> white supremacists increasingly dominate everyone's feeds
Either I'm the one person who isn't seeing this, or this person has a very deranged definition of "white supremacist." I get AI grifter guys in my feed but I can't recall seeing unironic white supremacists.
I'm not a fan of Elon but these people that made their entire personality trying to demonstrate how Twitter is dead are the same ones who were saying it would happen as soon as Musk was confirmed to take over, and if anything are disappointed it's not going as badly as they predicated so they need to make things seem worse than they are.
The biggest problems I've had with Twitter since Elon took over is having to see his unfunny jokes like tweets saying which planet they're sent from or making the logo a doge head for a few days.
Agreed, I hate how people just throw this out like it's fact and everyone applauds. My twitter feed before was a ton of artists I follow, my twitter feed now? A bunch of artists I follow.
I bet most of the community here defaults to Following (non-curated timeline). Mine's gotten a lot quieter, without as many interesting threads cutting across fields, but talking to friends hasn't changed. However I've seen the occasional literal, ideological N*zi pop up in New Twitter's For You (curated timeline), which I suspect is down to using metrics susceptible to rage-farming.
Not sure about white supremacists, but as an ex-user of Twitter, now a casual lurker, I find that toxic commenters are almost everywhere.
I don't know if part of Twitter's algorithm was to filter these out for me, but browsing Twitter without an account is a wild ride, and has led me to believe that the far right has indeed infested the platform thoroughly.
At least for me the twitter comments have always been a cess pool of toxicity and really have only gotten worse over the years. Far worse than any other platform I've used. I haven't noticed a significant change in the rate the toxicity grows since he elon took over but to be fair I do feel as though the toxicity has been near saturation for years already.
A lot of it did, and still does get removed/hidden that at least gives the impression that the platform is less toxic than it really is but I don't really buy the argument that forceful removal/banning is helpful anymore because it really hasn't worked anywhere online that ive seen, it just escalates things and makes them madder/more vengeful. Then they just make new posts/accounts/do damage elsewhere.
I'd much rather just read a few more empty death and terrorism theats and move on with my day than have twitter esculate them until they actually are mad enough to try and follow through with them.
It's like dating apps. Letting people buy reach, rather than relying on "merit," can make people's feeds worse. And yet you have to make money. It's a balancing act. You want to turn the ads spigot on just enough that people are still happy with the service.
It's exaggeration for sure, but even I get some white supremacist content in my "For You" feed and I only follow sports/band/venue/restaurant accounts. It's puzzling how it found its way there. My "Following" feed is fine though.
1. Their definition of "white supremacist" is far, far wider than yours.
2. I don't see white supremacists at all. In fact, aside from Elon's mercurial and adolescent drama and knee jerk policy changes, Twitter is far, far better.
It seems like all the people who whined about other people on Twitter fled to Mastodon or something. And in fact, I stopped using Mastodon because it became a clutter of people complaining about people on Twitter, because those people held different opinions.
It could be from Robin DeAngelo who wrote the very popular book "White Fragility" and other books about problematic white people. She says:
"Remember: When I use the term “white supremacy”, I do not use it to refer to extreme hate groups. I use the term to capture the pervasiveness, magnitude, and normalcy of white dominance and assumed superiority."
So it looks like a further redefinition of a word to control language and discourse. In essence, "white culture" (I don't really know if that's a thing?) or what is commonly referred to as "whiteness" today is “white supremacy”. So unless you want to be a "“white supremacist" you will actively fight against it. At the least, you certainly won't disagree with the critical social justice ideology if you want to be an "ally". And if you think you're being a "good white" by not being racist you are actually problematic and need to "do the work".
This is from her extremely popular, celebrated, and mainstream texts and not my opinions.
I don’t see any either, mainly b/c I curate who I follow and click the link at the top “Following” to only show tweets of people I follow (instead a of the default “For You” which mixes in Twitter’s mostly inane recommendations).
> Either I'm the one person who isn't seeing this, or this person has a very deranged definition of "white supremacist."
I honestly have noticed no changes whatsoever in my feed. A lot of people I follow are griping about how bad it is, but I'm not seeing it. Perhaps they are sunsetting this site because it's not all doom and gloom, as much as they may have wanted it to be?
I have no opinion on the entire matter other than it's the same for me, outside of Elon Musk making more frequent odd replies (as you mention). He seems to respond with "we really need to look into this" or "this needs further investigation" on things that border on conspiracies or are easily proven/disproven.
Yeah, I don't have this either. I suspect it's the new sense of "white supremacist" (something like "people who are at all critical of left-wing identity politics") rather than anyone who discernibly professes a belief in the superiority of the "white race".
> I'm not a fan of Elon but these people that made their entire personality trying to demonstrate how Twitter is dead
Yeah, when he laid off a bunch of engineering, lots of people (including Grady Booch, one of the guys behind UML) were insisting that Twitter was going to fall apart, pointing to every single bug as proof of their prophesy (despite that Twitter has always been plagued with bugs--fail whale, anyone?--and many other successful social media platforms thrive as businesses despite far more frequent, egregious bugs). Of course, this isn't an endorsement of Musk in any way, but it will be read as such because we're not allowed to have nuanced opinions on the Internet.
I have seen on my feed a picture of Hitler with a sympathetic quote from an account called "Racial Consciousness" with a blue check mark. I could not even imagine seeing that before Elon took over. So for me, yes, there are definitely white supremacists increasingly dominating my feed.
Maybe your feed is curated more, but it's definitely true that visiting a tweet url as an anonymous user, almost no matter what the tweet is about or who tweeted it, when you scroll down it starts just showing suggested tweets/topics, and not kidding they are almost all paid blue checkmark right wing provocateurs. And part of this was unintentional in promoting "paid" checkmark people but the vast majority of those are a certain type of person who want to shout loudly.
Seems the previously amplified "notable" voices have self-selected themselves out of the blue checks because they refuse to buy them. I see a lot of "I'll never pay a single cent to elon" sentiment from the former anointed ones.
My reading is that the author had a moment of self awareness and realised maintaining a barely-trafficked site essentially powered by their own bitterness was not a healthy or satisfying pastime.
These social networks never implode in spectacularly entertaining fashion, making the premise of the site flawed from beginning. They become zombies and collapse gradually, and then suddenly. Maybe twitter will reach a steady state of journalist echo chamber and survive for a bit longer but I don't understand why anyone spends time there unless they are advertising their work / doing public relations.
Exactly, everyone is expecting a Toys R Us moment, an Enron implosion, or an FTX scandal, but really, it's going to be IBM. It's going to be Atari. It's going to be MySpace, Digg, etc. It'll dwindle until it's a shell of its former self. And you won't be able to say exactly when it flipped from being alive to a zombie, but you'll know it's just different now.
>They become zombies and collapse gradually, and then suddenly.
This is true for all companies though. It's arguably happening to Google now, and to Facebook, and, hard as it is to imagine, will happen to Apple some day, even if that day is decades away. GE was an icon of corporate competence in the 80s and is now in parts. Toyota has long seemed invincible but now has to make it through the transition to electric vehicles. Intel, Microsoft, etc.
The hard part is not predicting that a corporation will decline, it's getting the timing right. (Just ask Michael Dell, who in the mid 1990s famously said he'd shut down Apple and sell it for parts if he was in charge. Red Herring magazine kept predicting Amazon's imminent collapse and at least half the people reading this don't even know who that is because they very much died first.)
> They become zombies and collapse gradually, and then suddenly.
I know people love to crib Hemingway's turn of phrase, but I don't think it makes sense here. Because it's the opposite, right? Sudden first, and then gradual. There's some big catalyst, and what remains afterwards slowly dissipates seemingly interminably towards zero. Even in notable cases like MySpace, which still exists, it's just "gradual" at first and then it's still "gradual" later, too.
Depends. Livejournal, say, was gradual (long-term decline), then sudden (Russian takeover). Similar for freenode. Digg was sudden (truly disastrous redesign), then gradual (spiral into irrelevance). Tumblr was… kind of all over the place.
Hmm perhaps you are right. Elon acquisition of Twitter / Fox News acquisition of Myspace? not sure what was the catalyst there. Removing porn from Tumblr? All sudden shocks that lead to a long term decline and eventual irrelevance.
Sure, such a website could exist, but it wouldn't be very fun to read or maintain. Seems like they created this site in a desire to partake in schadenfreude, not as an intellectual exercise.
But they weren't really tracking changes in Twitter over time in any meaningful or informative way. The were just regurgitating a variety of anti-Elon headlines.
It does seem perfectly in line with the 1% rule[1] for social networks. In this case I'm not sure if a user is a content creator or not so it's a little unclear if this is 1% of 1% or 1% of all.
Is that money worth the credibility they lost? The blue check used to be a status symbol, now accounts are putting out statements making it clear that they never paid for it.
> A 1% conversion rate is pretty much what I would expect from an online business.
When I was doing research on paywalls, this was my experience too, and some paywalls are much cheaper than $8/month. (Sites like Wired are always running random deals for $5 for an entire year.) Many sites came out of the gate at 1.5% or even 2%, but then dropped to 0.5% once all the fanatics were scooped up in the first few months. Pubs more often than not think their paywall or analytics must be “broken,” because they can’t believe the drop-off.
It's funny to see how Elon went from a hero of the left (omg EVs! omg Mars!) to a hated villain just because he took away (he didn't really though) their favorite web chat application.
Pretty sure his anti-labor stances, erratic and sometimes probably illegal behavior as a business leader (like, you know, tweeting lies that could influence stock prices), and constant over-promising and under-delivering had earned him quite a few haters well before Twitter.
> hero of the left [...] omg Mars!
"The left" doesn't give a shit about Mars. Some space-romantics who may or may not be on the left, give a shit about Mars.
> a hated villain just because he took away [Twitter]
This gets the details wrong. The backlash towards the Twitter acquisition was essentially immediate and a consequence of the fact that Elon was the one behind it. The antipathy towards all things Elon had already been in slow foment leading up to the announcement of the proposed acquisition last Spring.
I don't see Twitter going down anytime soon. It has noticeably become much better (though there were some issues initially) feature wise (especially with Twitter Blue). Disappointed with API pricing as it completely destroyed the Indie Hacker community. Maybe this is bound to happen with most services sooner or later as everyone is realizing that data is becoming more important than ever (Reddit/Stack Overflow is now charging for API access too). Won't be surprised if Elon uses Twitter data as base dataset for his new AI venture while restricting others from accessing it for building their own models.
How has it become better? AFAIK the number of genuine interactions on site has significantly decreased with platform exodus. The model of being recommended things that people for a checkmark to hope to show you is also definitely orthogonal to how social network interactions foster.
> How has it become better? AFAIK the number of genuine interactions on site has significantly decreased with platform exodus
Then that only means you were surrounded by your own small bubble. I had taken a hiatus from Twitter because I despised how the "algorithm" banned accounts that I was following earlier only because it was from the right of political spectrum in my Country (India). One of those accounts was an account that set right historical facts about Indian history which was distorted by leftist historians after India gained Independence. These new facts were cross verified and revealed to be true. So what did Twitter India decide to do? It banned the said account.
It was only after Elon took over, all those accounts were re-activated. So I have an opposite experience to you. Most of the accounts that I followed were banned by erstwhile regime have been now reinstated. So it is an opposite of an exodus for me.
Quite frankly, this is not just me in India who felt this. I am pretty sure it was widespread as Twitter was extremely left leaning in its ideology (from employees to the CEO). There was actual stifling of alternative viewpoints - though many on that side of the political spectrum will refuse to even acknowledge this.
Anyways I only brought this up to counter your point on there being some "platform exodus". There is only disgruntled developers who don't like Elon (especially after he openly said he would prefer voting Republican) and his centre-right leaning ideology and left the site. There is no "rational" reason for the hate.
Sorry to put it bluntly. I have always tried to be restricted in what I say lest I get "cancelled" by the woke mob (have been banned twice on HN itself for having contrary opinions). But at this point, I don't care anymore if people feel hurt by my ideological/political/social stances. I am tired of being censored every step of the way. By both Big Tech and Government. I respect your ideological point of view and I hope to get the same treatment back in return. At one point I identified with liberal causes, of being "for free speech" and not against it. Sadly, I find myself moving farther and farther away from what has now become of liberal ideology. It is no longer liberal in that old sense. It has turned fascist. And I can't stand that any more. I find myself on the right side of the aisle which ironically is "for free speech" while the liberal left, which was supposed to stand "for free speech" has adopted cancel culture and censorship as tools to counter opposing viewpoints. People who refuse to see this or accept this are just living in delusion.
Noticeably better in terms of content I am seeing and that the accounts I used to follow earlier, which were banned in the erstwhile Twitter regime, have been reinstated. Plus Twitter is more fun and engaging now than it was before where I used to only see people cancelling/boycotting/fighting over trivial things. Community notes is working great too. I know instantly if something is fake or not and prevents me from sharing that Tweet with friends/family (if not for community notes I would have believed the Tweet to be true, unless I actually did my own research/investigation).
Downsides I listed are more frustration with some decisions taken by Elon. Like increasing the price of the API. But I can see why he did that (especially considering news that OpenAI trained on Twitter data too). I just vented it out so if any Twitter employee is reading this, they come up with some way to also help indie developers (many of them shut shop after this debacle).
Also, I really despise it when people want you to choose either black or white. Either you are in the club of hating Elon or glorifying him. I don't want to fall in either of the buckets. I want to express my own opinion on things that are not influenced by the mob. So yeah I can say both good and bad things about Twitter takeover. And that's exactly what I am doing.
Honestly the only thing that I think has genuinely improved is Community Notes. I think it's pretty smart that a note is only added when people who usually disagree with each other agree on a note. I don't know if that was something in the works prior to Musk or not, but it seems like the rare good idea for improving social media discourse. By comparison, Twitter Blue seems like a gimmick at best.
Oh come on. Twitter going down was a big meme in pre-Musk takeover (remember the "Twitter is over capacity" blue whale of death? I do). Compared to earlier disruptions this is nothing (the entire site is still accessible for me). Could just be a feature upgrade or some form of maintenance which is causing accounts to be logged out. It is not like the "Twitter is over capacity" days where you just couldn't access Twitter at all (even when logged out).
(Twitter's auth flow is entirely broken if you had SMS 2FA before the Musk takeover and pay-to-play. It won't let you log in with the only 2FA method you have, and redirects you to a form to reclaim a locked account after the failure which... requires you to be logged in).
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Either I'm the one person who isn't seeing this, or this person has a very deranged definition of "white supremacist." I get AI grifter guys in my feed but I can't recall seeing unironic white supremacists.
I'm not a fan of Elon but these people that made their entire personality trying to demonstrate how Twitter is dead are the same ones who were saying it would happen as soon as Musk was confirmed to take over, and if anything are disappointed it's not going as badly as they predicated so they need to make things seem worse than they are.
The biggest problems I've had with Twitter since Elon took over is having to see his unfunny jokes like tweets saying which planet they're sent from or making the logo a doge head for a few days.
I don't know if part of Twitter's algorithm was to filter these out for me, but browsing Twitter without an account is a wild ride, and has led me to believe that the far right has indeed infested the platform thoroughly.
A lot of it did, and still does get removed/hidden that at least gives the impression that the platform is less toxic than it really is but I don't really buy the argument that forceful removal/banning is helpful anymore because it really hasn't worked anywhere online that ive seen, it just escalates things and makes them madder/more vengeful. Then they just make new posts/accounts/do damage elsewhere.
I'd much rather just read a few more empty death and terrorism theats and move on with my day than have twitter esculate them until they actually are mad enough to try and follow through with them.
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1. Their definition of "white supremacist" is far, far wider than yours.
2. I don't see white supremacists at all. In fact, aside from Elon's mercurial and adolescent drama and knee jerk policy changes, Twitter is far, far better.
It seems like all the people who whined about other people on Twitter fled to Mastodon or something. And in fact, I stopped using Mastodon because it became a clutter of people complaining about people on Twitter, because those people held different opinions.
"Remember: When I use the term “white supremacy”, I do not use it to refer to extreme hate groups. I use the term to capture the pervasiveness, magnitude, and normalcy of white dominance and assumed superiority."
So it looks like a further redefinition of a word to control language and discourse. In essence, "white culture" (I don't really know if that's a thing?) or what is commonly referred to as "whiteness" today is “white supremacy”. So unless you want to be a "“white supremacist" you will actively fight against it. At the least, you certainly won't disagree with the critical social justice ideology if you want to be an "ally". And if you think you're being a "good white" by not being racist you are actually problematic and need to "do the work".
This is from her extremely popular, celebrated, and mainstream texts and not my opinions.
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I honestly have noticed no changes whatsoever in my feed. A lot of people I follow are griping about how bad it is, but I'm not seeing it. Perhaps they are sunsetting this site because it's not all doom and gloom, as much as they may have wanted it to be?
I have no opinion on the entire matter other than it's the same for me, outside of Elon Musk making more frequent odd replies (as you mention). He seems to respond with "we really need to look into this" or "this needs further investigation" on things that border on conspiracies or are easily proven/disproven.
Am I just an outlier for some strange reason?
> I'm not a fan of Elon but these people that made their entire personality trying to demonstrate how Twitter is dead
Yeah, when he laid off a bunch of engineering, lots of people (including Grady Booch, one of the guys behind UML) were insisting that Twitter was going to fall apart, pointing to every single bug as proof of their prophesy (despite that Twitter has always been plagued with bugs--fail whale, anyone?--and many other successful social media platforms thrive as businesses despite far more frequent, egregious bugs). Of course, this isn't an endorsement of Musk in any way, but it will be read as such because we're not allowed to have nuanced opinions on the Internet.
Ah yes, I remember when people had those. I think they phased them out because they didn't fit into the headlines anymore.
Also, it costs less to paint the world with simple black and white.
All democrats are commie socialists that want to take away your individuality.
All republicans are white supremacist nazis that want to impose their will.
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It's popular here because people don't feel able to express themselves to others outside of such an online platform. That and prostitution
Elon wants to export this dystopia to the rest of the world... I joke, I doubt he has any clue about anything beyond the user counts.
This is true for all companies though. It's arguably happening to Google now, and to Facebook, and, hard as it is to imagine, will happen to Apple some day, even if that day is decades away. GE was an icon of corporate competence in the 80s and is now in parts. Toyota has long seemed invincible but now has to make it through the transition to electric vehicles. Intel, Microsoft, etc.
The hard part is not predicting that a corporation will decline, it's getting the timing right. (Just ask Michael Dell, who in the mid 1990s famously said he'd shut down Apple and sell it for parts if he was in charge. Red Herring magazine kept predicting Amazon's imminent collapse and at least half the people reading this don't even know who that is because they very much died first.)
I know people love to crib Hemingway's turn of phrase, but I don't think it makes sense here. Because it's the opposite, right? Sudden first, and then gradual. There's some big catalyst, and what remains afterwards slowly dissipates seemingly interminably towards zero. Even in notable cases like MySpace, which still exists, it's just "gradual" at first and then it's still "gradual" later, too.
From an information perspective, that makes tracking it over time more relevant, not less. But of course also means it's a lot more work.
A 1% conversion rate is pretty much what I would expect from an online business.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
When I was doing research on paywalls, this was my experience too, and some paywalls are much cheaper than $8/month. (Sites like Wired are always running random deals for $5 for an entire year.) Many sites came out of the gate at 1.5% or even 2%, but then dropped to 0.5% once all the fanatics were scooped up in the first few months. Pubs more often than not think their paywall or analytics must be “broken,” because they can’t believe the drop-off.
Elon Derangement Syndrome is not as prolific as TDS but it's still definitely a thing.
> hero of the left [...] omg Mars!
"The left" doesn't give a shit about Mars. Some space-romantics who may or may not be on the left, give a shit about Mars.
This gets the details wrong. The backlash towards the Twitter acquisition was essentially immediate and a consequence of the fact that Elon was the one behind it. The antipathy towards all things Elon had already been in slow foment leading up to the announcement of the proposed acquisition last Spring.
A kind of mimetic hatred
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Then that only means you were surrounded by your own small bubble. I had taken a hiatus from Twitter because I despised how the "algorithm" banned accounts that I was following earlier only because it was from the right of political spectrum in my Country (India). One of those accounts was an account that set right historical facts about Indian history which was distorted by leftist historians after India gained Independence. These new facts were cross verified and revealed to be true. So what did Twitter India decide to do? It banned the said account.
It was only after Elon took over, all those accounts were re-activated. So I have an opposite experience to you. Most of the accounts that I followed were banned by erstwhile regime have been now reinstated. So it is an opposite of an exodus for me.
Quite frankly, this is not just me in India who felt this. I am pretty sure it was widespread as Twitter was extremely left leaning in its ideology (from employees to the CEO). There was actual stifling of alternative viewpoints - though many on that side of the political spectrum will refuse to even acknowledge this.
Anyways I only brought this up to counter your point on there being some "platform exodus". There is only disgruntled developers who don't like Elon (especially after he openly said he would prefer voting Republican) and his centre-right leaning ideology and left the site. There is no "rational" reason for the hate.
Sorry to put it bluntly. I have always tried to be restricted in what I say lest I get "cancelled" by the woke mob (have been banned twice on HN itself for having contrary opinions). But at this point, I don't care anymore if people feel hurt by my ideological/political/social stances. I am tired of being censored every step of the way. By both Big Tech and Government. I respect your ideological point of view and I hope to get the same treatment back in return. At one point I identified with liberal causes, of being "for free speech" and not against it. Sadly, I find myself moving farther and farther away from what has now become of liberal ideology. It is no longer liberal in that old sense. It has turned fascist. And I can't stand that any more. I find myself on the right side of the aisle which ironically is "for free speech" while the liberal left, which was supposed to stand "for free speech" has adopted cancel culture and censorship as tools to counter opposing viewpoints. People who refuse to see this or accept this are just living in delusion.
Sorry for the rant.
Downsides I listed are more frustration with some decisions taken by Elon. Like increasing the price of the API. But I can see why he did that (especially considering news that OpenAI trained on Twitter data too). I just vented it out so if any Twitter employee is reading this, they come up with some way to also help indie developers (many of them shut shop after this debacle).
Also, I really despise it when people want you to choose either black or white. Either you are in the club of hating Elon or glorifying him. I don't want to fall in either of the buckets. I want to express my own opinion on things that are not influenced by the mob. So yeah I can say both good and bad things about Twitter takeover. And that's exactly what I am doing.
(Twitter's auth flow is entirely broken if you had SMS 2FA before the Musk takeover and pay-to-play. It won't let you log in with the only 2FA method you have, and redirects you to a form to reclaim a locked account after the failure which... requires you to be logged in).