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]