I've been preferring Bluesky lately. It's much more open so you can write your own feeds to consume it however you like. I currently have one that runs every post in my following feed through a cheap LLM filter to throw out ragebait and topics I don't care about. It requires some initial work to curate your experience (including blocking some annoying people) but after that it's good.
There are a lot of ways to scrape the content you want into a different interface, or filter ads and the content you don't want to see.
I mostly scrape and use a different interface, but when I view the actual site, I use https://imbue.com/blog/bouncer (I work at the company that makes this, on other projects).
I guess I should say I shared this here to see how people would react, as it is pretty much the converse of the Daring Fireball piece.
I want my work to be seen as much as anyone; I currently post to bsky and mastodon, and I've stayed off threads and twitter. I often wonder how much I'm sacrificing by not doing everything possible to maximize my social media footprint in the name of sleeping at night.
Nobody cares. The left overs have no moral high ground to stand on and judge anyone. If you demand stability( by conservating social order or nostalgia for the past) in unstable times by your own making you are disqualified. Somebody disqualified does not get to choose the people, the platform or the social order. Or which ideas are discussed and which are not.
Lex, I don’t know how to put this nicely. But if you are reading this, sell your teslas. Finger wagging about Twitter/X has roughly zero moral weight coming from someone who has bought two Teslas.
The bumper stickers are worse, unfortunately. They read as self awareness without moral conviction.
In 2014, he fired his PR person when she asked for a raise (she was very good at her job).
In Spring of 2018, investigative reporters at the LA Times found that Elon acted like a tyrant removing yellow hi-vis safety tape at Tesla factories because he didn't like the aesthetic, which lead to more workplace accidents. This was when Elon started getting extremely adversarial with the press.
A few months later, during the Thai cave rescue, he flaunted some kind of coffin made from spare rocket parts as his plan to save children who were trapped in a Thai cave, and when one of the actual rescuers Vernon Unsworth told him the cave was too narrow for that to be of use, Elon called him a "pedo" (note, Elon also begged to go to Jeffrey Epstein's parties).
Not really. He was trying very hard to get onto Epstein island.
“What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk wrote in an email to Epstein in November 2012. In another in December 2013, he asked, “Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”
So... Yuu don't like the guy who bought Twitter and renamed it to X? Thats fine. You dislike him so much that you want to boycott the platform he bought? Fine! Go ahead, show how prinicpled you are, and actually don't use the platform for anything. Neither post to it, nor read anything from it. Thats all fine. But... I am soooo done with this "I want to get clean, so everyone else has to stop, so that I dont feel alone." attitude. I don't care that you don't like X. I haven't used it since almost 10 years. Deleted my account back then, and NEVER looked back. I haven't read a single tweet since, because the web interface is basically unuseable with a simple browser. Thats fine, I am used to being excluded from most of the modern internet. Do I write blog posts asking people to stop using Firefox and go back to lynx? Maybe I should, but nah, its too hilarious. I like it when people have prinicples and stick to it. I learnt to absolutely hate activists, those people that seem more concerned to influence the people around themselves, then their own actions.
I think it's worth noting that Elon didn't make Twitter bad.
Twitter was already bad. Jack found himself accidentally in control of the world's message board, one of them at least... And decided his plan to be responsible for that vast power was to have no plan. Selling to Musk should have surprised nobody because Twitter was, in that sense, extremely traditional startup company work... And the goal was always to sell out.
I left Twitter when they responded to the United States electing a Twitter troll President by changing their policy on what trolling looked like instead of enforcing it. Because I suspected that nothing good would come of an organization whose top-level leadership had already shown that much of a lack of integrity.
I am disappointed to have been proven right with depressing consistency.
>Selling to Musk should have surprised nobody because Twitter was, in that sense, extremely traditional startup company work... And the goal was always to sell out.
It's more than that. Musk tried to back out and was forced in court to finish the deal to buy Twitter.
I'd argue it's really the author just saying out loud for themselves, like they need to cast off this old, and always stupid idea, that interfacing is condoning, that if you don't performative turn your back on "$THING" for "$Reason" that means you are for "$THING", even if not doing so has zero material impact at all. Me shitposting on Twitter (you can still call it that, X is a dumb fucking name and everyone knows what you're talking about, if you want to do the performative thing) is not why Elon Musk holds the shitty views he does nor why he has a trillion dollars in net worth. Me tapping "like" on a picture of an old computer on there does nothing. I own no stock in any of his companies. I buy none of his products. I make basic text API requests to a website he bought and block ads on it. So why would I leave just because he's a twat? Fuck him! I was there first!
Twitter/X never stopped being the place where people who have something interesting to say or show stopped hanging out; conversely, the big Bluesky migration really just meant a lot of annoying people left. I'm glad some of the more interesting ones are figuring out what a lame idea it was to leave in the first place. Come on back! It's worse than it was but it's no worse than anywhere else!
Like, you have to first prove anyone should care if you turn your back on them before you make a big show of turning your back on them. Otherwise it's just cringe. And just like "it's not an airport, you don't need to announce your departures", you don't need to announce your return either. No one who matters will judge you for looking at Twitter.
I guess for some folks yeah having a clean list might be helpful. Frankly though the "cave diver heros are pedos cause they insulted the stupid submarine" should have been the wake up call, a half a fucking DECADE before the outright Nazi shit, for a lot of people that he was a complete stupid cunt, sadly they didn't and kept buying those crappy cars he made. I bet those thousands of dollars enabled far more of wealth he enjoys vs the meager pennies he might earn from a non-ad seeing user lookin at stuff on Twitter.
In fact, two of those cars were bought by the author of this article! Wow!
You might not buy any of his products, but by visiting X you are a product he's selling to advertisers. The fact you block ads is not disclosed to the advertisers he sells to, but your regular visits absolutely are.
Ok? How much value does Twitter/X give him, and how much does my occasional visit bring?
Seriously, let's go with the old rules I used to have to follow if I got a gift from a vendor as a public employee: I need to make an equal value donation to a 503c. How much should I make the check out for? Does it matter when every dumb fuck is still throwing money at Tesla and SpaceX? Am I really the one empowering that dumbass? I think not.
Algorithm is much improved. Just way more interesting content reaches me now.
WAY less censorship. Like an unbelievably reduced amount of censorship. That's the biggest thing for me.
Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see. The fact that they send you a notification on posts you liked that get noted is awesome.
Better bot control (still a problem, though the bigger problem seems to be foreign sockpuppeting by humans, which is about the same as always)
More responsiveness to technical issues.
And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.
I can't see anything past all the blue checkmarks who pay for visibility. I've had to run the "block the blue" userscripts for hours just to make the site usable.
> WAY less censorship.
You could power a datacenter with how fast Orwell is spinning in his grave, as Elon's Xitter approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments (compared to pre-Elon Twitter's 50%). But I guess letting Grok undress children means "less censorship" for you specifically.
> Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see.
This is the only thing I agree with.
> Better bot control
Elon just crashed out when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center, and right-wing account activity dropped on Xitter.
> More responsiveness to technical issues.
Things breaking and then getting reverted isn't better than things not breaking in the first place
> And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.
It probably would have been better if Twitter itself had moved to AT Protocol, as it's the future. But I'm happy to leave the people using Grok to undress pictures of children on Xitter.
No, I don't mean Grok undressing pictures (which I have honestly never seen on X, but maybe that's just my algorithm), I mean approximately 30% of the world political spectrum that can now voice their opinion without being censored.
Because the censorship on old Twitter was so wildly effective, people can't even fathom it was happening, despite the extensive documentation.
You're confusing moderation with censorship. Censorship is when governments tell Twitter to silence people, this went up by 66% under Musk if you can read the link I posted (try reading something longer than a tweet, you might learn something). Less moderation means people can say slurs, post deepfakes of children, and make the place an extremely hostile environment filled with racists, slanderers, bots, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy nutjobs, which you seem enthused about.
I'd prefer my social media without people slinging slurs and braindead conspiracies every other post. The vile shit that gets promoted to the top of the feed is unbelievable. 4chan man-child garbage.
I'll probably be downvoted for admitting this but I do quite enjoy the new X, the suggested tab is certainly full of crazy, unhinged conspiracy theories and obvious rage bait posts, it's like opening the door to an insane asylum, somewhat entertaining for a short time, you'll probably find a few things that challenge your views and there are some genuine gems of a post that come up there from time to time, but then I can always switch over to my following tab for just the more sober and sane accounts I follow and then it's basically back to the more old style Twitter feed of just accounts your interested in following.
Most of the other similar platforms tend to conform to a more politically correct, consensus enforcement style of a certain narrative, which is fine for the more fragile minded who dislike anything that might challenge their world view, but those places just ultimately become boring echo chambers full on a small ingroup that tend to become increasingly weird and unfriendly to outsiders and divorced from reality over time.
You, and many other people in this industry, are cooking your brain on a website owned by a literal white supremacist, and you think you're too smart (or whatever the opposite of "fragile minded" is) for it to happen.
Where you spend time shapes your thoughts, whether you like it or not.
Good post, and I agree with it.
I've been preferring Bluesky lately. It's much more open so you can write your own feeds to consume it however you like. I currently have one that runs every post in my following feed through a cheap LLM filter to throw out ragebait and topics I don't care about. It requires some initial work to curate your experience (including blocking some annoying people) but after that it's good.
There are a lot of ways to scrape the content you want into a different interface, or filter ads and the content you don't want to see.
I mostly scrape and use a different interface, but when I view the actual site, I use https://imbue.com/blog/bouncer (I work at the company that makes this, on other projects).
I guess I should say I shared this here to see how people would react, as it is pretty much the converse of the Daring Fireball piece.
I want my work to be seen as much as anyone; I currently post to bsky and mastodon, and I've stayed off threads and twitter. I often wonder how much I'm sacrificing by not doing everything possible to maximize my social media footprint in the name of sleeping at night.
I excitedly thought this was an indictment of the X Window System, which is decidedly not bad in my experience.
What a relief that it's just another pants-shitting opine over the trillionaire.
Nobody cares. The left overs have no moral high ground to stand on and judge anyone. If you demand stability( by conservating social order or nostalgia for the past) in unstable times by your own making you are disqualified. Somebody disqualified does not get to choose the people, the platform or the social order. Or which ideas are discussed and which are not.
Lex, I don’t know how to put this nicely. But if you are reading this, sell your teslas. Finger wagging about Twitter/X has roughly zero moral weight coming from someone who has bought two Teslas.
The bumper stickers are worse, unfortunately. They read as self awareness without moral conviction.
Thank you. That was far more nicely put than I was inclined.
We'll have to give it at least another decade to assess whether Musk is a hero or villain, but nothing in TFA pushed me toward the latter.
Really? https://emeraldbook.org/news/jun-3026-3/
Agree, I'd also like to live on a different social network, but it is what it is
I really miss the Elon Musk from before 2018, he was completely different :(
what happened in 2018/19?
In 2014, he fired his PR person when she asked for a raise (she was very good at her job).
In Spring of 2018, investigative reporters at the LA Times found that Elon acted like a tyrant removing yellow hi-vis safety tape at Tesla factories because he didn't like the aesthetic, which lead to more workplace accidents. This was when Elon started getting extremely adversarial with the press.
https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-factor...
A few months later, during the Thai cave rescue, he flaunted some kind of coffin made from spare rocket parts as his plan to save children who were trapped in a Thai cave, and when one of the actual rescuers Vernon Unsworth told him the cave was too narrow for that to be of use, Elon called him a "pedo" (note, Elon also begged to go to Jeffrey Epstein's parties).
It all went downhill from there.
Not really. He was trying very hard to get onto Epstein island.
“What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk wrote in an email to Epstein in November 2012. In another in December 2013, he asked, “Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”
[1]: https://time.com/7362868/elon-musk-epstein-emails/
So... Yuu don't like the guy who bought Twitter and renamed it to X? Thats fine. You dislike him so much that you want to boycott the platform he bought? Fine! Go ahead, show how prinicpled you are, and actually don't use the platform for anything. Neither post to it, nor read anything from it. Thats all fine. But... I am soooo done with this "I want to get clean, so everyone else has to stop, so that I dont feel alone." attitude. I don't care that you don't like X. I haven't used it since almost 10 years. Deleted my account back then, and NEVER looked back. I haven't read a single tweet since, because the web interface is basically unuseable with a simple browser. Thats fine, I am used to being excluded from most of the modern internet. Do I write blog posts asking people to stop using Firefox and go back to lynx? Maybe I should, but nah, its too hilarious. I like it when people have prinicples and stick to it. I learnt to absolutely hate activists, those people that seem more concerned to influence the people around themselves, then their own actions.
I think it's worth noting that Elon didn't make Twitter bad.
Twitter was already bad. Jack found himself accidentally in control of the world's message board, one of them at least... And decided his plan to be responsible for that vast power was to have no plan. Selling to Musk should have surprised nobody because Twitter was, in that sense, extremely traditional startup company work... And the goal was always to sell out.
I left Twitter when they responded to the United States electing a Twitter troll President by changing their policy on what trolling looked like instead of enforcing it. Because I suspected that nothing good would come of an organization whose top-level leadership had already shown that much of a lack of integrity.
I am disappointed to have been proven right with depressing consistency.
>Selling to Musk should have surprised nobody because Twitter was, in that sense, extremely traditional startup company work... And the goal was always to sell out.
It's more than that. Musk tried to back out and was forced in court to finish the deal to buy Twitter.
This. Twitter was always a dumpster fire. The people who were part of the old dumpster fire are just mad that it’s someone else’s dumpster fire now.
Who is this for?
I'd argue it's really the author just saying out loud for themselves, like they need to cast off this old, and always stupid idea, that interfacing is condoning, that if you don't performative turn your back on "$THING" for "$Reason" that means you are for "$THING", even if not doing so has zero material impact at all. Me shitposting on Twitter (you can still call it that, X is a dumb fucking name and everyone knows what you're talking about, if you want to do the performative thing) is not why Elon Musk holds the shitty views he does nor why he has a trillion dollars in net worth. Me tapping "like" on a picture of an old computer on there does nothing. I own no stock in any of his companies. I buy none of his products. I make basic text API requests to a website he bought and block ads on it. So why would I leave just because he's a twat? Fuck him! I was there first!
Twitter/X never stopped being the place where people who have something interesting to say or show stopped hanging out; conversely, the big Bluesky migration really just meant a lot of annoying people left. I'm glad some of the more interesting ones are figuring out what a lame idea it was to leave in the first place. Come on back! It's worse than it was but it's no worse than anywhere else!
Like, you have to first prove anyone should care if you turn your back on them before you make a big show of turning your back on them. Otherwise it's just cringe. And just like "it's not an airport, you don't need to announce your departures", you don't need to announce your return either. No one who matters will judge you for looking at Twitter.
> Who is this for?
People who want a nice succinct "list of awful things Elon has done". Perfecto!
I guess for some folks yeah having a clean list might be helpful. Frankly though the "cave diver heros are pedos cause they insulted the stupid submarine" should have been the wake up call, a half a fucking DECADE before the outright Nazi shit, for a lot of people that he was a complete stupid cunt, sadly they didn't and kept buying those crappy cars he made. I bet those thousands of dollars enabled far more of wealth he enjoys vs the meager pennies he might earn from a non-ad seeing user lookin at stuff on Twitter. In fact, two of those cars were bought by the author of this article! Wow!
You might not buy any of his products, but by visiting X you are a product he's selling to advertisers. The fact you block ads is not disclosed to the advertisers he sells to, but your regular visits absolutely are.
Ok? How much value does Twitter/X give him, and how much does my occasional visit bring?
Seriously, let's go with the old rules I used to have to follow if I got a gift from a vendor as a public employee: I need to make an equal value donation to a 503c. How much should I make the check out for? Does it matter when every dumb fuck is still throwing money at Tesla and SpaceX? Am I really the one empowering that dumbass? I think not.
imagine some poor guy on twitter who pays for his premium because you happened to like his post... bringing $$ to Elon
a social media platform does need its users
Ironically this type of moralistic rant would have done numbers on old Twitter.
X is much much better than old Twitter
Edit: I can't reply so, here's why I think so:
Algorithm is much improved. Just way more interesting content reaches me now.
WAY less censorship. Like an unbelievably reduced amount of censorship. That's the biggest thing for me.
Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see. The fact that they send you a notification on posts you liked that get noted is awesome.
Better bot control (still a problem, though the bigger problem seems to be foreign sockpuppeting by humans, which is about the same as always)
More responsiveness to technical issues.
And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.
In what way?
> Algorithm is much improved.
I can't see anything past all the blue checkmarks who pay for visibility. I've had to run the "block the blue" userscripts for hours just to make the site usable.
> WAY less censorship.
You could power a datacenter with how fast Orwell is spinning in his grave, as Elon's Xitter approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments (compared to pre-Elon Twitter's 50%). But I guess letting Grok undress children means "less censorship" for you specifically.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...
> Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see.
This is the only thing I agree with.
> Better bot control
Elon just crashed out when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center, and right-wing account activity dropped on Xitter.
> More responsiveness to technical issues.
Things breaking and then getting reverted isn't better than things not breaking in the first place
> And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.
It probably would have been better if Twitter itself had moved to AT Protocol, as it's the future. But I'm happy to leave the people using Grok to undress pictures of children on Xitter.
No, I don't mean Grok undressing pictures (which I have honestly never seen on X, but maybe that's just my algorithm), I mean approximately 30% of the world political spectrum that can now voice their opinion without being censored.
Because the censorship on old Twitter was so wildly effective, people can't even fathom it was happening, despite the extensive documentation.
You're confusing moderation with censorship. Censorship is when governments tell Twitter to silence people, this went up by 66% under Musk if you can read the link I posted (try reading something longer than a tweet, you might learn something). Less moderation means people can say slurs, post deepfakes of children, and make the place an extremely hostile environment filled with racists, slanderers, bots, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy nutjobs, which you seem enthused about.
Maybe you don't know about the Grok deepfake story because you don't see far outside your filter bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal
I'd prefer my social media without people slinging slurs and braindead conspiracies every other post. The vile shit that gets promoted to the top of the feed is unbelievable. 4chan man-child garbage.
> The vile shit that gets promoted to the top of the feed
Can you share a screenshot so that we can get a taste of what you see?
I'll probably be downvoted for admitting this but I do quite enjoy the new X, the suggested tab is certainly full of crazy, unhinged conspiracy theories and obvious rage bait posts, it's like opening the door to an insane asylum, somewhat entertaining for a short time, you'll probably find a few things that challenge your views and there are some genuine gems of a post that come up there from time to time, but then I can always switch over to my following tab for just the more sober and sane accounts I follow and then it's basically back to the more old style Twitter feed of just accounts your interested in following.
Most of the other similar platforms tend to conform to a more politically correct, consensus enforcement style of a certain narrative, which is fine for the more fragile minded who dislike anything that might challenge their world view, but those places just ultimately become boring echo chambers full on a small ingroup that tend to become increasingly weird and unfriendly to outsiders and divorced from reality over time.
You, and many other people in this industry, are cooking your brain on a website owned by a literal white supremacist, and you think you're too smart (or whatever the opposite of "fragile minded" is) for it to happen.
Where you spend time shapes your thoughts, whether you like it or not.
> unhinged conspiracy theories and obvious rage bait posts
is it mostly the rightie conservative stuff or evenly distributed?
to me the problem is not if the algo censors things for craziness of views, it's more if the algo censors things for political direction of views.
Just think how miserable it must be to be the author.