X Is Bad, Though

howunfortunate

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.

shadowgovt

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.

bharrison

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.

wpm

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.

janalsncm

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.

cbradford

Just think how miserable it must be to be the author.

fivefifty

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.

ayaros

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.

marcelo-earth

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 :(

LargeLangMammal

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).

ripley12

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.

asanineassasin

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.

lynx97

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.

haunter

>His point, as I see it, is that yes, Elon Musk is awful, but the X algorithm no longer shoves his posts into John’s feed, and new Apple CEO John Ternus is posting there (along with other Apple executives), and that there are interesting people who post on X and not elsewhere. >That all may be true. But it’s not the point. They are talking past each other. "I like this technology because it's good" vs "I hate this technology because I hate the people behind it" It really comes down to how much conscious decision do you do every single time you buy a product. Or as the meme says we live in a society.

chrisbrandow

Putting the “bought b4 Elon was crazy” bumper stickers on the tesla but not selling it, puts a price range on how terrible one thinks Elon really is.