I just tried signing up for X using a new account.

99% ultra-right wing political content with obscene amounts of overt racism, anti-semitism etc.

Even though when it asked for my interests politics wasn't even an option.

"99%"... sure.

So just follow the accounts you're interested in? If you just signed up, how does the "for you" know what you like? You can spend all day on X and never see any of that stuff you mention.

Do you prefer "ultra-left wing" content? There's plenty on X, including angry marxists, anti-capitalists, de-colonisers, race-baiters, compulsive virtue-signallers, tantrum-throwers, Musk-haters, dis-information trolls, intifada-fascists, take your pick!

I remember back when Trump was president, every single post he made on Twitter had a torrent of abusive replies bubbling to the top. Even ordinary mundane posts about routine things happening in government were met with endless insult-memes. Surely you don't think Twitter was once a place where inflammatory posts were rare and everyone had good manners?

> race-baiters, compulsive virtue-signallers, tantrum-throwers, dis-information trolls,

are hardly exclusive "ultra-left wing" users, arguably there's more of that to the far-right .. and that's just Tucker Carlson on a slow day.

> Even ordinary mundane posts about routine things happening in government

In your honest opinion, if Trump only ever made ordinary mundane statements about the routine day to day functions of government would there be anything like the level of anti-Trump anger exhibited?

Is it possible the insult-memes are an unsuprising result of a tendancy to praise Hitlers Generals, demonise the people he should work with as "the enemy within", suggest removing licences from news organisations he objects to, etc?

You've gone off topic. I have no interest in rating politicians or their rhetoric. All are guilty at one time or another of gross exaggeration, mud-slinging, spin, etc.

The point is/was regarding X, you can enjoy all the hate-memes towards your favourite enemy. Or just follow posts about Unreal Engine or ancient history or announcements from politicians etc. Follow your favourite Marxists! Or don't follow them. Anything is possible. But whatever you do, don't whinge about "Musk ruined Twitter". That's disinformation of sorts, since as I just explained, you can sign up to X and do whatever you want - read only, post pictures of paint drying, poke fun at celebrities, advocate for animal rights. Up to you.

see: BridgyFed

I ultimately came to the conclusion that both those who advocated for the fediverse as a Twitter replacement and those who complained that it was inadequate as a Twitter replacement were both wrong. People don't need “a Twitter” in the first place. It's a terrible website designed to maximize engagement, including negative engagement, for its profit.

I quite agree with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38445649

> terrible website designed to maximize engagement

It really does show why engagement should never be monetised.

It's just full of fight videos, repackaged memes, controversial takes etc. all designed to get some extra money for the poster. Even VCs and the startup community gets in on it.

How did Musk "fuck [Twitter] up worse than ever"? It has more functionality and is more stable since Musk bought it.

Source? AFAIK it is not more stable:

https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/internet-report-twitter-to...

  Twitter appears to be an outlier in that respect. Instead of displaying the usual post-acquisition stability, ThousandEyes’ data indicates that the number and frequency of outages did increase commensurate with the acquisition. If we compare the two periods (pre- and post-acquisition), it’s apparent that there were fewer and less frequent outages prior to the purchase.

And “more functionality”… I guess time continues marching forward so there are some new things, but nothing game changing IMO. The creator economy on there is nonexistent, and changing the color of the checkmarks from blue to grey seems like a lateral move.

Nothing game-changing? How about:

• Long-form content

• Video streaming

• Grok

• Ability to edit posts

• Bookmarks

• Communities

• Better verification system

• Encrypted direct messages

• Cashtag feature

• Bold and italic text formatting

• Open-sourced algorithm

• Premium features

• Improved search

• Improved analytics for content creators

• And most importantly, less First-Amendment violations in secret partnership with the federal government

Thanks for the reply! That's a good list. Of those, I would break them down accordingly:

  - Cool new features
    - Encrypted direct messages
    - Video streaming
    - Ability to edit posts
    - Communities (IDK what this but it sounds cool)
    - Bookmarks
    - Cashtag feature (?)
    - Improved analytics for content creators

  - Trivial decisions about policy
    - Long-form content
    - Bold and italic text formatting

  - Untrue, or at least unverified
    - Better verification system (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-confusion-and-risks-surrounding-twitters-verified-account-changes, https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/tech/musk-twitter-blue-check-mark/index.html)
    - Open-sourced algorithm (https://www.wired.com/story/twitters-open-source-algorithm-is-a-red-herring/)
    - Premium features (?)
    - Improved search (?)

  - Same shit different day
    - Grok

Which, tbf, is a lot more cool features than I was giving them credit for! I still think the whole 'nazi' and 'arbitrary moderation' thing outweighs those changes by a lot, but they did add stuff.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Nazi" and "arbitrary moderation." Can you clarify?

Musk is reposting actual neonazi accounts

Most of that doesn't deserve to be called an improvement. That message encryption is one of the worst designs I've ever seen. The algorithm isn't open enough that anybody can see if what it's doing matches the code.

And instead of censoring "secretly" in partnership with the US government they do so in partnership with the Indian government as well as individual Republican politicians.

> Most of that doesn't deserve to be called an improvement.

Hard disagree. The platform is objectively much better than it was under Jack Dorsey.

> The algorithm isn't open enough that anybody can see if what it's doing matches the code.

Fair, but more is available than before.

> ...in partnership with the Indian government as well as individual Republican politicians.

Would you prefer X break India's laws, specifically Section 69A of the IT Act? I suppose they could do that and then the Indian government would shut them down in India.

Also, are you talking about X suspending Ken Klippenstein's account for doxxing JD Vance? X's rules explicitly state that doxxing people will result in a suspension, so maybe Klippenstein should have thought of that before posting Vance's home address and most of his social security number.

Here's X's policy against what Klippenstein did, which applies to everyone: https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-informatio...

Before Musk, Twitter used to fight those requests.

The platform can not be called better, with more bugs and errors than ever.

Why don't they apply those rules to Republicans? Why can they specifically post stuff like private info about Hunter?

Don't forget community notes. While not perfect, it presents valuable context or counter-points. Musk's posts have been community noted a few times.

Grok is a nice feature, although for paid accounts only. It also seems slightly out of place on X. Most people are there to express themselves, not necessarily seek help or information from AI-gen. I tried it for some coding help, and it did fine.. but doing that task on X felt odd.

Community notes was designed and shipped before the takeover. It was called "birdwatch".

Never heard of birdwatch, never saw it.

I'm in Australia, explanation follows:

From wikipedia: "In November 2022, at the request of new owner Elon Musk, Birdwatch was rebranded to Community Notes... and expanded to Europe and countries outside of the US."

Like Facebook, it does not really work for people without account. It did before. So for most people on the internet it has less functionality (if any).

To give just one example, sometime in March of this year, a bug appeared in the Android app that prevents loading of new posts for several minutes after the phone is plugged in to charge. It's now been 7 months, and the bug has not been fixed.