A small percentage might even be actual humans!

Is this … sarcasm?

garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not engage with the content. And for some people it is quite difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is trending so might be i should show this to more people. So this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is loosing battle in the sea of bots :)

Words have meaning. He said he does not hate him. That does not mean he likes him. Hate is a very strong emotion. Dislike is a much less stronger emotion. That is not all the same.

(I also don't hate Elon, but I still don't like him or consider doing buisness with him in any way)

/Raises hand Sam Altman hater over here.

It's not just HackerNews. I can remember when Facebook rolled out their "in-app browser", and a huge amount of content appeared on how to disable it.

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...

> This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not shared by normal users.

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.

This sounds more like however your OS handles opening the PDF mimetype(xdg-open,open,Invoke-Item) I'm assuming you're on windows. I think often times browsers will just be set to the default for previewing a PDF unless set otherwise. This is all just conjecture though as I don't use any of the tools you listed above and I'm not absolutely certain of how Windows/MacOS handles PDFs by default.

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

Seriously. I have a featureful PDF viewer I am intimately familiar with. I want it to be the default for all PDFs, ever. This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.

Ironically, I have the opposite complaint with YouTube, particularly with these new Twitter web views. It takes 3 “navigations” now to get to the iOS YouTube app: one to open the Twitter web view, one to open that URL in Safari, then one to open at YouTube video in the native app.

Brave prompts you before doing that. Then you can long press to new tab.

I remember how tiktok basically injected a keylogger into any site they opened in a webview https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/technology/tiktok-browser...

I didn't think IG does something similarly shady

idk but I’ve definitely experienced this. Presumably it’s a bug.

Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.

My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder.

It's network effect, same as Facebook

I would try again, but not use discover, and aggressively mute/block.

Interesting, BlueSky's non-algorithmic feed makes it really easy to avoid political ragebait and focus on tech accounts imo

Really depends on who you're following

If someone is feeding you ragebait on Bluesky you should just unsubscribe. The feed is what you make it. Twitter can be kind of like this too, but the trolls haunt the replies on there whereas people can shut trolls out of their replies on Bluesky. That's the big difference, is someone comes into a thread just to stir shit the original poster can shut them down.

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.

Oh god are we still pretending X is a free speech platform.

Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened.

If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell you.

BlueSky brags about not having what, exactly? Nazis?

That isn't true. I signed up for a fresh account for a project I was working on. Despite following no-one and not having interacted with anything, all I was pushed were racists, bigots, and extremist political content.

Oh, and the owner's account.

Even if you believe that Musk and team don’t “touch the scales” of the algorithm, the inevitable consequence of the decision to prioritize comments of people willing to pay for blue checks, is to discourage users not in that segment from engagement at all levels.

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.

The discussion over X is always the same:

"It's gone to hell"

"No, it just reflects your tastes"

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

"..."

I find this a bit disingenuous.

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.

A whole lot of machine learning practitioners use X. Makes it difficult to avoid if you're interested in the news. It's definitely a network effect issue.

Open a private tab, navigate to x.com. All you see are heinous neonazis casually discussing the jewish question and fantasizing about race wars.

For twitter at least, that would have to be done manually. It still shows a timeline for grey checkmark (government) accounts, and a "best of" type page for all other accounts.

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.

That would be equivalent to demonetizing the entire web. Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality. As the old adage goes, "when you're getting something for free, you're the product being sold." Only sites making money by, shall we say, "indirect" means would be able to survive. A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.

Because Google wants the web to be broken like that, they're also part of the design team of tech behemoths that made the internet shitty und no fun.

They have had ways of letting people who give Googlebot access to content that requires login for a long time. A decade?

Because people can get a login. If the best quality result is behind a login and a paywall, I still want it to be the first result. Only quality should decide ranking.

I remember that, people were convinced that twitter had a load of woke lib employees or something

I don't?

> flying whale era

Is that the same as the fail whale era?

This is not true, this change is a recent phenomenon, I believe it came into effect sometime around 2021-2023 (maybe earlier even). I believe it changed when OpenAI showed the value of data.

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.

False. You used to be able to read Twitter fine without being logged in

Instagram explicitly tells you need to be logged in. Twitter/X just appears to be broken

Obviously wrong. The typical user-hostile thing isn't this dumb, you'd see a teaser that's probably vaguely sexual and get some "sign up for the full experience" prodding. Literally any 2-person startup that's a week old would do better than this at being thirsty and awful

change the url to xcancel.com

Not really sure how that's possibly true considering CDN caching exists

> Hard to avoid that problem.

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

The training data was considered good by Musk to start with, so he could have spicy mode, but he changed his mind and now Grok is considered poisoned with porn. My question is, can that be fixed or does he have to start over again?

They are all like this to a degree because controversy creates engagement. If a platform is not making you money, is not making you smarter, and not helping you form IRL connections, then I highly recommend disabling it.

You literally have people crying that their garbage content isn't getting enough views (and hence payout).

It's embarrassing, but that's what the entire site is.

Simon Willison is on Bluesky, and I'm going to go out on a relatively safe limb and suggest that if you check out what he reposts, who he follows, etc., you will find people who do not deeply hate AI. I do think Bluesky, in general, is a lot like the Twitter of, say, 15 years ago, where the quality of one's feed is very much dependent on how aggressively one curates it -- although I wish they would finally add a feature for selectively turning off reposts user by user.

(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.)

> I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit

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.

may I ask, any good follows?

Literal moon shots, while he contributes meaningfully to worsening conditions on Earth. His dismantling of USAID will have a more consequential effect than 90% of his fever dreams ever will.

He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all to stay on X.

Starship will never get to the moon.

I have a bridge in downtown NYC, interested in buying?

those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of us are holding our breath on that one.

https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4

Cutting food stamps. What's the point of a moon base if we can't even feed people?

What does he do except making fossil fuel MORE critical? What do you think rockets are powered with?

> making fossil fuels less critical

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.

It's not 2014 anymore. Check his tweets, right wing slop occupies most of his brain these days.

What moon bases?

That was 5-10-15 years ago Elon.

YSK, it feels like the implication of the framing of your question is that you're suggesting it doesn't matter and nobody should care.

The disruption is egregious. It is notable and worth pushing back against, even if you don't view it as "exceptional".

Even so, Chrome has preloading turned on by default with an option for "extended preloading" which is even more aggressive. There may be some downsides, but I don't think what X is doing here is unreasonable. Speed makes a huge difference in UX.

I hadn't considered this.

When you're either unwilling or incapable of understanding other people's perspectives it is indeed very difficult.

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.

There's an impression counter on every tweet, visible to everyone

Is the request coming from the user's IP or via a Twitter proxy?

As a plain webview would mean that you can grab everyone's details.

I don't think this would even make it into top 10 good reasons to stop using Twitter.

I'm fascinated with the number of users of this site who seem disproportionately invested in getting people to stop using Twitter.

Replace "mega app" with "platform" and that's pretty much what Apple and Google are, Apple especially.

> Second rule of Twitter is why are you 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.

I just tried to find AI starter packs on BlueSky and confirmed that BlueSky is openly hostile to AI. I understand the reasons, it's just not where I'm at. I'll try Threads and see what happens.

Hackernews, Mastodon, Onlineplatforms of Newspapers or Magazines is what I use

Physical contact with Gramineae

X has everything, and you can pick what you follow (there's a "For You" tab, but also a strictly chronological following tab). I like it for variety of political views (e.g. super-lefty @caitoz, super-righty @L0m3z), following interesting LLM stuff (@elder_plinius is a great follow), lots of devs (e.g. carmack...), art accounts (@yumenohajime, @neurocolor), nutrition/health stuff, so much good stuff!

(The FYP, alas, sucks, and has since forever...)