As well, there have been moderation changes that I disagree with.
It’s just not factually correct to say the product is identical to what it was a year ago. It’s not.
What has changed with either, as it impacts a user? I've looked hard but found zero change whatsoever.
When I come across those statements previously, if it says George Bush with a blue check, I just trusted that George Bush made that statement. Now, I don’t. So, what used to be a fairly reliable way to get to a pretty solid primary source for plenty of statements has become unreliable. I’m not really worried about over the top parody, that’s easy to spot, but more subtle impersonations really concern me.
If, say, the Defense Minister of a foreign country posts something provocative, it’s much harder for me to know if they really posted that or not.
It doesn’t impact me as a user who posts things, but it has a serious impact on me as a user who wants to validate that X person really did say Y.
My experience has been that there have been a TON of impersonators over the past 5 years, and the largest number I've come across have been impersonating Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin.
Trusting all blue checks a year ago would have been a very, very foolish strategy. From what I've seen, the verification hasn't gotten at all worse in the last week.
Trust is a spectrum, and the old system wasn’t perfect, but it was vastly vastly better. I wouldn’t have absolute trust that an account was who it purported to be before, but I had much higher confidence that I did before.
> From what I've seen, the verification hasn't gotten at all worse in the last week.
Then we’ve had vastly different experiences. Did you miss the part where he sold verification for $8, but stopped doing the verification as part of that?
It seems preposterous to claim nothing changed in this regard, while they literally introduced a new feature that entirely changed this aspect of the product.
If anything, the number of fake Vitaliks and fake Elons with blue checks running scams (usually starting with an offer to give away crypto) I've stumbled across has been lower than it was early in the year.
Perhaps there will be large changes over time due to the more open verification process recently announced, but they would take time to ripple out and have any impact on us more normal users.
the experience is absolutely not the same as it was a month or a year ago.
here's a screenshot attempting to load twitter.com/home just 3 minutes ago [7]. these intermittent failures to load have been increasingly happening for me on multiple computers on multiple different networks. if you have been digging into this as much as you imply, you've surely seen the many, many other people discussing this.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-two-factor-sms-problems/
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/twitter-chaos-end...
[2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/11/failures-in-t...
[3] https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/159261861552149299...
[4] https://www.techradar.com/news/live/live-blog-twitter-chaos-...
[5] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/twitter-two-factor-authenticati...
[6] https://www.androidauthority.com/twitter-sms-2fa-3234698/
That's a dishonest characterization. I haven't been digging into it at all. I've just been using the site as normal and haven't seen any issues, which is why I'm asking more motivated people (such as yourself) who have been digging, for specifics.
I have zero interest in the maelstrom of negative US media coverage, but seeing an actual broken part of the app would have been interesting if you'd been able to provide a link.
> What has changed with either, as it impacts a user? I've looked hard but found zero change whatsoever.
...i mistook that to mean you had been looking hard. sorry bout that.
In the course of tweeting, reading tweets, etc, I've kept an eye open for any kind of breakages / downtime but haven't seen any.
Have you personally been locked out of your account due to a 2FA problem or was that just something you read about?
i have personally experienced an increase in spam.
i have personally experienced a drastic increase in trolls.
i have personally seen a _dramatic_ increase of outright abusive accounts.
unlike the vast majority of twitter's users, our organization uses physical hardware devices for our 2fa, but after we started seeing the reports, we didn't log out at all--at the time it wasn't clear exactly what was causing the failure, and obviously we didn't want to lose access.
i am genuinely glad that you haven't noticed any of the sites problems tho. i truly do hope they can get it back to the sanity it was pre-october. im pretty skeptical on this tho, i tend to think he's set on turning it into some kind of "be shitty to each other" site, and that will obviously turn it into a ghost-town when compared to what it once was.
ok, thanks... it's a useful data point even if I haven't encountered the issues.
Wow. The people on your list are nuts. Musk hasn’t even changed anything yet. The product is identical to what it was a month (or year) ago.