People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
Setting aside any feelings about Musk, ad quality, or even product direction choices like locking down public access...
I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also presented as server errors and 404s for a while until the necessary error states were added, and it has had some spotty downtime. Most of these things are better now than a year ago, but not all, and that's only getting back towards what it was before.
The only notable feature addition I'm aware of is Grok, and again that's pretty debatable.
So I'm interested in what you think has improved. Maybe I'm missing things, but it's not my perception.
The new automatic translation is something that I would like to see all communities adopt. You can now follow folks who speak any language and each of you interact using your native language with no friction, just a tiny note of what language each message was translated from.
The translation feature was always there, they just made it so you don't have to press a button to translate a post. Which I guess is nice, but it's like a minor client-side setting. On the other hand, they switched from Google Translate to Grok, which means that now you can't even really trust the translation because, even ignoring the inherent imprecision of an automatic translation tool, Grok is subject to hallucinations has been caught making up posts wholesale.
I find that the translations are way better than they used to, because Grok translates slang and insults more truthfully than Google Translate, and those two things are -- for better or worse -- a large part of the conversations on Twitter.
> each of you interact using your native language with no friction
I wouldn't be so sure about that... Translations contain a lot of telltales and signals - even perfect translations end up as translation-specific dialect separate from natural speeches - and there are significant average content quality differences between cultures. With these signals + differences combined creating a much tighter closed loop than before, it feels to me that it's introducing concept of racial supremacism/classism to a lot of previously unaware people, in which the en-US(or en-GB) culture is not at the top of the food chain.
I mostly only care about the former of ^ that, but I don't like the latter offending wrong set of people, and I think that is slowly going on over at Twitter.
I guess these points can be true but is it worth the cost to avoid them? I much prefer this to the prior status of having friction to see international perspectives at all.
Youtube is annoying about it
"aaaaaaaahahahahahaha"
[translate to english]
Twitter was famously unreliable for practically its entire existence. Don't remember the "fail whale?"
I do, yes... from about 2009. Twitter was fairly reliable for a good while.
Exactly, this issue was really solved by the mid 2010s. Twitter had a much longer run (10+ years) of solid reliability than they did of spotty reliability (2-3 years?).
The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people.
But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions.
I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replying, customized feeds, etc should be enough incentive to sign up for a social media site.
Tearing something out only to re-build it a few months later is classic tech industry move fast and break things hubris.
Most things exist for a reason, and if you don’t know the reason that doesn’t mean it’s a bad reason - it just means you don’t know the whole story.
I wonder when the re-building part is going to start for all the stuff that DOGE tore out.
Not just when. Also if.
Chesterton’s login?
I was hardly a heavy twitter user before acquisition but I recall generally being able to read threads and reply chains without logging in.
I’m not sure exactly when that changed, but it completely destroyed what little use the platform had left to me.
They started requiring log-ins when industrial level scraping for LLM data became a thing.
if someone shares me a link to x.com, it is literally faster for me to edit the URL to xcancel, even on my phone which makes this awkward, and load that, than to wait for the original URL to load.
xcancel does not have a login barrier, nor all the popup messages.
Of all the many ways to automate that redirect, https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ isn't bad.
and ( also reddit to old.reddit, various cdn image servers to deliver hi-res versions, etc )Interesting. That won't work for me directly (iOS), but it made me search around and find this, which has xcancel in one of the screenshots: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/redirectweb-smart-url-router/i...
The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile though.
When Musk's people took over they very briefly removed any login gate, then very soon after they completely blocked all meaningful non-logged-in access to the site. Which is frankly fine with me: it's a good reason to never visit a place that has become a cesspool of scams, porn, and white supremacist propaganda.
X has gone harder on login gating than the old Twitter they adopted for sure. Reddit also started going in this direction. Instagram has had it for a long time.
I suspect selling APIs for AI is playing a big role in that.
Reddit locked down their API around the time X started forcing logins (july 2023).
It was a pretty shithouse experience as a non-logged-in user before Musk, but it's a worse experience now.
Timelines were all over the place before Musk got his hands on it. And if timelines are all over the place, what's the point? (that was always my view as someone who's not logged in - and as a 'town square', I would have thought that getting its message(s) across to as many people as possible would be a goal. But no, it's just another in-club like all the others. Fuck 'em, walk on by).
I actually agree, they did the world a favor walling themselves off. The vile trash would be shared way more otherwise.
Have you tried viewing Instagram or TikTok logged out? They all do this
Bluesky doesn't.
I dropped X shortly after Elon took over. Around the time the neo-nazi spam increased. I also blocked it so I can't accidentally go to the site.
Nothing of value was lost.
Bluesky is like the early days of Twitter and I have a better control of my feeds.
[edit] I see the X bots are unhappy.
In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election because they noticed they speak in a void (journalists don't care about Bluesky) and also they all blocked each other in the purity battle.
They still hate Musk though.
Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.
> they all blocked each other in the purity battle
I listen to a bunch of (far) left podcast to balance out my media consumption and the amount of bickering about purity is both amusing and slightly scary. Both the wide span of subjects (from racism, to sexism, to ablism, there's something new every day!) and depth ("it's not my job to educate you and here are 5 books about lived experiences that you should read before talking to me") is scary and genuinely interesting. For some people it almost seems like a full-time job.
We even see it in some other, non-political, social circles (knitting famously had a purity competition/obsession a while ago).
I'm still struggling to explain why this is such a focal point for some people. Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people?
Listening to Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" podcast I was distinctly struck with the idea that the main thing leftists like to do, even more than fighting rightists, is fighting other leftists.
> Perhaps this is a modern replacement for religious fundamentalism for some people
I would say it’s narrower, loosely a sort of heresiology. It would be motivated by a strong internal sense of insiders vs. outsiders. Which isn’t saying much, but I think that’s that.
Aye.
My (literally, and self-proclaimed) communist former partner noted left-wing infighting. The Monty Python Life of Brian scene about The Popular Front of Judea ("he's over there") are, according to her, totally accurate in spirit.
Ironic, the right does strength through unity, the left talks about it and then argues with itself about who else used the phrase; the last time the left really did it was when trade unions still had teeth.
Jameela Jamil put this out pretty well: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOvh4_UDHGy/ (sorry for the instagram link, couldn't find the original clip)
Basically the gist of it is that if you want to be "on the left", you need to have the exact, correct, and up to date opinion on every single micro-issue or you're literally a fascist hitler paedophile and will be ostracized.
Meanwhile "on the right" as long as you agree on maybe one or two bigger things and you can deal with or tolerate the rest while you move on with winning elections.
> In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election
Do you have a citation on that?
Not on hand but you can observe it along the way, and sometimes they do a post or video to justify themselves, on X or BS.
People notice because some loud proponents of https://helloquittex.com/ came back, sometimes quietly.
Personally I think X & BS impact is over exaggerated anyway.
People are still allowed to share their experience and opinions without citations being a requirement.
I never said they weren't. Although if its a personal opinion, then it can't really be taken as fact.
The claim seemed off, so I was curious where it came from.
A google search, it's an alleged claim by Nate Silver posted on X from a year ago. Recent post from Nate is that X is rigged.
https://protos.com/nate-silver-says-x-is-rigged-musk-cries-b...
That seems to suggest that it's Far right.
> People are still allowed to share their experience and opinions without citations being a requirement.
Expressing feelings and staying assertions are two different things. If you go around saying the sky is red and someone asks you for the source, it's not reasonable to throw a tantrum while desperately trying to move the goalpost by weaseling around with excuses such as "well aktchualy it feels red to me" nonsense.
If you make a statement, own it. If you are caught peddling baseless bullshit don't complain about being caught, complain about mindlessly posting baseless bullshit.
Downvoted for asking for a citation?!
Doesn't mean Twitter should've followed suit.
All of your complaints are true of present-day Reddit.
It has become completely unusable.
In related news, I heard they’re locking down old.reddit.com now
They are. Requires Persona verification to view NSFW.
The login wall predates Elon BTW https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263
I mean a lot of sites do it unfortunately.
Reddit is trying to push to it (if they don't already?), Pinterest does it, unfortunately user-generated content is worth more nowadays for user monetization, ads and preventing AI bot scraping. Can't fault them for it too much.
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The whole experience is extremely frustrating. I quit x as it became unbearable bad and not functional. It's really a shame what Elon did to x but it's exactly what cancer billionaires do. Whoever says x is good is out of his mind.
That must be why xcancel exists, because it was such a pleasant experience.
It's why Nitter exists. xcancel is one public server of Nitter.
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Ime those people don't want to see the content at all; xcancel is used mainly by people annoyed by login walls (I even have an account! It's just annoying.).
(By 'those people' I mean those who tie their app experience to its CEO's politics or whatever. I'm no supporter, nor in the US so don't feel particularly affected anyway, but mainly I just don't care about the CEO one way or another when I use a website.)
It exists because you can’t see any reply without an account.
Anger at Elon, for a vast multitude of reasons, is entirely rational.
I wonder if these as well as "there is so much Elon hate" template comments are just his cronies projecting. Musk seem to have some irrational one-sided grudges on just about everything in the world.
Irrationally? The man fired tens of thousands of American citizens from their jobs on a whim, disproportionately veterans. Failed at his ultimate goal after firing everyone, and then just left.
Seems very rational to hate someone who messes with your livelihood to stroke his ego
Is also partially responsible and yet for the death of hundred of thousands of people around the world, if not more via the gleeful "deletion" of USAID. Musk is an evil narcissistic stain on humanity.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/chikungunya/quick-takes-death-tol...
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Dont forget stealing and leveraging all of journalist and politician Twitter phone data for his own nefarious means
Twitter abused phone data (handed out for 2FA) way before Musk took over.
This is not in any way a counter to the post you’re replying to; both can be true.
Improved how? You can now generate child porn in app? You can only pay for a decent experience but can't hide the badge of shame? Commenting, posting, even reading tweets vanishes for hours at a time with no acknowledgement or retrospective? To pay the worst people you've ever met to stir up farcical drama for pay?
Sure, the site is still working, but to call it improved is stretching the word to its breaking point
The most egregious one, IMO, is the pay-for-attention 'feature' (bluetick replies end up at the top). _Everyone knows this is a terrible idea_. Dating sites have known it's problematic for 30 years (these days, those that still allow pay-for-attention tend to ration it, because otherwise peoples' swipe stacks or grids are full of, well, the sort of people who pay for attention on dating sites, which are probably not the sort of people you want to date). And yet they did it.
According to Nikita, displaying country-of-origin on profiles was "one of the most impactful changes for X and the world."
Get this guy a Nobel Peace Prize.
Hyperbole aside, that was a genuinely good move. I assumed it was subversive, because i infer that musk wants twitter to be a vehicle for democratic capture.
(I can't call it "x", it feels like baby talk. Dignity also prevents me from ordering in Starbucks. Get off my lawn.)
You cannot, can you?
I don't think you can anymore, explicitly emphasizing present tense and not even a month ago, but there were many many many months where you could.
I initially didn't abandon xitter, because I still had a bunch of accounts I followed and BlueBlocker blocked the worst accounts, however it got so bad this year that I stopped visiting at all and eventually installed the xcancel plugin
Markedly not my experience at all, haha. I stopped using it.
I’ve been caught in a bug the last month where every day, it will ask me to complete a captcha, it tells me my account is banned, I click a button and it says congrats, I’m unbanned now and the first five likes I click tell me about how I’m improving the timeline.
I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.
Yeah, my experience of Twitter has improved dramatically since I deleted my account and disavowed it completely. I don't even visit the domain. If I need to visit a link, I'll change the domain to xcancel.com instead.
Now THAT is an improved web experience!
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>People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+
you say this like it had anywhere to go but up.
I don't know how you wrote that with a straight face. The site is really bad now. Every time I log in I get a full screen upsell ad, most of the features don't work, people get banned at random (big scary "permanent ban, no recovery" then a silent restoration afterwards), there's CSAM all over the platform, and moderation of legitimate bad posts goes ignored.
Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job.
The upsell ads progressively getting more massive and desperate is pretty funny tho.
I've been on the platform for 15 years, I use it for hours everyday and have never once seen CSAM. Idk what type of people you are following or looking up but I dont think your statement is true for many users (if any)
I love how I literally cannot sign up for a new account as of last month or two. Phone number required, and it won't even send the verification text if I try! Just lovely. Now if I want to create a news page dedicated to a project for people interested in updates to that specific project, I have to buy a fucking account second-hand. Pseudo-ID verification that still doesn't stop bots but does stop humans is such a dramatic improvement!
I have had a similar issue and support gave zero fs. I still cannot log in to my account from one of the Android phones (I suspect that it blocklists the older Android versions).
Maybe it improved in the last year but it's substantially worse than before it became X. Back then the algorithm was tuned to align with the users interests and posts would get visibility based on engagement. Now it's still a cesspool and visibility is pay to play.
I created a new account recently and the default homepage was all videos that were either (a) AI slop (b) sexual imagery (c) AI slop sexual imagery.
Really not what Twitter used to be about.
It is possible he's done a good job at the micro level, but at the macro level the platform is a cesspool.
> Really not what Twitter used to be about.
AI slop wasn't available then.
> People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+.
This feels like a blatantly unrealistic opinion to have, which goes completely against any observable evidence.
Without a login, you can barely click on any link without being spammed by login prompts. If you visit anyone's posts tab you are greeted with a comically bad collection of posts that only show stale years old tweets that follow no discernible pattern or logic. And you cannot sort by timestamp.
This is comically bad given Twitter's sales pitch of being a microblogging site that lives in the now.
The truth of the matter is that today's Twitter is a sad clone of the glory days Twitter. Lauding these developments as something praise worthy is perplexing.
I strongly disagree. It's gone to shit and paying people for attention is killing the platform. It's endless ragebait and nonsense now.
It's a far right cesspit run by the worlds most egotistical racist asshole, so if you think the experience has improved that says a lot about your character and political affiliation.
it's the social in a social media website that matters the most. every decent person is gone and what's left is bots, hucksters, vapid influencers, slop, racists, soyjakparty, pedophiles, proanas, personifications of the dunning-kruger effect and children who send eachother death threats over shipping the wrong roblox characters. there's a persistent aura of misery over everyone's heads
You're thinking in social network terms. Social media is a news feed (think media=TV) that looks like a social network.
>improved
What?! I don’t use twitter much but in the few times i open it, it’s basically un-browsable, a complete utter shit: the performance, the UI, the overall experience is just worse. Just open a tweet now with a video in it, without being a user, and report back your “improved” experience.
You can't be implying that twitter's UI suddenly became shit when Musk bought it. It had become the worst popular site on the web years before.
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There was a burst of improvements over the year after Musk bought it, then it stagnated. The Hasbara bots are drowning every conversation about any subject. I'm sick of hearing about Mamdani or roofs.