Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
> the telegraph, the telephone, the television
None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does.
Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement needed.
The town square concept has never made sense. The idea that you have a place where everybody goes and scream at each others insults non stop is completely insane in the real world
Yes that would be insane, but that's not an accurate depiction of my x feed at all
Good for you I guess? Seems to validate that the analogy is a pretty bad one, you cannot really filter out voices in a town square setting
Actually this place exists and it’s called a jail pod
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
That's not great. That's hideous.
Humanity is interested in hideous things.
You don’t solve this by making NY Times editors the deciders of what’s fit to be interested in.
I’m not. Maybe you’re just sick.
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
Uh neither did "X"... She originally went viral on Tik Tok [0], and then built a following on Youtube and later in podcaster circles. As near as I can tell, she doesn't even have a twitter account. So it's pretty weird to credit Twitter with building her career.
In fact, I really can't think of anyone who originally went viral just from twitter. Lots of famous people have used twitter as a microblogging platform after gaining notoriety but by itself I wouldn't say it drives much popularity amongst the larger internet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haliey_Welch
I guess.
If the town itself is an aids-ridden, nazi infested bunch of child-porn-creating yobs.
They can keep that town and its square. I'd nuke it from orbit, only way to be sure.
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions
Onlyfans was included under "almost every single aspect of the internet".
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
I take it you didn't watch much daytime television? Or YouTube?
X is not designed or moderated in a reputable, accountable or unbiased fashion - and neither was Twitter. X's ambition to be a "town square" is a solipsistic delusion that even Dorsey managed to avoid (despite all the mistakes he did make).
100 years worth of improvement isn't enough, X's centralized design is inherently abusive and many communities have already moved on. As Terry Davis would have put it, X glows.
Daytime television was intermediated by tv producers.
Youtube's algorithm prevents big channels (or even little channels) from saying scary words like "suicide" so they play games like saying "somebody un-alived" themselves.
I'm surprised HN hates X so much as a cess-pool of wrong-think: that's what you get when you let people say anything to anybody. The great challenge that X has taken on is trying to surface the useful stuff for people. Maybe they're not that good at it, but they're improving.... which is well in line with the hacker ethos.
Personally, my x feed is a pretty good mix of things I want to see and things I didn't know I want to see. Maybe 10~20% of it isn't relevant at all.
It's not even about wrong-think. So many people I know just drifted away--or cut contact and nothing equivalent replaced it. It was a fairly important type of social media to me and many of the the people I knew/know but it really isn't anymore.
I think your assumption that HN hates X "because of wrong-think" is clouding your judgement. There is a long list of reasons to hate X.
For example, paying users get top spot in replies to tweets, which instantly meant spam bots with paid accounts posting completely unrelated replies on anything popular while real users who aren't trying to make money off twitter disappear at the bottom.
This isn't even complicated 4D chess user interaction design. Anyone with 2 neurons to rub together could see the obvious and immediate effect of such policy. If it's dropping the ball with something so obvious, how can you trust it to handle any situation more complex?
Those are all valid areas crying out for improvement.
But that’s not what HN hates about X… any comment about the platform gets angry blindly political replies.
Whereas other platforms and topics get discussed in more neutral pros/cons terms.
I agree with the other commenters here - your assumption that all of us hate it for "wrong-think" is precluding your judgement here.
Twitter was also not a good social media, in my opinion. Jack Dorsey was a pretty clueless leader and ostensibly talentless businessman. The platform was mostly loved ironically by jaded millennials, and the entire thing became a laconic quip-off between minor celebrities and brand representatives. It set the stage for LinkedIn-tier corporate cringe content that became a tentpole of late Twitter and now X too. Celebrities fled the site for personal use and left it as a political shit-slinging platform for C-tier online influencer personalities to rile up their audiences. The universal appeal that made Twitter interesting for bored idiots was completely abandoned in favor of this new ragebait paradigm. Worse yet, X is just as debt-ridden as Twitter was, so Elon is walking around to political haymakers just like Chris Poole did when his forum was bleeding cash: https://boingboing.net/2026/02/05/epstein-met-4chans-founder...
People like you existed back in the Twitter days too, insisting that it was valuable to ignore the site politics, trending topics, livestreams, crypto/NFT features and focus on the minority of positive content on the site. Those people were frankly deluded back in 2016, and you're equally as deluded trying to convince people that a cash-poor federal honeypot is tolerable now because the Hawk Tuah girl uses it to interact with her audience. You're the target audience for this slop, and you bit it hook line and sinker like a Facebook mom.
My X feed is finance, AI, robotics, etc…
… I don’t eat Cheetos but I don’t get angry at the grocery store for promoting them to people who do.
> greatest communication techonlogy
1. Snail-mail
2. Public cork-boards
3. E-mail
sounds like the "what have the Romans done for us?" bit