens you need to trust the app developers.
No 'reasoned arguments' were provided in your take. I'll give you one against this though -- it's all fun and games until you end up on a list because of Musk's UX.
Try this: steelman the argument that what Musk did all those months ago wasn't a "literal Hitler salute". If you can do that, I suspect you'll find it a lot easier to have nuanced discussions about that topic (and possibly others) going forward.
You'd think given how complicated and faceted people are it would be especially easy to find both good and bad things to say about them, but online at least it almost seems to be the opposite: there's even less nuance when discussing people than there is discussing other topics. (Case in point.)
He has probably done something for someone somewhere that wasn't terrible. Does it counterbalance the rest? Not really!
There's that (possibly apocryphal) saying, "and Magda Goebbels made a great strudel." Just because a nazi has a redeeming quality somewhere does not undo them being a nazi.
One of the fascists that is destroying my country? Fuck no, no consideration for them.
I'm OK with calling fascists what they are. I'm also OK with recognizing a neighbor who has been consumed by fascist propaganda.
The fascist is not one that can be negotiated with. As Sartre said:
"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."
I can negotiate with the propaganda poisoned neighbor. There is no negotiating with the people who are running the fascist show. Giving a fascist the benefit of the doubt is playing into their strategy.
Elon absolutely on his track to copy this important feature [1]
The webview works as a traffic faucet. Elon can turn it on or off for every third-party site, you know, for "Internet safety".
My take:
Next step is X.com proprietary APIs inside the Webview, like payment and everything.
The ultimate goal is a "mini-app" framework that use PWA-like techs to run everything based on the Webview and circumvent Appstore.
And last a phone that runs the "mini-app" framework because why not, as an "AI edge node" like Elon recently proposed.
[1]: https://x.com/danmurrays/status/1683446630245187584
That's an interesting word to describe a platform that was previously the undisputed playground of Feds and NGOs.
Censorship and propaganda at breathtaking scale.
This is a good place to start: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyers/in...
> “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.
> The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
> “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.” The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.
> Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.
Don't worry, though. Under Musk's leadership, free speech is well protected. Just ask https://x.com/elonjet, which Musk specifically promised (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456) to protect! They would never ban a news story just because it was from a hack! (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...)
Does exactly that using Musk's own lawyers
"...Wait no you weren't suppose to actually do that..."
[0] https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil...
> > The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
That was the case for the Biden laptop story, too. (And SCOTUS, thus far, seems to agree; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri)
Again: Musk's own lawyers argued in court that the Twitter Files don't actually show what Matt Taibbi claimed they do.
(Taibbi also publicly claims Musk is now censoring him. https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1758230628355485979)
> though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent
While I tend to doubt that assertion, "Left-wing terrorism outpaces far-right attacks for first time in 30 years" perhaps points to a reason for a difference if it exists. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/28/left-wing-terrorism-far-rig...
The current administration seems just fine with similar jawboning. https://www.theverge.com/policy/799473/facebook-meta-ice-jaw...
In and Out has 5 menu items, similar to an app made in the USA, not too many features
A Chinese market can list 50 items similar to WeChat that has 50 different features.
The culture is reflected in the app design.
source: https://digitalcreative.cn/blog/how-china-ux-is-different
The UI looks different (information density etc.) but in the end it's still a collection of external applications neatly wrapped inside a platform with strong walls and a strict gatekeeper, with a basic suite available by default. In China, you could ditch most of iOS if you could trick a phone into launching directly into WeChat.
[0] https://xcancel.com/
I often save links to posts from Reddit in my Obsidian note app. Just copying the link marks it that you shared the link and artificially increases stats in that manner.
People, including myself, were booted out for giving opinions that did not align with their corrupt values. Even post-Elon, after appealing decision, some of us still haven't been let back in.
but indeed unfortunately there is not many other things doing real-time info better than X / Twitter
Everything is posted to get views, even from the more quality people. It’s ironic that I hear about “brainrot” the most on X, but it’s full of brainrot masquerading as valuable information.
It's embarrassing, but that's what the entire site is.
It is a journey, I still miss so many people from Twitter and it took me/us years of building a specific community, which is now mostly gone, but I do see signs of that appearing on Bluesky.
(It is absolutely true that a lot of creators hate AI, although I would argue that they have fair reasons to do so given the way AI is frequently presented / talked about / used. I find it unfortunate that everything remotely related to machine learning has now been rebranded as "AI", which leads people to reflexively dunk on tools that really aren't that much like the AI they have in their heads, but it's not their fault.)
Like what precisely? Infosec twitter is gone, science twitter is long dead. Visiting my timeline in non-algorithmic mode yields a post from months ago. In algo mode it's just ads and rage-bait.
There are studies showing how objectively bad Facebook and Instagram are for people, leading them to depression and so on. Isn't this hitting the fabric of our society? Our youth has severe issues also because of Zuckeberg, probably even more than due to Musk.
Or is the fabric of our society only what's convenient to pick, such as whatever you guys dislike about Elon?
Social media the way these companies run it is s** from all point of views.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
BTW: it's normal to diverge or even say "also xyz does that s*". The issue is bigger than X, and more related to social media itself. As long as there is some respect or some argument...
At least the guy says what he thinks, which you might agree or disagree with. And yes, in the meantime he is getting richer.
Not sure what's bad about that.
Parent commenter pointed out Musk performing a nazi salute during the inauguration of the President of the United States, and supporting fascist party takeovers across the world. If you are not sure what is bad about that, then maybe you should just admit to having nazi inclinations?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632336
Further, unless you are in the top .1% of earners, or you live on tips (I somehow doubt there are many stippers on HN) your taxes will not decrease as a result of any of Trumps "cuts".
In short, you have been lied to and are celebrating unnecessary cruelty for the sake of cruelty which will save you personally $0.00 and which only further increases America's debts.
Worse the ridiculous tariffs are pushing us toward a recession that only AI investment has forestalled. AI investment now represents the single largest investment of capital in human history, and if that bubble bursts we will enter into what could potentially be the worst economic collapse in not only American history, but human history.
My contention is that this kind of emotional appeal has been exploited to the point of (quickly) diminishing returns.
People are scratching the surface and following the money. Those who used such maudlin tactics to protect money laundering, war mongering and such things would do well to go and sin no more, lest more serious consequences come knocking.
But when you become blind to what happens around you, you become the pawn in someone else’s plan. A messenger is an authority’s favorite tool.
Someone would like to starve people and you are a part of their plan. If you feel the tug of appeal, it is because you understand something isn’t right here. If you don’t investigate, your mind is not your own.
That might apply to you personally, and if it does then it says a lot more about you than it does any broader societal point.
Personally, I’m able to distinguish between attempts to manipulate my emotions and the very real, very true fact that people are starving and dying as a result of cynical choices made by Musk and DOGE. There’s no reason to group that together with war mongering and money laundering, the only reason to do so is if you’re seeking to dismiss real documented suffering.
“People have cynically tried to manipulate my emotions so I don’t have any emotions any more” isn’t the retort you apparently think it is.
It is not an emotional appeal. It is a statement of objective and provable fact that cutting off funding for food resulted in people not having food. It's also obvious that this would be the result. The grandparent posted a link to one study. There are others if you do a quick search.
> People are scratching the surface and following the money. Those who used such maudlin tactics to protect money laundering, war mongering and such things would do well to go and sin no more, lest more serious consequences come knocking.
I have no idea what any of this even means. I don't live in whatever bubble you do, but it sounds like you believe there is some kind of global cabal of "them" that profited by these children not starving and you're out to stop that?
It's a wild world we live-in when internet conspiracies can kill actual children.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pad.70011
Mr Beast has done more for Saving the Children in Africa with $5m than USAID has done with $500b per year.
Children are being left to die. SOMETHING is more important than that to the proponents of these policies. What is it? If it's lower taxes... they aren't achieving that goal. Taxes are only decreasing for the top 0.1% of the population and tip earners.
If it's to lower the national debt that also isn't working. The national debt has increased at record rates.
Is there some other goal I'm not aware of? Why is it so important that these children not be fed?
Ironically, one of the consistent outcomes is starving and dying children. They're just delivered asynchronously and from the "wrong" side of the ledger.
The government decided to let food they’d already paid for rot while people starved. Twist yourself into a pretzel to defend that if you wish but I won’t be joining you.
Have you ever been without food? I have, and vague conspiracies and high ideals really didn't matter too much to me in those moments.
Tesla for years made billions by enabling others to pollute, and it still does so.
Every EV Musk sells enables more ICE cars to stay on the road.
If you want to drink the kool-aid thats fine, but the facts are not on your side.
[1]: https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2025-10-03-senate-again-fa...
You're right of course that Trump could probably persuade Schumer to end the shutdown by agreeing to his demands, but I think it's disingenuous to suggest that means he's in "control" of what's happening. (Let alone the insanity of trying to suggest Elon Musk is somehow to blame as previous commenters did, or that X users are for continuing to use X. This thread about a new link preloading feature in Twitter got very off topic very quickly.)
How are budget negotiations supposed to work if one of the sides won't even promise to honor the agreements made?
How is Musk involved in the current budget debacle aside from being "republican"? It's easy to blame stuff on him when he was running DOGE, but since his falling out with trump blaming every cut on Musk is a tired and expired meme.
Plus he's on Twitter every week publicly discussing how much he uses the platform to put his thumb on the scale of discourse towards his personal beliefs.
In what world is he not involved?
Also, Elon has weighed in quite aggressively on prior budgetary fights, so it would be crazy to say his influence isn't being felt here. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5046887-elon-musk-slam...
Americans will be living with Musk's legacy for decades.
In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his personal brand. This is not going to end well.
Absolutely laughable motivated reasoning. Hate the guy if you must, but claiming one of the most impactful business leaders in American history is "99% vaporware" makes you look silly.
The disruption is egregious. It is notable and worth pushing back against, even if you don't view it as "exceptional".
This is just so funny.
The what now? Is this also a feature of the actual website if I go there in a browser?
I think I selected science and music as starting interests. Within 10 minutes I was getting lots of right wing borderline Nazi bullshit.
Tries it all again in incognito mode. Roughly same thing. WTF
Second rule of Twitter is why are you on Twitter, it's a full on Nazi bar now.
The "following" feed that mostly shows you content from people you have explicitly followed is better, although the site really likes to swap back to the algorithmic "for you" feed whenever you aren't paying attention. However, even the following feed will still have the troll responses on most posts. You really can't avoid them on Twitter.
It was a short affair.
No longer on Twitter. I can't see how anyone would want to be. It's a veritable cesspool.
https://bsky.app/starter-pack-short/LFAZcGE
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/maosbot.bsky.social/3l3ix4wi64...
You DO care about the actual, meaningful, quantifiable results, right, not just the vibes and trends and fashions?
To use a dead platform or an actual active one?
I don’t even follow politics on Twitter just video games and some fandoms but it’s actual alive compared to Bluesky where nothing happens basically. Especially true if you follow non-english content.
I wasn't.
Why? It's a cesspool of hate. Even if you try to avoid the political nonsense Elon forces himself and his cronies into your recommendations.
(The FYP, alas, sucks, and has since forever...)
As a user I like to get out as soon as I click because I can trace back the link and I can do clipping or bookmark in my browser.