Likewise, especially because (1) he still owns it and (2) he can revert this at the drop of a hat and (3) he will likely be one heck of a backseat driver while she takes all the heat for his fuckups.

What change "destroyed" it for you? Was it extending the tweet length limit? Opening up verification for individuals? Organization labels? Bringing back a "following" timeline?

From my POV, it's gotten objectively better at a rapid clip over the past 6 months and I've been seeing less off-topic stuff in my feed (which is basically anything not programming-related) or a few other accounts I follow.

Also: long form videos, subscriptions, encrypted messaging.

Upcoming possibilities: video conferencing, micropayments á la WeChat.

I think the acquisition has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities and potential for a service that had become stale.

Courting actual Nazis, white supremacists, MAGA extremists and pushing them into prominence on feeds. And his constant need to feed his ego.

Can you provide examples of this? And I mean genuine extremists rather than just people you disagree with.

He brought back anyone previously banned for open naziism such as Andrew Anglin. And some suspicious several “14 88” referencing tweets

I checked just now and Andrew Anglin's account is suspended. I wasnt able to find a Patriotic Alternative account and when I searched on it, the overwhelming majority of the tweets were critical. And the content of the so-called nazi meme appears to have nothing to do with Nazism other than the shape of a helmet. It's actually about the speed of technology change. And from what I can tell Nick Fuentes/Groyper thing was on twitter for 24hrs before being suspended. So I dunno....it looks like you are providing a distorted view to support a narrative. If I wanted to I'm sure I could find all kinds of other hate content on the fringes that is equally nasty but sits outside the "narrative" we are constantly being force-fed.

you haven't looked much. those are also people who were let back and again suspended after obvious and newsworthy pressure from advertisers. lmk if you want more detail... or if you're unserious about this

Sure if you have some links although Im assuming itll be some leftwing news outlets doing what you appear to be doing, which is dressing up supposition and hearsay as fact.

Generally for me I mostly ignore the media as I find its largely distortions and half-truths. Not to mention Twitter is increasingly their competitor so unlikely to be objective anyway.

I just go on what I see with my own eyes and it seems pretty clean to me.

All those were ones I saw first hand

ok my experience is very different. Here's a short video on this exact topic of an interview with Elon Musk and a BBC "journalist" (I use that label very loosely).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqJKAnN0-gM

Idk what you’re showing me, a bad interviewer Elon accepted and edited by Daily Caller. Goodbye

Just mentioning as your comments reminded me of the BBC guy.

I'm skeptical given how often I've seen people be accused of being nazis and upon investigating discovering to my disappointment some rather milktoast views that would have been mainstream in 1990.

Can you name an actual nazi he is courting?

From a product perspective it’s certainly better.

But his antics drove away a significant chunk of the user base I care about.

It always makes me laugh how, for years, we mocked journalists because of their inflated blue check egos, and now every "free thinker" out there is eager to pay to be just like them. Verification is meaningless for most individuals since there's no real need to verify if @ronny2938742 is indeed Mr. Ron Whatever.

However, it's crucial to know if an account claiming to be a big company, government agency, journalist, politician, etc. is legitimate. Opening verification to subscribers is absolutely scammy, just a way to make a couple of bucks off the victims of culture war brainwashing.

At least in my circles blue check marks were mocked because they became a symbol of endorsement of certain viewpoints by Twitter rather than a symbol of verified identity.

And yet the process to grant bluecheck was to literally check personal id, and grant it to whoever had media presence. For years, you could request verification, send a couple of links citing you, provide a government-issued ID and that was it.

Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.

That’s just straight up a total lie. Everyone who was self-aware in 2017 or is able to use Google can confirm that. I don’t even understand what is the point of such blatant gaslighting.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/twitt...

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/15/twitter-v...

Yeah, I overstated that. It's not relevant to my main point, by I'll give you that.

Funny. I see it differently. I pay for the blue check because it adds legitimacy. If I'm replying and having conversations with people with similar blue checks then I know I'm talking to real humans not hiding behind fake usernames. Also, any threats or anything from bad actors could otherwise be tracked based on payment method.

When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames? What do you think underlies this feeling you seem to have?

EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.

> When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames?

On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.

The accounts of companies, government agencies and people linked to those two have a different color of check or a special icon. This seems like an actual improvement on everyone being blue to me.

I acknowledge they're shipping changes to the frontend - some of which are not bad at all - but it sounds surreal to me that we keep talking about UI changes as if they were major features, and pretend twitter circles aren't broken, that notifications are as in near real time as they were, etc. There were major losses of service quality in basically everything backend related, and no amount of frontend tweaking can compensate that.

He is actively amplifying what amounts to phrenology.

What do you mean?

Here are a few threads you might find interesting:

* https://twitter.com/maxberger/status/1654877506783137792

* https://twitter.com/hello__caitlin/status/165487177008270950...

* https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1655948197129494532

I'm having trouble finding another one I saw yesterday he tweeted basically implying black women were an order of magnitude more violent than white women.

Edit: ah, found it, along with a couple inane conspiracies to boot, which has become standard for him these days:

* https://twitter.com/maxberger/status/1655985143700389893

The links you posted are inflammatory nonsense that try to draw a line between concern over mainstream media coverage of race and crime and "fascism". It's contrived at best.

Are the statistics wrong? Is it wrong to say that media coverage is slanted and focuses on the minority of racist white-on-black crime while ignoring the reverse? Seems like this is all fairly well documented. Slapping slurs on the posts that point that out and calling for the posters to be "cancelled" or suppressed by calling them "dangerous" - that, if anything, strikes me as fascistic.

> The links you posted are inflammatory nonsense

What? They are screenshots of his responses!

> Are the statistics wrong?

They have been purposefully stripped of context and misrepresented to imply that black people are more violent than white people. The author literally worked backwards from the originally expressed percentages to deceive! It's not the statistics that are wrong, it's the way they've been presented.

Over the last 10+ years on this site, I have mostly found this to be one of the higher quality places for discussion on the internet, but occasionally over the last few years I have questioned whether this is the right place for me. The responses to this have once again made me rethink whether this community is one I want to be a part of.

I am genuinely revolted.

Please be specific, the vague accusations and appeal to emotion are not conducive to a grounded high-quality discussion.

What context is missing? What is being misrepresented? And what is wrong with reposting those statistics, calling them concerning, and expressing the idea that media coverage of it is unbalanced? You linked to posts that connect this to fascism instead of to the original tweets, so I assume your thinking is in line with that, but you're not giving us much to go off of, so we're spinning our wheels.

From my standpoint, it looks like Elon Musk is not happy that American mainstream media covers white-on-black racism and homicides disproportionately. I can't see what's wrong with the statistics he reposted, or his concerns. I can only assume that you're attributing an entirely different conclusion to him, even though none of those tweets seem to support that if you take them at face value.

Sorry if you feel revolted that there's been a shift in culture away from calling people racist over loose associations or things that they didn't say ("dog whistles"). I'm feeling optimistic myself.

I have already linked you to a perfectly good explanation of (https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1655948197129494532). Somehow this is "inflammatory nonsense".

> I can't see what's wrong with the statistics he reposted, or his concerns.

This is the problem. It's designed to manipulate people like you, and it works. This is the problem. It's designed to manipulate people like you, and it works. This is the problem. It's designed to manipulate people like you, and it works. This is the problem. It's designed to manipulate people like you, and it works. This is the problem. It's designed to manipulate people like you, and it works. This is the problem. It's designed to manipulate people like you, and it works. This is the problem. It's designed to manipulate people like you, and it works. This is the problem. It's designed to manipulate people like you, and it works.

Edit: Ah, I get it now. Surprise surprise, I had to go a whopping three hours back to find you defending the chief white surpremacist propagandist in this country and saying actually the racism isn't really that bothersome to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35921468

Climate change denier too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866992 Weird!

Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? and please not use HN for ideological battle, regardless of what you're battling for or against? You've unfortunately been doing these things a lot lately. They're not what the site is for, and they destroy what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you questioning whether this is the right place for you based more on quality of discourse or on the leanings of the views expressed?

I must confess the quality of discourse seems to have gone down over the last few years. Feels like we've had a migration from reddit.

> Are you questioning whether this is the right place for you based more on quality of discourse or on the leanings of the views expressed?

Both. I am uninterested in hanging out with the 13/52 crowd.

Having looked up what that means: am I missing something or is it the case that you don't want to interact with people who mention facts that can be used to support unpleasant narratives?

Because if so, that seems like a way of ending up with a very biased view of the world... while the murder ratio fact might be old news to you and something that shouldn't be dwelled on, there's bound to be one of the 10,000[1] just learning it for the first time and sometimes you'd be one of those 10,000 unless you cut yourself off from it.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

You are missing that this is one of many racist signalers and memes white supremacists and nazis use to justify their hatred. They're based on incomplete and misleading statistics designed to manipulate people without critical thinking skills.

The best solution there seems to be teaching people critical thinking, statistics and how to look things up tbh... rather than cutting them off from these sorts of figures.

(I've personally been advocating that for a decade to anyone who'll sit still for a minute)

Just add a bunch of political terms into your word block list. It helps make Twitter much more enjoyable.

What does that have to do with phrenology? You could just say he is racist or whatever if you think so.

It's pseudoscientific bunk (in this case, statistics manipulated to deceive) designed push a narrative of a specific race being more violent. It is no more moral, intelligent, or useful than phrenology.

I think saying that it amounts to phrenology is a manipulation designed to push a narrative. I expected something completely different than what you’ve presented. I think you aren’t better than Elon Musk in that regard.

I don't know how warped you have to be to look at that and think this isn't the most bottom of the barrel racism there is.

If the worst racism possible is complaining about disproportionate media focus on white on black crime then I think we can safely declare the problem of racism solved. :)

To be a bit more constructive: looking at those links it seems obvious to me that the main point is about media focus, not the actual crime statistics.

Complaining about "disproportionate media coverage" is a thin veil for the delivery of the more insidious message the dishonest graphic is conveying: why aren't they covering the real problem of all these black people committing violence.

And I didn't say it's the "worst" racism. It's cheap, low effort, dishonest, unintelligent, and designed to manipulate morons, which brings me back to my original comparison to phrenology.

Well, from my somewhat uninformed un-american perspective, the question of "how can we fix the problem of violence in black American communities?" does indeed seem much more important than the one of "how can we fix the problem of white Americans doing violence against black ones?" due to its relative size. So I'm unclear on why the message you claim is being delivered is bad.

I just don't know how many times I have to post the same basic takedown of why this presentation is a problem: https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1655948197129494532

It's completely removing intra-racial statistics that would make the problem much more apparent, which is that there are far more white people in America than black people, and thus, there are far more white victims of crime than black victims. Expressing absolute numbers rather than percentages is a bald faced misrepresentation, and the creator of the graphic went out of their way to represent it that way (the cited source has the data correctly expressed as a percentage and includes intra-racial statistics too).

The fundamental problem: this is designed to mislead people like you and it works. And I'm struggling not to be rude here, but it is really hard for me not to see how someone with even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills couldn't look at a graphic like that and immediately see the red flags.

Uh... the big media narrative that Elon seems to be pushing back against is that there's a big inter-racial thing making white people attack and kill blacks. Showing that there is 10x more violence going the other way seems to directly address that by making people notice that they're being shown a non-representative slice of reality.

Also, if violence was randomly targeted irrespective of race you still wouldn't expect 10x as many black on white as white on black, you'd expect approximately the same absolute numbers (10x as many white violent people but only 0.1x as many victims being black cancelling out to 1x). This even holds true in a segregated society as long as black Americans and white Americans are equally segregated (e.g. 70% of whites only being around whites and 70% of blacks being around blacks).

So it's not actually that misleading a stat.

It's really rather disgusting seeing so many people here being so dedicated to sealion racist garbage.

Part of me wished I hadn't spent so much time responding to it on here, but I appreciate your response. It makes me feel a bit better.

It would be really interesting to meet you and see what you're actually like in person, the people who display this sort of incurious, black and white, us and them attitude I encounter online aren't possible to talk to and have an extended conversation with.

But I'd really like to know how you guys think... do you genuinely only look at the everything through the lense of "which political views does this fact support?" and "what type of people repeat this sort of fact? Are they outgroup?"?

Let’s disregard the comparison to phrenology, now it’s clear it was done in bad faith. But what exactly is your position? Do you think it is impossible to not be racist and believe in racial media bias at the same time? Is it an obvious dog whistle that someone has to be either stupid or autistic to misunderstand?

You said he promotes "what amounts to phrenology" and then linked to a tweet where someone calls Musk a white supremacist for commenting "wow" on a post about illegal immigration. That whole chain of justification looks to me like a total non sequitur.

That doesn't seem like phrenology to me. Yes, there's a lack of context, but the fundamental points about media (both traditional and social) amplifying certain things (to get more shares mostly) seems sound... I certainly have been exposed to at least 10x as many reports of USA whites killing blacks than the reverse.

Effectively taking away API access by charging a huge fee for it is what made me move on personally.

See Sam Harris’s interview about the issues with Musk that are directly done on Twitter by Musk himself.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRKaMHCD/

Sam Harris is a radical leftist.

He’s a liberal

>I've never been under any illusion that he is Orange Hitler.

>I supported censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story because it helped Biden

>I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden

>Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.

That's sounds like a radical leftist to me with a severe case of TDS.

Electoralism is liberalism

I hadn't realized how lost Sam had gotten until I saw his Triggernometry interview [0]. I had a lot of respect for him once but he's clearly lost the plot.

[0] https://youtu.be/DDqtFS_Pvcs

My feed is no longer related to my interests and I don’t know how to get it back on track. That and losing the confidence that the blue check posting is actually someone relevant. Really kills the enjoyment for me.

Over the last few days my feed have been full of actual, literal fascists and other people I have no interest in seeing anything from.

I spend less and less time on Twitter, and it's less and less enjoyable. Unless it changes drastically I won't still be there very long.

It shows more of you what you click on. Just stop clicking on things you don't like and they'll go away.

The problem with those assertions is that it didn't use to show me any of this content. It used to show me content I was reasonably happy with. Then the content showing up for me very rapidly changed towards including a huge amount of extreme right-wing content and bigotry over a period that I was hardly active, and only used the "Followers" tab and clicked on content I enjoyed from people who don't in any way fit the profile of the type of accounts I complained about earlier.

At best the quality of their recommendation system has dramatically declined. At worst they're intentionally favouring different stuff. In between there are slightly more palatable (than the worst case) options, such as that they're favouring overall popularity of content more over your individual preferences, but in any case all I know is that it's turned from a relatively pleasant experience to pushing content in my face that disgusts me.

I've also written recommendation systems. In fact, I've written one I used to run on top of Twitters API. And so I know from first-hand experience that it's trivial to get better quality recommendations more aligned with what I click on than what I'm currently getting. Something is seriously wrong, whether accidentally or intentionally.

The complete destruction of content moderation and his personal beefs with users. He has been preaching "free speech" but he is enabling the worst people in the world while laying dishonest criticism on anyone he doesn't personally like.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...

I get pushed openly Nazi content. I used to report but they get turned down or only suspended for some days.

For me, it was killing the API access. The native client sucks.

Three of those four changes (tweet length, paid checks, timeline changes) have made Twitter substantially worse to use. Now every reasonably popular tweet's replies are drowning in irrelevant novel-length screeds and emoji-laden nonsense from paying users.

Not going back either, but mostly because it gave me the impetus to get off and discover what a useless timesink it was for me from the start. So Elon does get my thanks for that. I don't miss it just like I don't miss FB since dropping off that ~10 yrs ago.

I agree with you though I do miss PaulG. I was excited when he was on Mastodon because I could follow him with RSS.