If you look at his history, he’s really good at growth hacking apps to pump-and-dump into acquisitions. He hasn’t proven himself in building lasting products.
His last app, Gas, saw meteoric growth from some truly impressive growth hacking on children, but then got acquired by Discord and very soon after tanked. Same with whatever he’d sold to Facebook.
His (and others’ defense) to criticism has always been, “I made a lot of money on an exit,” which, sure, whatever. Personally, I don’t find that very interesting or compelling.
He fit Musk’s profile (brash, extremely online Take Haver), but not the kind of person you want leading product.
The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.
most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.
X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.
AI, database tech, etc I find I read about it on X much earlier and the comments are a lot less negative.
X is what you make it. It will feed you with more of what you read and interact with.
I have been disappointed that "Not interested" seems to have very little influence over anything on X, it does add some friction on shaping the experience to be what you make it. I pretty much never used the block (or mute) function pre-X, and now I've used it so much. Not just for the never-ending bots or blue-check click farmers either, sometimes it's just "that was such a stupid comment about Y; I'd prefer to deprioritize showing things related to Y, but at least by blocking I can ensure I won't see further remarks about Y from this person, or further dumb remarks from this person about some future Z". I have a little Tampermonkey script for HN that gives me similar functionality, "blocking" (more precisely muting) by username those I've decided I'd just rather not see comments from again for a variety of reasons. I never needed/wanted it before [insert date] but the HN decline has been real. (It just replaces the comment content with an "[unblock]" clickable, so it's cheap for me to give them an nth-chance to see some particular comment, and re-block if as usual it was also undesirable.) Staying out of certain HN threads entirely is the best self-curation one can do anyway, there are topics that just don't get reasonably discussed here yet keep being brought up.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I'd like to give a different perspective - it's an algorithmic feed like anything else, it surfaces what you engage with. There are good niches on it. My feed is a mix of designers and AI engineers - not leaders, but people on the ground making things.
There's definitely been weird things politically with it, but content wise it really isn't as bad as people demonize it to be.
I myself always use the "following" tab. So I would like to stay in my bubble, thank you very much.
Isn't the same true of hackernews though?
Pre his takeover , it would more reliably show me my niches of design, technology, gamedev etc
After his take over I’d start seeing more and more boosted content from frankly abhorrent individuals. The whole blue check mark thing being paid instead of truly verified also messed with the algorithm.
I’m sure it’s doable to curate it into what you want again, but it was a night and day shift for me and why I eventually left.
Even filtering out content wasn’t enough because it would get boosted through other means.
And it tries to sneak back in - even outside personal experience, "my feed started getting too toxic again and I had to retrain it with [indiscriminately following/liking a bunch of] cute animal posts" is a weirdly common sentiment I hear from non-tech-literate users (who probably aren't leveraging "proper" signals enough to ever fully clean out their timeline like you or I might).
Every website's "impact" will always be defined by their "default path".
Lots of economic and tech stuff, and some memes.
I often hear people say the same thing about the YouTube algorithm which also confuses me because the YouTube algorithm is amazing at surfacing a wide range of content I'd never had watched back in the subscription days.
I suspect most people who have a bad experience with these algorithms could have a much better experience if they didn't engage in low effort rage bait content.
That shit show us a direct result of Musk’s guidance and participation. Bier says he worked to eliminate bots, but the For You tab argues otherwise.
Twitter is 100% better now than a year ago. For one, I haven't gotten a single bullshit click-farm fake-ass sock-puppet follower in months. Secondly, I see very few low-effort reply guys lately, human or otherwise.
Not exactly sure how that changed anything but I see a lot less bot slop now.
I need to quit this place. It's a total echo chamber these days – arguably worse than X because at least when you express an unpopular opinion there people can't just flag and burry your post.
Shows how valuable the Play Store is to them
Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823
1. 10 points, 15 comments
2. 9 points, 17 comments
3. 44 points, 84 comments
That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.
I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
(471 points, 512 comments)
Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.
It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.
>There are rumors
Interesting methodology you use to make concrete assertions.
A little cocky.
It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
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.
Onlyfans was included under "almost every single aspect of the internet".
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.
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.
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.