[HN Gopher] Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview wh...
___________________________________________________________________
Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press
it or not
Just saw the CEO of Substack celebrating traffic from X/Twitter
shooting up thinking they stopped suppressing tweets with links[0].
Actually, this traffic is because now any time you open a tweet
with a link, the in-app webview loads in the background, and
displays when you press the link. I run an ecom store that gets a
lot of its customers from Twitter. I was also shocked to see my
traffic double or triple overnight and thought the algorithm had
blessed me and my business. Soon realized what was actually
happening. Thought other traffic-monitors might appreciate this
explanation. Meanwhile Nikita Bier is pretending they never
suppressed tweets with links to begin with, offering the
alternative explanation: "a common complaint is that posts with
links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser
covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn't
get a clear signal whether the content is any good"[1]. A bit of a
rewriting of history since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how
it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other
links/platforms, even banning people who shared profiles of other
social networks (including Paul Graham for a period). They
suppressed all links shortly after. [0]
https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985464687350485092 [1]
https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1979994223224209709
Author : stillatit
Score : 517 points
Date : 2025-11-04 05:53 UTC (17 hours ago)
| braza wrote:
| I understand the rationale and I am happy for the authors and I
| think the distribution will be way better.
|
| As a user I like to get out as soon as I click because I can
| trace back the link and I can do clipping or bookmark in my
| browser.
| pavelai wrote:
| It seems like they changed the strategy and enhanced UX. Feels
| like now there would a lot of worthless traffic in the web
| saagarjha wrote:
| I'm just happy they got rid of the system web view and replaced
| it with the one which they can inject their own JavaScript into.
| Bonus points that it covers the thing I want to read and I can't
| turn it off. Truly, a masterpiece of engineering from the guy
| whose entire schtick was coming up with was to boost engagement
| from kids.
| est wrote:
| That's precisely what Wechat is doing. Most chinese "mega apps"
| do this.
|
| Elon absolutely on his track to copy this important feature [1]
|
| The webview works as a traffic faucet. Elon can turn it on or off
| for every third-party site, you know, for "Internet safety".
|
| My take:
|
| Next step is X.com proprietary APIs inside the Webview, like
| payment and everything.
|
| The ultimate goal is a "mini-app" framework that use PWA-like
| techs to run everything based on the Webview and circumvent
| Appstore.
|
| And last a phone that runs the "mini-app" framework because why
| not, as an "AI edge node" like Elon recently proposed.
|
| [1]: https://x.com/danmurrays/status/1683446630245187584
| ojr wrote:
| the webview messes up tokens and passwords managers so I don't
| see this happening. The US is too culturally different to have
| mega apps. In Asia their supermarkets also have a lot of
| information in the menu for example.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Replace "mega app" with "platform" and that's pretty much
| what Apple and Google are, Apple especially.
| ojr wrote:
| no I will not replace mega app with platform, WeChat app is
| totally different from the App Store.
|
| In and Out has 5 menu items, similar to an app made in the
| USA, not too many features
|
| A Chinese market can list 50 items similar to WeChat that
| has 50 different features.
|
| The culture is reflected in the app design.
|
| source: https://digitalcreative.cn/blog/how-china-ux-is-
| different
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The App Store moved the clusters of icons to the home
| screen, but the messages and wallet app are right next to
| each other, and tightly integrated. You get to re-arrange
| and hide most icons, at least.
|
| The UI looks different (information density etc.) but in
| the end it's still a collection of external applications
| neatly wrapped inside a platform with strong walls and a
| strict gatekeeper, with a basic suite available by
| default. In China, you could ditch most of iOS if you
| could trick a phone into launching directly into WeChat.
| gip wrote:
| Totally. Mini apps and mini-app stores are already developing
| in crypto (Farcaster, World,..) and the approach may well
| become the primary way to deploy advanced and secure apps going
| forward.
| isodev wrote:
| Who in their right mind would give X/Elon money or even enable
| photos or contacts access on their phone. At some point is just
| another money laundering thing for our (least) favourite
| billionaire.
| scuff3d wrote:
| If there was ever a good reason to stop using Twitter, this is
| it.
| input_sh wrote:
| I don't think this would even make it into top 10 good
| reasons to stop using Twitter.
| scuff3d wrote:
| A crazy ass billionaire trying to develop an "everything"
| app seems like a pretty damn good reason to run the other
| direction. I wouldn't want anyone controlling an app like
| that, much less Elon fucking Musk.
| est wrote:
| the same story applies to Wechat. Pony Ma was crazy rich
| for QQ and games already, he created another Wechat. Lots
| of ppl tried to boycott it, but network effect forced
| everyone to use it.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| I'm fascinated with the number of users of this site who seem
| disproportionately invested in getting people to stop using
| Twitter.
| paxys wrote:
| Yeah it's so fascinating that people want an open internet
| rather than a small group of billionaires and big tech
| companies controlling everything. Truly bizarre.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| "open"?
|
| That's an interesting word to describe a platform that
| was previously the undisputed playground of Feds and
| NGOs.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| What does this mean?
| CaptWillard wrote:
| Pre-2022, Twitter was subject to heavy editorial
| oversight from D.C. and northern VA.
|
| Censorship and propaganda at breathtaking scale.
|
| This is a good place to start:
| https://twitterfiles.substack.com/
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I like how you complain about "propaganda at breathtaking
| scale" and you fell for the Twitter Files, which was...
| precisely that.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| Please show your work.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Musk's own lawyers did the work for us.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-
| lawyers/in...
|
| > "Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental
| actor compelling or even discussing any content-
| moderation action with respect to Trump" and others
| participating in the suit, Twitter argued.
|
| > The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter
| Files do not show coercion, Twitter's lawyers wrote,
| "because they do not contain a specific government demand
| to remove content--let alone one backed by the threat of
| government sanction."
|
| > "Instead," the filing continued, the communications
| "show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their
| efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020
| election." The evidence outlined by Twitter's lawyers is
| consistent with public statements by former Twitter
| employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of
| the Twitter Files.
|
| > Altogether, the filing by Musk's own corporate lawyers
| represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most
| explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and
| that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.
|
| Don't worry, though. Under Musk's leadership, free speech
| is well protected. Just ask https://x.com/elonjet, which
| Musk specifically promised
| (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456) to
| protect! They would never ban a news story just because
| it was from a hack!
| (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-
| bloc...)
| philipallstar wrote:
| Yes - it wasn't with respect to Trump. It was silencing
| negative stories about Biden and his son that was the
| proximate issue, and the general silencing of mostly
| Republican voices by mostly Democrat voices (though
| sometimes it went the other way, it was much less
| frequent[0].
|
| [0] https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-
| twitter-fil...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Again:
|
| > > The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter
| Files do not show coercion, Twitter's lawyers wrote,
| "because they do not contain a specific government demand
| to remove content--let alone one backed by the threat of
| government sanction."
|
| That was the case for the Biden laptop story, too. (And
| SCOTUS, thus far, seems to agree;
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri)
|
| Again: Musk's own lawyers argued in court that the
| Twitter Files don't actually show what Matt Taibbi
| claimed they do.
|
| (Taibbi also publicly claims Musk is now _censoring him_.
| https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1758230628355485979)
|
| > though sometimes it went the other way, it was much
| less frequent
|
| While I tend to doubt that assertion, "Left-wing
| terrorism outpaces far-right attacks for first time in 30
| years" perhaps points to a reason for a difference if it
| exists. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/28/left-wing-
| terrorism-far-rig...
|
| The current administration seems just fine with similar
| jawboning.
| https://www.theverge.com/policy/799473/facebook-meta-ice-
| jaw...
| scuff3d wrote:
| "Show you're work"
|
| _Does exactly that using Musk 's own lawyers_
|
| "...Wait no you weren't suppose to actually do that..."
| lagniappe wrote:
| If that were the reason we'd see even 10% of the same
| fervor for cutting out AWS or Cloudflare but we don't
| mtmail wrote:
| In January the (now former) CEO announced the X Money payment
| platform will debut "later this year". "Yaccarino says the Visa
| partnership is the "first of many big announcements" that will
| be made about X Money this year."
| https://www.theverge.com/news/599137/x-money-payments-servic...
| I don't remember any other big announcements.
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| Since we're doing PSAs, isn't it also now just a completely
| broken platform on mobile for everyone who isn't logged in?
|
| > Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another
| shot.
|
| This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error,
| does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on
| my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a
| button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On
| the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in
| obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb
| oversight in the funnel
| teiferer wrote:
| Always been like that. Twitter, Instagram, ... None of those
| platforms have usable UX if you're not logged in.
| davedx wrote:
| False. You used to be able to read Twitter fine without being
| logged in
| teiferer wrote:
| When was that? Already pre-Elon it was terrible.
| input_sh wrote:
| Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and
| read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you
| just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
|
| And if you click on an account you just get top posts of
| all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's
| impossible to even find the context while being logged
| off.
| as1mov wrote:
| Here's me complaining[1] about the login walls way back
| in 2021, this was before the Elon takeover.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365
|
| Edit: Some more posts -
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| That's a completely unrelated issue. Once someone sent
| you a link to a tweet, you could read it.
| as1mov wrote:
| Is it unrelated? From the parent comment:
|
| > Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and
| read _the entire thread as well as the replies_ , now you
| just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
|
| I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But
| my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going
| downhill before the takeover.
|
| (And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless
| of who owned it, but that's a different matter
| altogether)
| Carp wrote:
| Interesting; if you'd have asked me when Elon took over
| I'd have said something around 2020-2022. Probably why
| everyone assumes it's a result of him
| derbOac wrote:
| Both are correct, at least according to my memory: you
| used to be able to read tweets without an account, but
| that stopped, and it stopped before Musk took over.
|
| There were similar trends at other social media sites
| that happened around the same time.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Sorry, are you actually five years old? Until just a few
| years ago Twitter was entirely open. You could view any
| and all public tweets, replies, threads. All exactly like
| you were logged in. Their APIs were open and you could
| literally plug the entire stream of all tweets from all
| users on the actual planet in real time into your own
| application.
| callamdelaney wrote:
| Actually, you definitely could not plug the entire stream
| of all tweets from all users in real time into your own
| application (without huge cost). You only would ever see
| a subset of tweets via twitters API's and search results,
| if you wanted the full thing you had to pay for 'the
| firehose' which was very expensive.
| nwsm wrote:
| From UI perspective you are right, but not for APIs.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| The APIs definitly used to be open enough that you could
| hit a "Generate token", hit one endpoint with cURL and
| then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that
| moment on, no reviews or validation at all, all you
| needed was an account + token.
|
| I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity,
| because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on
| top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason
| (guessing money, one way or another).
|
| At the same time, you could also view tweets without
| being logged in, and you saw replies too.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from
| that moment on
|
| The complete firehose was expensive and paid-only.
|
| You could get a sampling of Tweets at a lower rate
| through the API. It wasn't the complete firehose, though.
| Izkata wrote:
| No, I'm with GP: Most of the time I'd just get errors and
| retries that don't work, even years before Elon. I also
| never had an account there and assumed it had something
| to do with that.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Some years ago you could even subscribe to an RSS feed
| for each user.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| This openness is part of the reason governments (local,
| state, federal, sovereign) started using it for official
| comms. Seems rather shortsighted in retrospect, but it
| was a useful tool for a short period of time.
| Zolomon wrote:
| This is not true, this change is a recent phenomenon, I
| believe it came into effect sometime around 2021-2023 (maybe
| earlier even). I believe it changed when OpenAI showed the
| value of data.
|
| Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while
| not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to
| create an account, or log in.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| People already knew the value of data long before LLMs were
| popularised and web scraping has been a thing since the
| very beginnings of the web.
|
| Why you're describing isn't a recent phenomenon. Not even
| remotely.
|
| Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their
| platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the
| same dark patterns you described too.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Getting down voted for stating a fact. Just goes to show
| how short some people's memories are.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Instagram's been a pita to use without a login for years,
| they've recently got even worse though.
| KronisLV wrote:
| That's roughly when I stopped opening Twitter links, I
| still sometimes see posts from that platform, but mostly
| just as screenshots and with the discussions elsewhere. I
| don't care for their dark patterns.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Instagram has always redirected me to a login page. Twitter
| only did after Elon and his friends went batshit ruining
| the website.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Following an Insta link gives me a dismissible login
| modal, but still shows the linked page when dismissed.
| Following any link becomes login only _unless_ you right
| click to open link in new. Now it does the same previous
| behavior. I don't use Insta, only when every now and then
| someone sends me a link with what looks like might be
| some other interesting post, but the game becomes boring
| and and I just close the tab
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is my recollection as well when they all realized they
| were feeding the bots that the free use became broken
| jelder wrote:
| My recollection is that this happened pretty much
| immediately after Twitter became X.
| nxor wrote:
| Best comment.
| agos wrote:
| Instagram explicitly tells you need to be logged in.
| Twitter/X just appears to be broken
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| Obviously wrong. The typical user-hostile thing isn't this
| dumb, you'd see a teaser that's probably vaguely sexual and
| get some "sign up for the full experience" prodding.
| Literally any 2-person startup that's a week old would do
| better than this at being thirsty and awful
| gethly wrote:
| Twitter never worked on my on desktop without account since
| Elon took over. It came down to security settings not allowing
| 3rd party cookies. If you allow it, it loads up.
| jonway wrote:
| change the url to xcancel.com
| dagurp wrote:
| or nitter.net
| agos wrote:
| remember when part of the commentary was "ha! twitter fired one
| bajllion people and it's still operating fine". I keep seeing
| errors, much more than in the flying whale era, just now they
| appear to be in the frontend.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| I don't?
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| I remember that, people were convinced that twitter had a
| load of woke lib employees or something
| verdverm wrote:
| > flying whale era
|
| Is that the same as the fail whale era?
| bhouston wrote:
| This past week I rarely see quoted tweets now in the main
| timeline, it just says not available. So something about
| viewing RT is broken.
| nottorp wrote:
| No, it's also completely broken on desktop. Still have one or
| two friends who insist on sending twitter links. I don't click.
| myko wrote:
| It's been broken for anyone not logged in since Elon turned a
| bunch of servers off. It costs too much to make Twitter freely
| available. If users who weren't logged in could see the site it
| would crash constantly.
| dbbk wrote:
| Not really sure how that's possibly true considering CDN
| caching exists
| PyWoody wrote:
| Serious question: Why doesn't Google de-rank content that
| requires a login? I remember they used to claim they did but
| they clearly do not anymore.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Because people can get a login. If the best quality result is
| behind a login and a paywall, I still want it to be the first
| result. Only quality should decide ranking.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Well I sure don't
| debazel wrote:
| Please do tell how to get an X account? It instantly locked
| my account after registration and I have several friends
| have the same issue.
|
| I would much prefer if Google just stopped showing
| inaccessible information completely.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I have no idea, I've never used X or Twitter. But
| apparently millions do, so it is not inaccessible.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Openness and accessibility should absolutely be factors in
| ranking, otherwise where does it end? I dk what twitter
| requires these days, maybe an email, password and a couple
| more fields, what if a site starts doing id verification?
| What if accounts require a subscription? What if all the
| best content on the first page of your search results is
| behind a paywall with 3 easy payments of $299
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It ends with you paying for information. If I need some
| information and it is only available behind a paywall,
| then I'll pay for it or I didn't need it anyway.
|
| Google is doing the correct thing in not discriminating
| against content which is paid or behind login walls. Some
| of the most important content are on social media, and
| most of them only serve logged in users.
|
| If you want to decide yourself how search results are
| presented to you, you should try Kagi for a search
| engine.
| jelder wrote:
| That would be equivalent to demonetizing the entire web. Free
| content would win out over paid content regardless of
| quality. As the old adage goes, "when you're getting
| something for free, you're the product being sold." Only
| sites making money by, shall we say, "indirect" means would
| be able to survive. A search engine which prioritizes free
| content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda
| engine.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| "Free content would win out over paid content regardless of
| quality" this doesn't follow unless we assume the most
| extreme implementation, the openness of the content is just
| one factor of many that should count in the contents favor.
| Further it assumes the only non-shady way to monetize
| content is put it behind a login which is not true.
| observationist wrote:
| A site can be a billboard for a product or service, or
| provide a social hub, without participating in the
| surveillance adtech industry. There are plenty of hobby
| forums, like those for craft brewing, which get supported
| by brewery suppliers, for example. There are luthier
| communities which get supported by toolmakers and
| professionals, and so on. The implicit community
| networking, reviews by community members, and other
| interactions reward quality and honesty, and penalize the
| shady shit.
|
| It's just not scalable into the exploitative cash cows
| that VCs drool over.
| PyWoody wrote:
| I think I should at least be able to see even a subset of
| the content that caused the item to be returned in the
| search result, though. If I try to navigate away or see
| more content, sure, make me log in. But, if I search
| something, click on a Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin result, I
| should at least be able to see something.
|
| The search --> visit --> immediate redirect to login
| results should be de-ranked.
| observationist wrote:
| >>> nothing but a propaganda engine
|
| And that's different from Google, how?
|
| A search engine which prioritizes free content, reviewed
| intelligently, is curation, and not Goodharted gotcha
| games. If you can crawl the web and index sites with human
| level content curation, with a reasonably performant
| scaffolding, you can prevent SEO style exploitation, and
| use natural language rules like "does this content contain
| text attempting to game the ranking of a site or violate
| policy XYZ?"
|
| Most AIs use bing and google, so the best you can get is a
| curated list from the already censored and politically
| filtered results from those sources, funneling commercial
| traffic toward the highest paying adtech customers - it's
| just refined, ultra-pure SEO results, unless they use their
| own index and crawler.
|
| I'd almost rather have a naive raw index that can be
| interacted with, but custom indices, like xAI and Kagi, are
| definitely superior to Google and Bing. Google's a dumpster
| fire and Bing's a tawdry knockoff, and they're both
| interested in gaming the surveillance data and extracting
| as much money as possible from their adtech customers.
|
| Paying for a service incentivizes the quality of that
| service. If that service is honest curation of and
| effective web search with custom indices and crawlers, then
| the free and paid distinction don't matter - the highest
| quality based on the curation criteria is what gets a site
| surfaced. I want my search engine to return McMaster Carr
| over Temu or Amazon, or a local flower shop over some
| corporate slop. Google doesn't get paid by meeting my
| expectations, it gets paid by exploiting my attention and
| extracting fractions of profit from commercial
| interactions, and makes more money by pushing me into
| business with companies that I'd otherwise want nothing to
| do with.
|
| Demonetizing the entire web - dismantling the surveillance
| adtech regime - sounds like an absolute utopic victory to
| me.
| graemep wrote:
| They have had ways of letting people who give Googlebot
| access to content that requires login for a long time. A
| decade?
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| For twitter at least, that would have to be done manually. It
| still shows a timeline for grey checkmark (government)
| accounts, and a "best of" type page for all other accounts.
|
| Most sites serve a special version of the page to visitors
| with "googlebot" in their UA string and/or coming from an IP
| range google controls with more SEO'd contents too.
| emsign wrote:
| Because Google wants the web to be broken like that, they're
| also part of the design team of tech behemoths that made the
| internet shitty und no fun.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Another PSA. RSS is still very good.
| moneywoes wrote:
| same with Instagram
| ewoodrich wrote:
| I set up a URL redirect rule in Edge/Brave/Chrome with the
| extension URL Auto Redirector (previously used Redirector but
| it was removed, there are other alternatives available for
| Firefox I'm sure). I also found a similar front end for
| Instagram but just added a rule yesterday so haven't tested it
| extensively yet.
|
| I avoid most Twitter/X content after I deleted my account but
| it's helpful when it gets linked in HN. Source
| | Destination
| -----------------------------------------------------------
| ^https?://x.com/(.*) | https://xcancel.com/$1
| ^https?://twitter.com/(.*) | https://xcancel.com/$1
| ^https?://instagram.com/(.*) | https://imginn.com/$1
| ^https?://www.instagram.com/(.*) | https://imginn.com/$1
|
| URL Auto Redirector:
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/url-auto-redirector...
| boramalper wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I continue using Redirector [0] on
| Firefox for other stuff but it didn't occur to me to set one
| for Twitter.
|
| [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/redirector/
| clydethefrog wrote:
| For Kagi users - it's also possible to redirect it in Kagi
| with redirect rules in search settings:
| ^https://x.com|https://xcancel.com
| ^https://instagram.com|https://imginn.com
| Tepix wrote:
| Thanks. You only need this single regex for instagram:
| ^https?://(?:www\.)?instagram.com/(.\*)
| defaultchar wrote:
| I created this plug-in for firefox...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-
| cont...
|
| Not being updated any more, but might be useful to someone.
| blikdak wrote:
| What bugs me is the sheer number of people, and organisations,
| who still link to images and video or '1/20' long screeds on
| twitter, while the next article on their own site is bitching
| about how bad twatter/owner/politics etc is. Seriously if a site,
| blog, forum etc you know ever links to twitter then just stop
| interaction with them, they're lazy mofos need to do their own
| groundwork.
| gcr wrote:
| Does this mean an attacker can turn any impression into any GET
| request?
| stillatit wrote:
| Not sure how much of an attack that is. FWIW the preloading is
| nice as a user.
| lysp wrote:
| Is the request coming from the user's IP or via a Twitter
| proxy?
|
| As a plain webview would mean that you can grab everyone's
| details.
| netsharc wrote:
| It'd be an interesting way to count how many impressions your
| tweets get: add a URL to every tweet, put a tracking "pixel" in
| the webpage (assuming the webview loads all assets; if not,
| then just add the "pixel' URL to the tweet..
| modeless wrote:
| There's an impression counter on every tweet, visible to
| everyone
| netsharc wrote:
| All ad networks also claim the ad you pay them to show got
| n impressions, according to their calculations, here's the
| bill...
| penguin_booze wrote:
| Another example and incentive not to use apps and to be held
| hostage, when an equivalent web service is available. On Android,
| just use Hermit or some similar app to sandbox a webview of their
| webpage.
| labrador wrote:
| On a related topic, I've been following with some amusement the
| outrage on Reddit/r/Grok because Grok will no longer make porn.
| Apparently Grok was trained on all the NSFW material on X and
| Twitter before it intentionally so Grok could have a "spicy"
| mode. And spicy it was. Some of the stuff it made was really good
| and people loved it. But (allegedly) Musk changed his mind to go
| after enterprise and government accounts so spicy mode was killed
| and now there a lot of angry users complaining on Reddit.
|
| My interest is this: It appears that it's not possible to over-
| ride the training effectively since NSFW material bleeds into
| normal image requests. Musk had this problem before trying to
| over-ride Grok's training, so at one point said he would have to
| retrain Grok. It's interesting to me that LLMs can't be steered
| effectively, which makes me wonder if they can ever really be
| aligned ("safe")
| elpakal wrote:
| I mean isn't this just considered data poisoning?
| labrador wrote:
| The training data was considered good by Musk to start with,
| so he could have spicy mode, but he changed his mind and now
| Grok is considered poisoned with porn. My question is, can
| that be fixed or does he have to start over again?
| looobay wrote:
| There was research on LLMs training and distillation that
| if two models have a similar architecture (probably the
| case for Xai) the "master" model will distill knowledge to
| the model even if its not in the distillation data. So they
| probably need to train a new model from scratch.
|
| (sorry i don't remember the name but there was an example
| with a model liking howl to showcase this)
| -_- wrote:
| Subliminal learning:
| https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/
| labrador wrote:
| If true, bad news for Elon Musk and xAI because they have
| to start over. He's already indicated this in regards to
| Wikipedia. He wants to train on Grokepedia and not
| Wikipedia. Removing NSFW material gives him another
| reason.
| duxup wrote:
| I think the more general issue with all AI and "safe" is that
| AI 'learned' what it knows from human content ... and we object
| to the content we as humans created.
|
| Hard to avoid that problem.
| labrador wrote:
| > Hard to avoid that problem.
|
| Agree. Even the Christian Bible has horrific content that in
| some communities would require trigger warnings
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Why do so many supposedly smart humans think that we can make
| an artificial mind that is capable of AGI (or even something
| close to it), but from a completely detached evolutionary
| history and biological needs, and somehow force it to "align"
| to our human/biological/societal priorities?
|
| Have none of these people ever had or been a teenager? At least
| teens have some overlapping biological requirements with non-
| teens that will force some amount of alignment.
| robinhood wrote:
| I find it so sad that Twitter still gets traffic at all. Even if
| we put aside the super shady content on this platform (free
| speech, lol), the app, either on the web or mobile, has a sub-par
| user experience.
|
| I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.
| boringg wrote:
| X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured
| out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption
| perspective.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| My government has been posting a lot of information (weather
| alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon
| instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they
| have a platform to publish live information to in case the
| Americans continue to get weirder.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Do you have any examples of this? I'd love to point this
| out to my local government.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It's network effect, same as Facebook
| bpavuk wrote:
| Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's
| quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse
| (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads.
| Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount
| of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances
| located there.
| ndr wrote:
| Who is using Bluesky in the US?
|
| Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links
| from friends. Is it just my friends?
| toyg wrote:
| _> Who is using Bluesky in the US?_
|
| A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach
| X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's
| geekiness).
|
| _> Is it just my friends?_
|
| If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe
| Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a
| year ago.
|
| It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing
| sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal
| "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
| delecti wrote:
| I suspect our politics are just too different for my
| attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but
| it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky.
|
| You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you
| can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people
| who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to
| yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties
| can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama
| that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can
| hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you
| immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or
| interacting with you, and there's a culture among many
| users to immediately block people who are thought to be
| potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't
| feed the trolls").
|
| If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't
| use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i consider myself left-wing and found it very toxic. the
| ubiquitous blocking features are also a pretty big
| negative as i found myself blocked by a considerable
| portion of the site simply for following people in AI
|
| site features can only go so far when there is a broader
| cultural ethos
| csallen wrote:
| The fact that the left defined Joe Rogan as right-wing
| for not adhering to very specific far-left tenets (e.g.
| de-platforming personas non grata and cooperating with
| cancel culture) only served to push him and his listeners
| rightward, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
| djeastm wrote:
| >only served to push him and his listeners rightward
|
| Kind of takes the agency away from full-grown adults,
| doesn't it?
|
| How about people have principles and don't change them to
| chase audience/money/fame, eh?
| csallen wrote:
| You're right. Change the words "they were pushed" to
| "they chose". There's your agency.
|
| > _How about people have principles and don 't change
| them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?_
|
| You assume that "having principles" means having _your_
| principles, and that for someone to disagree must mean
| they are unprincipled and simply chasing money
| /audience/fame. This kind of attitude comes across as
| incredibly arrogant and un-self-aware, and people/voters
| en masse want nothing to do with it.
|
| The reality is that many millions of people are
| principled, and they simply have _different_ principles.
|
| For example, "opposing views should be aired and
| discussed" is a principle widely held by many millions of
| voters that the left has had an incredibly hard time
| understanding, respecting, and digesting.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I suspect the people that really think that are a small
| minority. "The South was right, black people are subhuman
| and needed to be taken care of by slave owners" is not
| going to be a popular discussion topic, for example. Or
| suggesting that Hitler was right about how people should
| be treated in Europe.
| afavour wrote:
| "My views are everyone else's fault" is such a prevalent
| and baffling claim these last few years. If you have a
| belief, own it.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| I am.... For what it's worth.
|
| There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated
| over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.
|
| And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed.
| There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did
| have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the
| same activist problem.
|
| Believe me, you can live without Twitter.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > Who is using Bluesky in the US?
|
| Everyone I know. I routinely see only bluesky links. Yes,
| if X/Grok is promoting Nazi content, then yeah, I'll hear
| about it. But beyond that, nothing important that happens
| isn't showing up on Bluesky.
|
| > Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com
| links from friends. Is it just my friends?
|
| I think it's safe to say that if people are sending links
| to a certain site, they are using that site. But assuming
| that everyone is using that same site is silly. It
| doesn't take any amount of effort to realize that other
| people are using other sites.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _But beyond that, nothing important that happens isn 't
| showing up on Bluesky._
|
| I would Press X to Doubt (perhaps ironically, for _this_
| X...). Searching around, it seems like Bluesky has about
| a tenth as many total users as X has active users, but it
| 's definitely growing at a faster rate, and X might be
| declining in active users.
|
| Anecdotally, lots of people I noticed leaving for Bluesky
| very loudly and publicly quietly returned to posting on X
| after a while.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| it's completely false for the ML technical discussion i'm
| interested in. here's a random topic, for instance:
|
| https://bsky.app/search?q=%22induced+operator+norm%22 htt
| ps://x.com/search?q=%22induced%20operator%20norm%22&src=t
| ...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I consider myself left-wing, but bluesky is pretty
| casually toxic in a way that turns me off.
| Kye wrote:
| Most embeds I see on Discord are Bluesky. Bluesky seems
| to have taken over for social media links on sports
| subreddits. It saw a huge spike during the last game of
| the World Series.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/
|
| Those might not matter to you, but neither did the early
| cohorts that drove growth on early Twitter matter to most
| people. Enough large mainstream cohorts set up a base
| there after the election spike that it's still growing
| toward the peak after dropping to a little less than
| half.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| But X doesn't have a lock on live information.
|
| What people obsess over and see on X is _literal propaganda_
|
| If something matters so much to your life that you can't wait
| the hour or so it takes to filter through normal channels,
| _you will not need X to tell you it is happening, and knowing
| an hour early will not help you_
|
| Instead, X will tell you that the USA is loading nukes onto
| planes getting ready to fly to China (that the video shows is
| not nukes, not going to china, and from a marketing video
| several years back)
|
| X will tell you to invest in <Scam>
|
| X will tell you some right wing propaganda like Seattle being
| on fire.
|
| People who _still_ insist that X has _good, reliable, and
| timely news_ are saying they have really bad FOMO. If you
| validated everything that came from X attempting to tease out
| the signal from the noise, that validation _takes longer than
| just waiting for actual news to filter out_. So instead,
| people who get their "news" from X just don't validate.
|
| X is worse than the tabloids at the checkout line, and _those
| tabloids have on occasion broken world news_. But if you
| bought one every single day because of that, you would be a
| moron.
| maxlin wrote:
| It's good people like you who consider free speech some
| laughing matter don't lead the conversation.
|
| I don't even want to think how dim the situation would be
| without him having taken over.
| rcruzeiro wrote:
| Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened.
| nkohari wrote:
| If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any
| platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell
| you.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Seems to me to be more possible than on a manually curated
| platform where any whiff of a differing opinion gets
| downvoted, [dead] and [flagged].
| platevoltage wrote:
| Oh god are we still pretending X is a free speech platform.
| nomdep wrote:
| The algorithm is a mirror: it show more of what you interact
| with. You see "shady content" because you pay attention to it.
|
| But you can also follow people and read only what they write,
| reply to them, and write yourself.
| edent wrote:
| That isn't true. I signed up for a fresh account for a
| project I was working on. Despite following no-one and not
| having interacted with anything, all I was pushed were
| racists, bigots, and extremist political content.
|
| Oh, and the owner's account.
| degamad wrote:
| While this is an interesting data point, the main thing it
| tells us is that when the algorithm has no information
| about your preferences, that it skews racist.
|
| This might be because, absent other information, the
| algorithm defaults to the "average" user's preferences.
|
| Or it might be evidence of intentional bias in the
| algorithm.
|
| The next piece of data we need is, if we take a new
| account, and only interact with non-Nazi accounts and
| content (e.g. EFF, Cory Doctorow, Human Rights Watch,
| Amnesty, AOC/Obama/Clinton etc), does the feed become
| filled with non-racist content, or is it still pushed?
| afavour wrote:
| Or you can just leave the platform. We don't always need
| to interrogate the exact reasons why something happens,
| we can just see it, document it, then go elsewhere.
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| I find this a bit disingenuous.
|
| If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of
| the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of
| time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as
| the best worst option.
|
| Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have
| significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm
| keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash.
| cloverich wrote:
| You can take your analogy further. The buffet noticed you
| pausing on unhealthy food, and begins replacing all the
| healthy options with unhealthy options. People shame your
| criticisms and note you could easily put blinders on and
| intentionally look longer at healthy options anytime you
| accidentally glance at an unhealthy one. the alternative
| would be an absolute repression of free speech after all.
| redman25 wrote:
| A whole lot of machine learning practitioners use X. Makes it
| difficult to avoid if you're interested in the news. It's
| definitely a network effect issue.
| mooreds wrote:
| You might find this useful: https://news.smol.ai/
| thrance wrote:
| Open a private tab, navigate to x.com. All you see are
| heinous neonazis casually discussing the jewish question and
| fantasizing about race wars.
| nalak wrote:
| If you do that all you get is a login wall. Have you
| actually done this or is this what you imagine it to be?
| gloflo wrote:
| Well, I can confirm that this is the case with a brand
| new account.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| I created an account, picked "pets" as my interest. I was
| suggested several pet-related accounts to follow, and
| followed none.
|
| I went to the home page and "for you" was populated about
| 80% from known right accounts and angry right-flavored
| screeds from people I didn't recognize.
|
| The other 20% was just a smattering of random, normal
| stuff. None of it about pets.
| toyg wrote:
| The discussion over X is always the same:
|
| "It's gone to hell"
|
| "No, it just reflects your tastes"
|
| "That's objectively false: create a new account and see what
| happens."
|
| "..."
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Thanks for that super insightful comment.
| gertop wrote:
| The same can be said of bluesky. In fact I think that
| you've said it yourself and recommended that people stick
| to manually curated follows!
| toyg wrote:
| uh, where...?
| dutchCourage wrote:
| I think it's good advice, the main difference is that
| Bsky encourages you to do that by giving you the
| possibility to customize your feeds (and set whatever as
| the default). You can have a combination of personal
| lists and custom algorithmic feeds (your own or someone
| else's).
|
| Even ignoring musk's takeover, I think it's a better
| model that reduces doomscrolling, ragebait and generally
| low quality interactions.
| btown wrote:
| Even if you believe that Musk and team don't "touch the
| scales" of the algorithm, the inevitable consequence of the
| decision to prioritize comments of people willing to pay for
| blue checks, is to discourage users not in that segment from
| engagement at all levels.
|
| The resulting shift in attention data naturally propagates to
| weight the _input_ to the algorithm away from "what does an
| average user pay attention to" and more towards "what does a
| paying user pay attention to."
|
| Setting morality aside, this is a self-consistent, if IMO
| short-sighted, business goal. What it is _not_ is a way to
| create a fair and impartial "mirror" as you have described.
| nkohari wrote:
| There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky,
| but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons.
|
| BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of
| things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of
| which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now
| an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in
| constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of
| awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my
| feed enough that I don't usually see it.
|
| They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better
| off not using either, but I still find myself going back to
| Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about
| Reddit, honestly.
| myko wrote:
| Interesting, BlueSky's non-algorithmic feed makes it really
| easy to avoid political ragebait and focus on tech accounts
| imo
|
| Really depends on who you're following
| nkohari wrote:
| I'd love to give it another try and be proven wrong. At the
| beginning it felt like "old Twitter", before it became
| mainstream, because it was almost entirely software
| engineers who had left Twitter. After Trump took office it
| felt like a constant deluge of hand-wringing and people
| shaking their fists at clouds, and it was tough to immerse
| myself in it.
| myko wrote:
| Make sure you stick to your "Following" feed and not
| "Discover" or even the feed dedicated to what your
| friends are into
| nozzlegear wrote:
| The problem (if you want to call it that) with following _a
| person_ on sites like Bluesky or X is that people aren 't
| machines and won't stay "on topic" regarding the reason you
| followed them in the first place. You might follow them for
| software dev, biking, birding, or whatever, but one day
| they could suddenly start ranting about their own political
| opinions or crazy beliefs.
|
| IMO, Reddit/HN-esque sites are better for following
| _topics_ , and Bluesky/X/Mastodon are better for following
| _people_. Maybe hashtags are a good middleground but I don
| 't have enough experience using those sites to say.
|
| (Disclaimer: I don't use any social media except for HN.)
| l33tbro wrote:
| > but one day they could suddenly start ranting about
| their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.
|
| Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational
| here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy",
| or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity?
| Politics has to emerge _somewhere_ , and it's not like we
| have third spaces for these rants in our modern world
| (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall
| meeting).
|
| Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to
| emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I
| think if you learn to not take them at face value, then
| it can really give you a quick insight (not always
| accurate) about what makes somebody tick.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I don't think you're being confrontational, and I don't
| think it's a problem either to be honest. My point was
| more that, try as one might, you can't build the ultimate
| curated list of non-political follows because somebody
| will eventually write something that you consider
| political. It can't be avoided, which I think is what
| you're saying too.
|
| I personally think that people try too hard to avoid
| politics and shame those who "make things political" -
| especially in tech. We live in an inherently political
| world, and our industry is increasingly political as it's
| co-opted by political figures and even dictators across
| the world. Trying to avoid talking about it is like
| stuffing our fingers in our ears and pretending reality
| isn't real, imo.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I would try again, but not use discover, and aggressively
| mute/block.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Yep. I ruthlessly anyone who induces the slightest negative
| emotion in me, be it annoyance, fear, anger etc. You are
| what you consume.
|
| I check the mainstream headlines once a day, kind of like
| checking the weather. There may be something I need to
| know. But then I move on.
|
| Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your fist
| at the rain clouds, completely pointless.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Getting worked up about politics is like shaking your
| fist at the rain clouds, completely pointless.
|
| The problem with that attitude is that eventually
| democracy _itself_ suffers, when people don 't care no
| more. The word "democracy" itself points that out -
| "demos" means "the people".
| nkohari wrote:
| I think what's disappointing is that so many people that
| I've followed for years now routinely engage in daily
| political slapfights, or at least retweet ragebait. In the
| blogging era, it would have been really weird for a
| software engineer to sit down and write several paragraphs
| about their political views, but the friction of hitting
| "repost" is so comparatively low that everyone does it.
| Myself included, honestly, although I've been trying not
| to.
|
| I don't have any problem with people having and voicing
| thoughts on politics. Everyone should strive to be well-
| informed and be capable of having reasonable conversations
| about politics, especially with people with whom they
| disagree. (Obviously, that's a charitable description of
| what's happening on social media, but that's a different
| topic.)
|
| I guess ultimately the problem is that I want to follow
| _topics_ , not _people_ , and there isn't a great way to do
| that. Reddit provides an alternative but is comparatively
| low-volume, and voting represents a fundamental design
| problem because it by definition creates an echo chamber.
| And that's not even taking into account how over-moderated
| the site is at this point.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| To follow topics on Bluesky, add feeds for those topics.
|
| The "Following" tab is literally that - chronologically
| ordered posts and replies from accounts you follow. The
| "Discover" and "Popular with Friends" tabs give you
| algorithm-sourced stuff that is somewhat connected to who
| you follow.
|
| When I click on the tab for the Game Dev feed, I see
| nothing but posts about game dev. When I click on the
| Astronomy feed, I only see telescopes and pictures taken
| with telescopes.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The reality is that microblogging, whether it be on X or
| bluesky or mastadon or even facebook posts, will ALWAYS
| be lower signal, lower value than real, curated or effort
| filled content.
|
| I like John Green a lot, including his vlogs that are
| just him speaking about stuff he doesn't know for half an
| hour, but I still do not go read what he posts on
| Bluesky, because it's as low quality, low signal, low
| intent, and _low effort_ as comments here on HN.
|
| It's just not useful. It's not a good use of my time to
| read random tweets from people.
|
| When I first got a twitter account in like 2010, I very
| very instantly recognized it was not for me. If something
| is important, someone will take the effort to make an
| actual piece of real content about it, like a blog or
| video or essay or book. Hell, even a thorough reddit post
| is better than microblogging.
|
| If it's not worth going through that effort to get the
| message out to people, _why should I consider that a
| valuable message_?
|
| It's emblematic of the past 20 years of social
| development in my opinion. If the only thing stopping you
| from getting the word about something super duper
| important is that _writing a page essay is too hard_ ,
| nobody really needs to care about that, because writing
| an essay is so easy we make children do it
|
| It's all noise. The signal doesn't go on twitter, it goes
| on real platforms where you might make money from good
| signal, or like, a freaking scientific paper, or the
| front page of a news org.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I noticed the same thing with Angela Collier. I love her
| videos, but her Bluesky posts have less subtlety than I
| would expect from someone of her intelligence and
| scientific training.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's because it's a microblogging platform.
|
| That's just what it's _meant for_ , low effort swipes,
| shitposting, retweets out of context etc.
|
| It is notable that in order to actually accomplish their
| "We want a platform where a celebrity says something and
| you instantly get that something", Twitter had to do a
| lot of work and pain curating who "celebrities" are. The
| alternative is everyone getting a waterfall of shit,
| because the vast majority of people do not have PR
| agencies between them and their tweet button, and do not
| have anything important or meaningful to say that is
| better said _fast and short_ than long and naunced. The
| entire point of microblogging is to eschew nuance.
|
| That's absurd full stop.
|
| Why would you ever want to know whatever low effort
| comment sparked thanksgiving dinner arguments at _other
| people 's_ thanksgivings?
|
| > I love her videos, but her Bluesky posts have less
| subtlety than I would expect from someone of her
| intelligence and scientific training.
|
| Please tell me which of "Water fluoridation is a well
| understood treatment, and people who are telling you it's
| bad for you are just lying", "<Knitting trivia>" or
| "Target is doing poorly as a business right now" or "ICE
| doing gestapo things" is "unsubtle", or why any of that
| should be "subtle", which is a strange choice of word.
| tart-lemonade wrote:
| Agreed, low character limits inevitably trend towards
| reductive, low-effort responses. If you have to split
| your comeback over more than one post, you've lost. No
| matter how good your point, most people will not read
| past your first tweet.
| jandrese wrote:
| If someone is feeding you ragebait on Bluesky you should just
| unsubscribe. The feed is what you make it. Twitter can be
| kind of like this too, but the trolls haunt the replies on
| there whereas people can shut trolls out of their replies on
| Bluesky. That's the big difference, is someone comes into a
| thread just to stir shit the original poster can shut them
| down.
|
| The danger that this creates an echo chamber has to be
| weighed against allowing trolls to run unchecked, or worse be
| like Twitter where these people get promoted to the top
| because ragebait generates big engagement numbers.
|
| Ultimately, the entire social media world needs to admit that
| maximizing engagement is a bad idea. They have to somehow
| convince the advertisers that having their product next to
| content designed entirely to enrage the reader is not good.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| The app consistently shows me things that I want to see from
| the social circle around the people I follow and the topics
| they talk about. Alternative platforms like Threads are worse
| at this; the platform I hear the most about, Bluesky, brags
| about not having this. Maybe the Twitter experience varies by
| which topics you are interested in, you might get served more
| slop the more mainstream topics you follow. But the reason I
| have not quit due to unusability is because there isn't any
| unusability.
| spankalee wrote:
| BlueSky brags about not having what, exactly? Nazis?
| delecti wrote:
| Charitably, I assume they mean it brags about not having an
| algorithmic feed.
|
| Bluesky does actually have an algorithmic feed
| ("Discover"), but it isn't the default.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| I have a great user experience on it.
|
| Here's what I do:
|
| I follow people who are consistently interesting and don't post
| too much.
|
| Then I only use "Following". "For You" is an algorithmic
| attention vortex for the proles.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I like the new Twitter stance on speech and some of the new
| features, problem is the UI is super annoying. It was actually
| kinda bad before too, but it got way worse.
| rc_kas wrote:
| You like the X.com stance where it bans speech from liberals
| and leftists?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Who did they ban? Old one was https://ballotpedia.org/Elect
| ed_officials_suspended_or_banne... plus the New York Post
| for the laptop thing
| mk89 wrote:
| What about links to malware or other illegal content that will be
| downloaded without me clicking on it...?
|
| Is it only in the app, or also with the browser?
|
| Crazy.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| You don't get it. It's worth it for the sake of _UX_.
|
| /s
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > also with the browser
|
| Browsers have been doing this forever: you make a request to a
| server (A) that you choose to interact with, and it could
| respond with various things (a redirect, a page with a meta
| refresh, a page with a frame / iframe, etc.) that result in
| your browser automatically making a request (and rendering the
| resulting page response) to some other server (B) that could
| get you in trouble.
|
| However, in this classic scenario, when A starts sending you to
| B, you stop trusting A. This is simple when A's behavior is
| entirely determined by A's owner. What if it's determined by
| other users (not just A's owner)? Typically, A would be careful
| to _not_ serve a redirect (etc.) based on user input, as that
| would be considered an "open redirect" vulnerability (with an
| exception for link shorteners, I guess). Interesting how the
| webview preloading that we're discussing now commits
| essentially this same offense.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Again, anyone still using Twitter should know they are
| contributing to the richest man in the world actively pushing to
| disrupt the core fabric of our society.
| nomdep wrote:
| Building rockets, moon bases, making fossil fuels less
| critical... yes, I agree
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Cutting food stamps. What's the point of a moon base if we
| can't even feed people?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Escape from pitchforks
| Integrape wrote:
| Shooting the billionaires into outer space would make the
| world a better place.
| gruez wrote:
| >Cutting food stamps.
|
| How is Musk involved in the current budget debacle aside
| from being "republican"? It's easy to blame stuff on him
| when he was running DOGE, but since his falling out with
| trump blaming every cut on Musk is a tired and expired
| meme.
| mayneack wrote:
| Given how much he contributed to the election outcome it
| hardly seems tired to blame him for the consequences.
|
| Plus he's on Twitter every week publicly discussing how
| much he uses the platform to put his thumb on the scale
| of discourse towards his personal beliefs.
|
| In what world is he not involved?
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| The consequences of blocking a CR?
| mayneack wrote:
| The consequences of the 2024 election in which he played
| a significant role. This "budget debacle" is a direct
| consequence.
|
| Also, Elon has weighed in quite aggressively on prior
| budgetary fights, so it would be crazy to say his
| influence isn't being felt here.
| https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5046887-elon-musk-
| slam...
| oulipo2 wrote:
| It's not because he no longer works there that he doesn't
| have the exact same ideology. And now he's trying to push
| a Trump-like figure in the UK
| rootlocus wrote:
| Actions speak to the character of a person. And some
| actions have long lasting consequences.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| "He gave the federal government organizational cancer,
| but he left now so he's not to blame"
|
| Americans will be living with Musk's legacy for decades.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| Hopefully, fingers crossed
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I hope, of all people here, you most directly feel the
| influence of Musk in your life.. Trust me, it will not be
| pleasant..
| platevoltage wrote:
| I'm okay with blaming him along with all of these Austin
| turds with podcasts.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| Schumer isn't engineering anything lol
| throwawaysoxjje wrote:
| Republicans control all three branches the government.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Not the Senate. That takes 60 votes to end the democrat's
| filibuster, which is why the last dozen attempts by
| republicans to pass a clean CR with no changes to the
| current budget failed. (The last one yesterday[1] failed
| with 54 in favor 44 against. Three democrats voted with
| the republicans in that vote, still not enough.)
|
| [1]: https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2025-10-03-senate-
| again-fa...
| platevoltage wrote:
| Not having supermajority doesn't mean they aren't in
| control. The fact is, the president could say one
| sentence, and the shutdown would be over. It's no
| surprise that the last 2 record setting shutdowns
| happened under this president.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| They're in control of some things certainly, but not
| this. The decision to filibuster republican attempts to
| re-open the government is almost entirely up to Schumer,
| and under current rules the republicans can't do anything
| about that without 60 votes.
|
| You're right of course that Trump could probably persuade
| Schumer to end the shutdown by agreeing to his demands,
| but I think it's disingenuous to suggest that means he's
| in "control" of what's happening. (Let alone the insanity
| of trying to suggest Elon Musk is somehow to blame as
| previous commenters did, or that X users are for
| continuing to use X. This thread about a new link
| preloading feature in Twitter got very off topic very
| quickly.)
| rocketpastsix wrote:
| those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he
| can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think
| he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the
| site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of
| us are holding our breath on that one.
| sporkxrocket wrote:
| What moon bases?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System /
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III
| sporkxrocket wrote:
| These don't exist.
| nomdep wrote:
| Yet
| sporkxrocket wrote:
| More Musk vaporware.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They did say _building_ , not _built_. Starship R &D work
| is... tough to deny.
| sporkxrocket wrote:
| Musk constantly promises to build things that never get
| built. He's 99% vaporware. Unless it actually exists,
| it's safe to assume that it never will.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm very much in the Musk hater category, but it really
| takes some doing to dismiss SpaceX as vaporware.
| stickfigure wrote:
| This is the problem with the dialogue around Musk. He's
| not 99% vaporware, he's 80-90% vaporware. That's problem
| enough.
|
| In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up
| the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are
| crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his
| personal brand. This is not going to end well.
| sporkxrocket wrote:
| Going to the moon is _very_ much vaporware. Maybe the
| penultimate example of it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Going to the moon was, at the very least, demonstrated as
| technologically possible in the 1960s, and you can
| literally go watch a Starship launch if you want. I have
| a very hard time putting it in the same "entirely
| prospective" category as androids, self-driving taxis,
| and Mars bases.
| sporkxrocket wrote:
| The moon is orders of magnitude more difficult to land on
| than launching a LEO satellite.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| And that'd be a great point if we didn't already do it
| six times with slide rules in the 1960s.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| penultimate = second last
| seneca wrote:
| > Musk constantly promises to build things that never get
| built. He's 99% vaporware.
|
| Absolutely laughable motivated reasoning. Hate the guy if
| you must, but claiming one of the most impactful business
| leaders in American history is "99% vaporware" makes you
| look silly.
| sporkxrocket wrote:
| Every shareholder meeting he announces something that
| never comes to fruition. He's the vaporware king.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| It's near the middle of Musk's pile of vaporware.
| afavour wrote:
| Literal moon shots, while he contributes meaningfully to
| worsening conditions on Earth. His dismantling of USAID will
| have a more consequential effect than 90% of his fever dreams
| ever will.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| "Consequential effects" to the pockets of the billionaires
| running public contractors that embezzle all the money,
| perhaps.
|
| But hey, maybe those gay Nicaraguan's really needed that $3
| million. Perhaps another $70 trillion to Israel, just to
| round it off.
| afavour wrote:
| Sigh, these talking points are beyond expired. There's no
| evidence DOGE has ever saved the government a notable
| amount of money, they just straight up lied about the
| value of things they were cancelling.
|
| I understand having a favourable view of Musk in the
| past. But to continue to do so today is to put your hands
| over your ears and say "la la la la" while confronted
| with overwhelming evidence.
|
| The effects of shutting down USAID are extremely clear.
| Kids are starving and dying:
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12150160/
|
| Even if you truly genuinely believe USAID must be shut
| down then you phase it out over, at minimum, months.
| Doing so overnight means you have made an active choice
| to kill people. If your response to that is to completely
| ignore the suffering and pull out some absurd right wing
| talking point then I truly worry for you.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| "Kids are starving and dying"
|
| Emotional blackmail paired with dismissive ad hominem had
| a good run, admittedly.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Is it your contention that children are not starving and
| dying, or that you don't care if they are because you
| think this will lower your taxes?
|
| I have bad news either way.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| I am a messenger, and it turns out I've got some bad news
| as well.
|
| My contention is that this kind of emotional appeal has
| been exploited to the point of (quickly) diminishing
| returns.
|
| People are scratching the surface and following the
| money. Those who used such maudlin tactics to protect
| money laundering, war mongering and such things would do
| well to go and sin no more, lest more serious
| consequences come knocking.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > this kind of emotional appeal
|
| It is not an emotional appeal. It is a statement of
| objective and provable fact that cutting off funding for
| food resulted in people not having food. It's also
| obvious that this would be the result. The grandparent
| posted a link to one study. There are others if you do a
| quick search.
|
| > People are scratching the surface and following the
| money. Those who used such maudlin tactics to protect
| money laundering, war mongering and such things would do
| well to go and sin no more, lest more serious
| consequences come knocking.
|
| I have no idea what any of this even means. I don't live
| in whatever bubble you do, but it sounds like you believe
| there is some kind of global cabal of "them" that
| profited by these children not starving and you're out to
| stop that?
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I googled it. It turns out there are ton of wacky
| conspiracy theories about USAID, and that's largely where
| Musk got his ideas. I had no idea.
|
| It's a wild world we live-in when internet conspiracies
| can kill actual children.
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pad.70011
| afavour wrote:
| > My contention is that this kind of emotional appeal has
| been exploited to the point of (quickly) diminishing
| returns.
|
| That might apply to you personally, and if it does then
| it says a lot more about you than it does any broader
| societal point.
|
| Personally, I'm able to distinguish between attempts to
| manipulate my emotions and the very real, very true fact
| that people are starving and dying as a result of cynical
| choices made by Musk and DOGE. There's no reason to group
| that together with war mongering and money laundering,
| the only reason to do so is if you're seeking to dismiss
| real documented suffering.
|
| "People have cynically tried to manipulate my emotions so
| I don't have any emotions any more" isn't the retort you
| apparently think it is.
| almosthere wrote:
| I think specifically these NGOs were run by board members
| that ran 10 other NGOs all called "Save the children
| Africa" etc... And the weird thing about it, is that no
| children were actually being saved. Instead the money
| went to ActBlue through a few actors.
|
| Mr Beast has done more for Saving the Children in Africa
| with $5m than USAID has done with $500b per year.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Citation?
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| Focus and determination can grant you the power of the
| queen on the chessboard.
|
| But when you become blind to what happens around you, you
| become the pawn in someone else's plan. A messenger is an
| authority's favorite tool.
|
| Someone would like to starve people and you are a part of
| their plan. If you feel the tug of appeal, it is because
| you understand something isn't right here. If you don't
| investigate, your mind is not your own.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| "you don't care if they are because you think this will
| lower your taxes?"
|
| Stop that. Now.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Is it untrue? You failed to address my point.
|
| Children are being left to die. SOMETHING is more
| important than that to the proponents of these policies.
| What is it? If it's lower taxes... they aren't achieving
| that goal. Taxes are only decreasing for the top 0.1% of
| the population and tip earners.
|
| If it's to lower the national debt that also isn't
| working. The national debt has increased at record rates.
|
| Is there some other goal I'm not aware of? Why is it so
| important that these children not be fed?
| CaptWillard wrote:
| The most important goal IMO is to expose and weaken the
| misguided use and expansion of "soft power" in my name,
| with my tax dollars and without my consent.
|
| Ironically, one of the consistent outcomes is starving
| and dying children. They're just delivered asynchronously
| and from the "wrong" side of the ledger.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| That is a very vague justification for the very real lack
| of food those children are dying of.
|
| Have you ever been without food? I have, and vague
| conspiracies and high ideals really didn't matter too
| much to me in those moments.
| afavour wrote:
| As I said in my original comment, even if you disagree
| with the concept of USAID and want to shut it down you
| ramp it down over time to allow for replacements. Doing
| it immediately has an absolutely negligible effect on
| your tax dollars (putting aside the fact it's a rounding
| error at best anyway) and is a deliberate choice to
| inflict suffering on innocent people.
|
| The government decided to let food they'd already paid
| for rot while people starved. Twist yourself into a
| pretzel to defend that if you wish but I won't be joining
| you.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Are you "consenting" to starving children, then?
| almosthere wrote:
| Don't let them die then. Go help save them. Give money to
| Mr Beast, he's done more for Children dying in Africa
| than all of USAID's $500B per year.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| On October 22nd the US national debt passed $38 trillion,
| a record number. That is the fastest accumulation of a
| trillion dollars in debt outside of the COVID-19
| pandemic. We only hit $37 trillion in in August.
|
| Further, unless you are in the top .1% of earners, or you
| live on tips (I somehow doubt there are many stippers on
| HN) your taxes will not decrease as a result of any of
| Trumps "cuts".
|
| In short, you have been lied to and are celebrating
| unnecessary cruelty for the sake of cruelty which will
| save you personally $0.00 and which only further
| increases America's debts.
|
| Worse the ridiculous tariffs are pushing us toward a
| recession that only AI investment has forestalled. AI
| investment now represents the single largest investment
| of capital in human history, and if that bubble bursts we
| will enter into what could potentially be the worst
| economic collapse in not only American history, but human
| history.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Only "stippers" live on tips? What an awful, misogynistic
| take.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Yes. I literally mean that only strippers live on tips.
| Where I'm from only strippers are legally allowed to
| receive tips, actually. The local Caddies went on strike,
| but it didn't' work out. I hear the Dalai Lama blessed
| them though, so at least they have that going for them.
| EGreg wrote:
| Not only that, but his @grok bot is now completely unhinged
| too (the public version) spewing an even more polarized
| version of his exact views without any ability to consider
| new information:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632336
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| His only legacy will be the deaths of millions. Fifty years
| from now he will be known for nothing else, his other
| projects merely footnotes. Joining the esteemed ranks of
| Stalin, Mao, Leopold II, Hitler, Pol Pot.
| tiberius_p wrote:
| Starship will never get to the moon.
| darkwater wrote:
| That was 5-10-15 years ago Elon.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4
| 0xAFFFF wrote:
| He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give
| Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and
| hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all
| to stay on X.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| What does he do except making fossil fuel MORE critical? What
| do you think rockets are powered with?
| nutjob2 wrote:
| > making fossil fuels less critical
|
| Tesla for years made billions by enabling others to pollute,
| and it still does so.
|
| Every EV Musk sells enables more ICE cars to stay on the
| road.
|
| If you want to drink the kool-aid thats fine, but the facts
| are not on your side.
| rcpt wrote:
| It's not 2014 anymore. Check his tweets, right wing slop
| occupies most of his brain these days.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| I have a bridge in downtown NYC, interested in buying?
| zetanor wrote:
| Is the implication here that the core fabric of our society
| isn't otherwise being disrupted, or that this particular
| disruption should be viewed as exceptionally egregious?
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| YSK, it feels like the implication of the framing of your
| question is that you're suggesting it doesn't matter and
| nobody should care.
|
| The disruption is egregious. It is notable and worth pushing
| back against, even if you don't view it as "exceptional".
| zetanor wrote:
| I am concerned with attacks on freedom, dignity, culture
| and national character. King Elmo of Twitter is "bad", but
| mild.
| runjake wrote:
| I don't have the same take, but the algorithm and site is so
| broken, the patterns so dark, that I'm down to maybe 5 minutes
| of X a week at best.
|
| Everything is posted to get views, even from the more quality
| people. It's ironic that I hear about "brainrot" the most on X,
| but it's full of brainrot masquerading as valuable information.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| You literally have people crying that their garbage content
| isn't getting enough views (and hence payout).
|
| It's embarrassing, but that's what the entire site is.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| They are all like this to a degree because controversy
| creates engagement. If a platform is not making you money, is
| not making you smarter, and not helping you form IRL
| connections, then I highly recommend disabling it.
| meowface wrote:
| I fully agree with your stance on Elon but I simply find
| Twitter too useful for too many things to quit. I've tried
| Bluesky and although I am very left-leaning on sociocultural
| topics I just find them too... annoying over there. (I'm closer
| to neoliberal on economic topics and that's also a bit of an
| issue there. And I like AI and they pretty much all deeply hate
| AI.)
| phoronixrly wrote:
| > I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to
| quit
|
| Like what precisely? Infosec twitter is gone, science twitter
| is long dead. Visiting my timeline in non-algorithmic mode
| yields a post from months ago. In algo mode it's just ads and
| rage-bait.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Simon Willison is on Bluesky, and I'm going to go out on a
| relatively safe limb and suggest that if you check out what
| he reposts, who he follows, etc., you will find people who do
| not deeply hate AI. I do think Bluesky, in _general,_ is a
| lot like the Twitter of, say, 15 years ago, where the quality
| of one 's feed is very much dependent on how aggressively one
| curates it -- although I wish they would finally add a
| feature for selectively turning off reposts user by user.
|
| (It is absolutely true that a lot of creators hate AI,
| although I would argue that they have fair reasons to do so
| given the way AI is frequently presented / talked about /
| used. I find it unfortunate that everything remotely related
| to machine learning has now been rebranded as "AI", which
| leads people to reflexively dunk on tools that really aren't
| that much like the AI they have in their heads, but it's not
| their fault.)
| moneywoes wrote:
| may I ask, any good follows?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Disagree, albeit with a /s. We should continue attaching
| increasingly more corrupted cores to the Wheatley-GLaDOS.
| Twitter as it is an artery IV port to inject defeatism and
| derangement into that group of people. Eventually the
| controlling core will come off and all will return to normal
| someday.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Why are you using twitter for anything at this stage?
| labrador wrote:
| It's still the most interesting platform for AI
| labrador wrote:
| I just tried to find AI starter packs on BlueSky and
| confirmed that BlueSky is openly hostile to AI. I understand
| the reasons, it's just not where I'm at. I'll try Threads and
| see what happens.
| jandrese wrote:
| Bluesky has lots of artists, authors, journalists, etc...
| who see AI as a direct threat to human creativity. Not that
| the AI will replace the creativity, but that it can
| generate slop that looks "good enough" and doesn't demand a
| living wage or healthcare benefits. Many of these creative
| types have little trust that corporate management won't try
| to replace them just to save a buck.
| labrador wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to their arguments but that doesn't
| lesson my need to understand AI if I'm going to help them
| with their concerns. Ignoring it is not an effective
| strategy.
| metabagel wrote:
| I can't vouch for these, but they seem like reasonable
| starting points. I searched for "AI starter pack" with the
| quotes.
|
| https://bsky.app/starter-pack-short/LFAZcGE
|
| https://bsky.app/starter-
| pack/maosbot.bsky.social/3l3ix4wi64...
| labrador wrote:
| Thank you. I did follow one of those using the same
| search without the quotes and followed. And your second
| one now. I'm also cleaning up my X site to get rid of
| anything not AI so I can do a fair comparison.
| shatnersbassoon wrote:
| what do you recommend instead?
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Hackernews, Mastodon, Onlineplatforms of Newspapers or
| Magazines is what I use
| Biganon wrote:
| Physical contact with Gramineae
| mrguyorama wrote:
| What's so hard about reading scientific papers?
|
| You DO care about the actual, meaningful, _quantifiable_
| results, right, not just the vibes and trends and fashions?
| afpx wrote:
| I block X and related domains at the router.
| sd9 wrote:
| This seems like a fairly reasonable UX improvement. Unless I'm
| missing anything, it doesn't seem like this has nefarious intent,
| it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see the
| content as quickly as possible.
|
| ---
|
| It's astonishing how quickly discussion disintegrates when Musk
| is mentioned on HN. He really is such a divisive figure, with
| incredibly polarised language both in support and against him.
|
| Normal reasoned arguments are just absent here. Sometimes when
| two people disagree, they can still have a nuanced
| conversation/argument about it. But not about Musk.
|
| There are some opinions in this thread that I vehemently disagree
| with, but it's not worth escalating by adding my opinion to the
| pile.
|
| It reminds me of that phenomenon where you read the newspaper and
| notice an article in your domain of expertise and it's riddled
| with errors! Then you turn the page, read an article about
| something else, and completely trust it. You somehow didn't
| transfer the knowledge that the newspaper is inaccurate to the
| new domain.
|
| It makes me wonder what other discussions on HN (and elsewhere)
| are completely devoid of nuance and reason, but I just don't
| notice it.
| Retric wrote:
| Preloading links is often avoided because it creates a wide
| range of issues. Using up newspapers free stories a month on
| articles users never see etc. Speed just isn't that useful by
| comparison.
|
| Incompetence is obviously still a possibility, but the likely
| intent overcoming such issues is to make X seem to generate
| more traffic and thus appear to be more relevant.
| sd9 wrote:
| I hadn't considered this.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Even so, Chrome has preloading turned on by default with an
| option for "extended preloading" which is even more
| aggressive. There may be some downsides, but I don't think
| what X is doing here is unreasonable. Speed makes a huge
| difference in UX.
| stillatit wrote:
| >Using up newspapers free stories a month on articles users
| never see etc
|
| Webviews are pretty quarantined from the main safari app. I
| don't think cookies persist, so I don't think this would be
| an issue.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| > It's intriguing how normal reasoned arguments are just absent
| here
|
| No 'reasoned arguments' were provided in your take. I'll give
| you one against this though -- it's all fun and games until you
| end up on a list because of Musk's UX.
| oulipo2 wrote:
| How are you supposed to have a "nuanced discussion" about a guy
| doing literal Hitler salutes in public?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| When you're either unwilling or incapable of understanding
| other people's perspectives it is indeed very difficult.
|
| Try this: steelman the argument that what Musk did all those
| months ago wasn't a "literal Hitler salute". If you can do
| that, I suspect you'll find it a lot easier to have nuanced
| discussions about that topic (and possibly others) going
| forward.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Fuck the salute. I can look at everything else he's done
| and still think he's a terrible individual that should not
| be given money or power.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Speaking of nuance, I find it rather unintuitive how it
| often seems like it's harder for people to have a nuanced
| opinion of other people than to have a nuanced opinion
| about a policy or software feature or specific situation.
|
| You'd think given how complicated and faceted people are
| it would be especially _easy_ to find both good and bad
| things to say about them, but online at least it almost
| seems to be the opposite: there 's even less nuance when
| discussing people than there is discussing other topics.
| (Case in point.)
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| I'm not required to find the good in a person like Musk.
| I'm allowed to look at the many shitty things he's done
| and terrible opinions he expresses and say "that is a
| shit man, and I do not like him or trust him."
|
| He has probably done something for someone somewhere that
| wasn't terrible. Does it counterbalance the rest? Not
| really!
|
| There's that (possibly apocryphal) saying, "and Magda
| Goebbels made a great strudel." Just because a nazi has a
| redeeming quality somewhere does not undo them being a
| nazi.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| You're not required to do anything. Consider though that
| if you refuse to see the good in people you disagree
| with, you have little room to complain when they refuse
| to see the good in you.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| I'll happily do that for the guy who cuts me off in
| traffic.
|
| One of the fascists that is destroying my country? Fuck
| no, no consideration for them.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| There's a lot of overlap between those two groups. Half
| of the country voted for Trump in the last election, a
| few of them are probably your neighbors. They control the
| presidency and a majority in the house and senate. You
| better hope they don't all decide they feel the same way
| about you that you apparently do about them.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| The largest share of the eligible voting population was
| the 'did not vote' group.
|
| I'm OK with calling fascists what they are. I'm also OK
| with recognizing a neighbor who has been consumed by
| fascist propaganda.
|
| The fascist is not one that can be negotiated with. As
| Sartre said:
|
| "They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to
| challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is
| their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly,
| since he believes in words."
|
| I can negotiate with the propaganda poisoned neighbor.
| There is no negotiating with the people who are running
| the fascist show. Giving a fascist the benefit of the
| doubt is playing into their strategy.
| platevoltage wrote:
| Or we could look at everything else he does, like advocate
| for the AFD in Germany.
| duxup wrote:
| >it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see
| the content as quickly as possible.
|
| Yes and many people think that is outweighed by all the other
| issues raised in the larger thread here. That's "nuance and
| reason". Pretending it isn't there is not "nuance and reason".
| mooreds wrote:
| Webviews have serious security issues, at least if you enter
| any data into them.
|
| See this article from 2016:
| https://developers.googleblog.com/en/modernizing-oauth-inter...
|
| So my worries are that someone is going to click a link in
| Twitter and then enter their username and password into a news
| website. When this happens you need to trust the app
| developers.
| aldousd666 wrote:
| Nobody wants a damn web view. If I'm clicking off to a link, I
| may want to click to another app and back in and still be where
| it was... If it's in a webview that's gone as soon as I click
| out. Yes, you can open in Chrome or whatever, open in a browser,
| but that's a pain in the ass to do an the time. I hate web views,
| in all forms.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Why would the web view be gone after you've multi tasked? On my
| phone the web view stays open inside the parent app.
| minitoar wrote:
| idk but I've definitely experienced this. Presumably it's a
| bug.
| tracker1 wrote:
| In the settings you can configure to open in the configured
| external browser. I recently switched phones, so had to adjust
| several apps for this. It's a pain and would be nice if it was
| a global setting to always open links in the browser.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| You know what to do..... ')
| emehrkay wrote:
| I clicked a link in IG once and and it opened via a webveiw. it
| was one of those "give us your email for a discount" popups so
| I put in "mark@aol.com" and at a later date, IG asked if I
| wanted to associate that email with my account (or something
| along those lines). I tend to take the extra step to "open in
| native browser" whenever webveiws popup
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I remember how tiktok basically injected a keylogger into any
| site they opened in a webview
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/technology/tiktok-
| browser...
|
| I didn't think IG does something similarly shady
| codybontecou wrote:
| That's the point of a webview - to continue tracking users
| while "off" your app.
| bradly wrote:
| Similarly... I _really_ dislike clicking a link in Safari on
| iOS and it opening an App instead of going to the web page. I
| have the YouTube app installed and use it on occasion, but its
| really jarring when I click an organic search result in Duck
| and get launched into an app that may not have the same privacy
| settings my browser is setup with.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Ironically, I have the opposite complaint with YouTube,
| particularly with these new Twitter web views. It takes 3
| "navigations" now to get to the iOS YouTube app: one to open
| the Twitter web view, one to open that URL in Safari, then
| one to open at YouTube video in the native app.
| rolandog wrote:
| Isn't that because they ask you to sign in if you're not
| leaking enough information?
| randallsquared wrote:
| The "open in YouTube" button just does nothing in the
| (iOS) webview, for whatever reason. So, in order to get a
| working open-in-app button, you have to open the webpage
| in your browser. Not sure if intentional or a bug.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Brave prompts you before doing that. Then you can long press
| to new tab.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Pro tip, links clicked in private mode will always ask you
| before opening the app, so you can say no.
| fusslo wrote:
| I dont know if this is in the same vein, but I want to complain
| about how websites handle pdfs.
|
| Slack, Teams, confluence, jira, etc all open a pdf in a in-
| browser preview thing. Then if you try scrolling, it makes the
| PAGE contents bigger, but does NOT zoom into the pdf.
|
| Who thought of this? Who thought it was a good idea?
|
| Never have I wanted to open a preview of the pdf.
| Arrath wrote:
| Seriously. I have a featureful PDF viewer I am intimately
| familiar with. I want it to be the default for all PDFs,
| ever. This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want.
| telotortium wrote:
| Not sure how bad it is these days, but Adobe Reader used to
| open pretty slowly (and if you had Adobe Acrobat open your
| PDFs by default, it was even slower), so an in-browser PDF
| viewer was appreciated for that purpose.
|
| Also, it can be useful to keep the PDF in the context of
| the app you opened it in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a
| window manager that surfaces the fact that, for example,
| one macOS Preview window was opened from the browser,
| another from Slack, another from Finder, etc. Compare to
| iOS, where opening a PDF viewer from an app will result in
| a button at the top-left corner to go back to the app you
| opened it from.
| friedtofu wrote:
| This sounds more like however your OS handles opening the PDF
| mimetype(xdg-open,open,Invoke-Item) I'm assuming you're on
| windows. I think often times browsers will just be set to the
| default for previewing a PDF unless set otherwise. This is
| all just conjecture though as I don't use any of the tools
| you listed above and I'm not absolutely certain of how
| Windows/MacOS handles PDFs by default.
|
| Twitter's handling of opening links in its own webview is a
| bit different, unless Slack, Teams, Confluence, Jira all open
| these browser instances within some sort of webview wrapper
| as well(I wouldn't think so). So its a little bit different
| stephen_g wrote:
| No, what they are talking about is that you click on a link
| to see a PDF in these web apps, and instead of serving up
| the PDF document itself, they serve up a page in their web
| app that embeds a PDF viewer.
|
| I assume they are trying to be "helpful" but 99% of the
| time the user's browser can render the PDF more
| conveniently than the app's embedded viewer (not breaking
| scrolling and zooming etc.)
| stillatit wrote:
| >Nobody wants a damn web view.
|
| OP here. This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's
| not shared by normal users. Being able to instantly return to
| where you were without having to navigate apps is probably
| appreciated by a lot of people. (As would be preloading in this
| instance).
|
| FWIW when I first started browsing HN a common complaint was
| websites being mobile sized. The sentiment here was they should
| be rendered in full desktop and require pinch-zooming and
| scrolling in all directions.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > This might be a classic Hacker News sentiment that's not
| shared by normal users.
|
| My wife just didn't know what a web view was (she still
| doesn't), but she prefers using the browser after I showed
| her how to "escape" Facebook's web view and open pages in
| Safari where the content blocker and ad blocker extensions
| could do their work. You probably have a point about
| preloading pages, but until content and ad blockers start
| working in all web views, then I agree with the person you're
| replying to: nobody wants a damn web view.
| danudey wrote:
| FWIW apps can use a SafariWebView IIRC to basically pass
| off a link to a separate Safari instance that can use
| autofill, content blockers, Javascript JIT, etc. but which
| the app doesn't have access to.
|
| Meanwhile a WebView will show whatever HTML you throw at
| it, but it won't do any of that other fun stuff because the
| app that created it can access and manipulate the content
| (e.g. stealing your passwords) and the OS doesn't know if
| content filtering is relevant in that webview (since it's
| just the "show some HTML in a browser-type view" control
| and maybe it's important to see everything as-is). Being
| able to access the WebView also means the app can watch
| where you browse, what URLs, etc. so it can see what you're
| looking at even once you leave the page it opened to.
|
| So yeah, apps _can_ have a user-friendly experience;
| Telegram for the longest time used a SafariWebView so that
| everything was nice and neat. Then they decided to change
| their UI to a regular WebView and suddenly everything was
| full of trash again and I had to set it to "open in
| Safari" instead.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It's not just HackerNews. I can remember when Facebook rolled
| out their "in-app browser", and a huge amount of content
| appeared on how to disable it.
|
| That was partly due to websites being broken. You can still
| find some old discussions on Stack Overflow about features of
| their websites not working correctly in it:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27000708/file-upload-
| con...
| Thoreandan wrote:
| Checking in - it's not possible to disable from the app
| anymore, is it? The preference setting is still there, but
| ignored, afaict.
| gizzlon wrote:
| You still have the fb app? You know the spied everything
| you browsed, right?
|
| And if they didn't, it was not for lack of trying... What
| does it take for people to delete this shit?
| drdec wrote:
| > Being able to instantly return to where you were without
| having to navigate apps is probably appreciated by a lot of
| people.
|
| The back button supplied by the OS is perfectly capable of
| this (at least on Android I have witnessed this)
| mcint wrote:
| Well, Twitter/X gets this wrong too. Pretty often jumps
| away from what you're viewing, especially on the nav-in to
| a thread or nav-out from a thread actions.
| franga2000 wrote:
| In-app webviews are a usability disaster for normal users, I
| need to help a relative out of one at least once every few
| weeks.
|
| The webviews don't have adblock so they fall for ads and
| scams, sometimes they don't properly follow UI scaling, they
| don't have the cookies or saved passwords needed to, for
| example, read a paywalled newspaper article that someone
| linked...
| igleria wrote:
| Nikita should be ashamed of how BAD the android X app is.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| I've been a long-time Twitter user. I don't hate Elon, so when he
| bought it I was cautiously optimistic.
|
| I deactivated last week. The platform is bad and getting worse.
| It's scammy and spammy. Everything is designed around garbage
| engagement, so that the X team can brag about how good the
| product is doing.
| vachina wrote:
| I prefer the X now. Unlimited stream of unhinged, unfiltered
| thought stream from strangers straight into my feed.
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Is this ... sarcasm?
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Maybe GP genuinely enjoys madness.
| SLWW wrote:
| If you grew up with image boards in their heyday
| (pre-2004) then X could feel a bit nostalgic.
|
| However the word filters (to suppress messages) does
| dampen it a bit.
| EGreg wrote:
| I mean, is 4chan better than those image boards? or
| worse? how about 8chan
| swyx wrote:
| i mean have you seen Fox News?
| kypro wrote:
| I like it about the same. Maybe a tad more because some
| people I like are no longer banned or feel the need to
| censor.
|
| I'm weird though. I like 4chan and find most social media
| today is too intolerant and authoritarian for my tastes.
| rc_kas wrote:
| Excuse me for thinking you a hypocrite. X.com is about as
| authoritarian as it gets. They have banned so many
| people.
|
| Just an example ..
|
| https://fortune.com/2024/09/25/twitter-x-account-
| suspensions...
| danudey wrote:
| Sure, but people he _likes_ (racists, bigots, homophobes,
| and so on) aren 't banned. No more intolerance of their
| intolerance, now it's on full display and celebrated!
| rhcom2 wrote:
| A small percentage might even be actual humans!
| alpineman wrote:
| I am honestly curious what Elon would need to do for you to
| dislike him. That ship sailed for me long ago
| lukan wrote:
| Words have meaning. He said he does not hate him. That does
| not mean he likes him. Hate is a very strong emotion. Dislike
| is a much less stronger emotion. That is not all the same.
|
| (I also don't hate Elon, but I still don't like him or
| consider doing buisness with him in any way)
| metabagel wrote:
| USAID was a highly effective and efficient operation. Musk
| dismembered it, leading to untold misery, death, and the
| spread of infectious diseases. I think this is reason
| enough to hate Musk.
|
| Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation of
| the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he
| simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while he
| also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
|
| https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-
| anticipat...
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-
| soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1...
| lukan wrote:
| I would argue without Musk and his Twitter/richest man of
| the world power, Trump would have never been elected in
| the first place, which would have prevented this and a
| lot of other bad things. Still, I don't hate him. (Hate
| is not a condition I think is healthy or constructive or
| something I should explain myself not feeling it)
| metabagel wrote:
| > Hate is not a condition I think is healthy or
| constructive
|
| I agree with you on this. Strong emotions impede our
| ability to be creative and problem-solve.
| fatbird wrote:
| The race to the highest body count looks like Elon in
| first, RFK jr. second, and Stephen Miller a distant third
| but looking like he'll finish strong once the camps are
| fully operating.
| ElectronCharge wrote:
| > USAID was a highly effective and efficient operation.
|
| I'm sure all those getting payouts from it thought so...
|
| > Musk dismembered it, leading to untold misery, death,
| and the spread of infectious diseases.
|
| Musk did nothing except make recommendations. The
| executive branch took concrete action.
|
| > I think this is reason enough to hate Musk.
|
| You do you. Those of us with a more balanced view realize
| USAID was largely a money laundering scheme funneling
| cash to NGOs in favor with the FedGov. Whatever good it
| did was a side effect.
|
| > Also, keep in mind that what Musk did was a violation
| of the separation of powers in the Constitution, so he
| simultaneously killed a program which saved lives while
| he also started the U.S. on the road to authoritarianism.
|
| The Executive Branch controls funds within itself, and
| USAID fell under that purview.
|
| I'm sorry for any lives lost due to USAID defunding. That
| said, the USA is $38 TRILLION in debt, we must fix that
| before returning to massive aid to the rest of the world.
|
| I highly recommend that those concerned about USAID
| immediately start making charitable donations to relevant
| charities. That's a sustainable approach to things, as
| opposed to further bankrupting the USA.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| This administration has added more debt than any
| previous. So this talk about lowering debt is pure
| bullshit.
| ElectronCharge wrote:
| An "administration" doesn't add debt - Congress does.
| Power of the purse strings, no?
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "this administration". Are
| you including DJT's first term?
|
| Regardless, here are the numbers per Investopedia:
|
| "Based on total dollar amounts, Joe Biden contributed the
| most to the national debt, adding $8.5 trillion during
| his presidency, followed by Donald Trump ($7.8 trillion
| in his first term) and Barack Obama ($7.7 trillion during
| his two terms)."
|
| DJT's first term had the excuse of the COVID pandemic.
| Other than the final year when that was an issue, his
| spending was reasonable. 0'Biden on the other hand, had
| no such excuse for his spending binge, which was
| consistent across his (thankfully few) four years in
| office.
|
| The "talk of lowering debt" is necessary, since right now
| we're spending 25% of federal revenue (about $1 trillion)
| paying the interest on our current massive national debt.
|
| The hope is that a supercharged US economy can raise
| revenues enough to ease the pain of paying down the
| national debt that's largely been accumulated since 2000.
| It must be done to avoid the inevitable consequences.
| Angostura wrote:
| > Musk did nothing except make recommendations. The
| executive branch took concrete action.
|
| Can you think of a "recommendation" that wasn't acted
| upon?
| throwaway902984 wrote:
| Not who you were responding to:
|
| It is misremembering to frame their actions as
| recommendations, when they took action themselves, acted
| first, and asked for permission later. There were
| infamous public displays of being given carte blanche on
| the spot after employees told them they didn't have just
| that. They put metaphorical "heads on pikes" so that they
| wouldn't have to face questions again outside of court.
| groby_b wrote:
| > Musk did nothing except make recommendations. The
| executive branch took concrete action.
|
| The bullshit is strong in this one. Yes, Musk & DOGE
| acted: https://www.epi.org/policywatch/doge-shuts-down-
| usaid
| johnwheeler wrote:
| /Raises hand Sam Altman hater over here.
| bko wrote:
| What is garbage engagement?
|
| I think its entirely reasonable that an algorithm shows you
| things that you engaged with. It would be weird if it didn't
| promoted stuff I didn't engage w/.
| vincnetas wrote:
| garbage engagement are posts so obviously wrong/provoking/you
| name it that you must exercise supreme self control to not
| engage with the content. And for some people it is quite
| difficult to do so algorithm thinks that, hey this is
| trending so might be i should show this to more people. So
| this garbage turns up on your stream. I bean dealing with
| this by straight up blocking such accounts, but this is
| loosing battle in the sea of bots :)
| danudey wrote:
| Person A: Says something exceptionally inflammatory and
| provably false
|
| Person B-Z: That's a horrible thing to say, why are you
| like this?
|
| Algorithm: Wow, this post must be awesome, I should show it
| to more people!
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| A better term might be antagonism. X seemed to switch to a
| system of rewarding views as a method of engagement far above
| all else, which led to people (generally and deliberately)
| ramping up the extremeness of their hot takes in a bid to get
| as much attention as possible.
|
| A parallel term is "hate click", where there's a headline
| that's so stupid or off that you click it just to see what
| the hell they were talking about.
|
| An example of this vile genre was someone tweeting about how:
|
| "Teachers make plenty of money, and I think they should
| provide school supplies to their students out of their own
| pocket instead of making hard-working parents pay for them."
|
| It was a message _designed_ to get people to yell at them,
| and for all of that, it wasn't any of the really hot-button
| stuff around politics, race, or any of the other divisive
| things that drive antagonistic engagement.
|
| Twitter could have (and previously did) reward all sorts of
| other types of engagement, but the shift to rewarding
| divisiveness was just at another level.
| moduspol wrote:
| I just use the "Following" tab (and not the "For you" tab).
| dayvid wrote:
| It's a full PvP server now. Old Social media outrage algos +
| paying people for posts further broke it
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| When I left about a year ago the whole feed was entirely just
| bot slop from verified accounts. It was impossible to tune or
| subscribe your way in to a good feed. I imagine it's so much
| worse now with all the AI generated content.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Only last week is shocking to me. People were saying this about
| twitter for like 10+ years as soon as it was commercialized and
| was no longer just user content.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| I follow a couple of writers on X through Nitter on a desktop
| browser. These writers inevitably draw bot comments whenever
| they touch on something relevant to some or another powerful
| country's politics. For me, it's easy to verify that these
| commentators (who often have convincing-sounding fake names and
| photos) are bots by simply ctrl-clicking on the commenters'
| usernames and, in the tab that immediately opens, seeing at a
| glance that they post weird single-issue material at an
| unusually sporadic pace, and often in tellingly flawed English.
|
| Do I suspect correctly that in the way most people consume X,
| though the official website or an app, this is not so
| transparent? Whether because opening new views is so slow on a
| phone screen, or because the official interfaces probably
| intersperse content with advertisements and other visual crap?
| I don't think state actors would be so active in trying to
| manipulate discourse if the platform hadn't degraded to a point
| where their activity isn't obvious to most users.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| Why do bots have flawed english? Seems like with LLMs being a
| thing they would not.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| "Bots" is a cover term for both purely automated scripts,
| and for human posters who are using some kind of tools to
| post more efficiently in order to manipulate discourse.
|
| In this case, it's obvious that a lot of Russian state-
| actor employees, for instance, are not passing their
| writing through an LLM, but rather are just quickly
| vomiting out a comment in their imperfect English. Exposes
| of Russian troll factories show that a lot of these
| employees are young university-educated people who only
| want the money, and don't have strong feelings for the
| propaganda they are posting, so they half-arse it.
| riffraff wrote:
| They're not necessarily bots in the sense of automated
| accounts but the older troll farms with a bunch of people
| just clicking away.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| I mean his personal lack of ethics, bigotries, greed, and
| ignorance is what directly made twitter what it is today. Maybe
| you should dislike him and hold him in low opinion.
| perlgeek wrote:
| If you link to a page with ads on it, will that webview load
| count as an ad impression?
| -_- wrote:
| I've also noticed recently that when I click a Twitter link from
| Telegram, it hijacks the Telegram webview to open the tweet in
| Safari.
| Quitschquat wrote:
| I don't know what everyone gets out of Twitter/X. I signed up
| recently to see what the fuss is about,
|
| I think I selected science and music as starting interests.
| Within 10 minutes I was getting lots of right wing borderline
| Nazi bullshit.
|
| Tries it all again in incognito mode. Roughly same thing. WTF
| jandrese wrote:
| First rule of Twitter is avoid the algorithm at all costs. The
| trolls have long since figured it out and now if the algorithm
| is involved you are going to see white supremacist talking
| points nonstop.
|
| Second rule of Twitter is why are you on Twitter, it's a full
| on Nazi bar now.
|
| The "following" feed that mostly shows you content from people
| you have explicitly followed is better, although the site
| really likes to swap back to the algorithmic "for you" feed
| whenever you aren't paying attention. However, even the
| following feed will still have the troll responses on most
| posts. You really can't avoid them on Twitter.
| Quitschquat wrote:
| > Second rule of Twitter is why are you on Twitter,
|
| It was a short affair.
|
| No longer on Twitter. I can't see how anyone would want to
| be. It's a veritable cesspool.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| seamless data harvesting hidden behind a feature, more cached
| urls for training data
| dilap wrote:
| Huge fan of X, but it's pissing in the face of your fans to tell
| such obvious lies.
| driverdan wrote:
| > Huge fan of X
|
| Why? It's a cesspool of hate. Even if you try to avoid the
| political nonsense Elon forces himself and his cronies into
| your recommendations.
| dilap wrote:
| X has everything, and you can pick what you follow (there's a
| "For You" tab, but also a strictly chronological following
| tab). I like it for variety of political views (e.g. super-
| lefty @caitoz, super-righty @L0m3z), following interesting
| LLM stuff (@elder_plinius is a great follow), lots of devs
| (e.g. carmack...), art accounts (@yumenohajime, @neurocolor),
| nutrition/health stuff, so much good stuff!
|
| (The FYP, alas, sucks, and has since forever...)
| programable wrote:
| But Elon Musk is a Nazi who goes around doing Hitler
| salutes. By using X you are implicitly endorsing and
| supporting this.
| SilentM68 wrote:
| X is an authoritarian platform designed for freedomless speech.
|
| People, including myself, were booted out for giving opinions
| that did not align with their corrupt values. Even post-Elon,
| after appealing decision, some of us still haven't been let back
| in.
| jandrese wrote:
| Which opinions were those again?
| rc_kas wrote:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/x-purges-prominent-
| journalis...
| benlivengood wrote:
| This reinforces why I never use the social media apps and only
| the web versions. Very few apps avoid the invasive engagement-
| maximization that browsers make a bit more difficult.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| They're also doing something very scammy with ads - if you are
| scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour on iOS so that
| if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a click and opens it,
| whereas it's much less sensitive on ordinary posts and behaves
| like any other app. This is clearly to increase click-through
| artificially.
| doawoo wrote:
| The Tumblr app does this and it's infuriating
| lossolo wrote:
| I noticed that too, it's so annoying.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Ads and "scammy" tactics were always like bread and butter. The
| whole point of industry is to just increase the numbers using
| whatever means possible except for what the industry deems
| unquestionably unacceptable, after all. So, naturally, there's
| this incentive of making the paid-for action as low effort as
| tolerable (preferably under the guise of "improvement" to
| prolong the status quo) and make money while that window of
| opportunity is still open. Sad but true.
|
| As long as pay-per-click exists it'll always be like that.
| Minimally necessary action will be probed, negative feedback
| ("won't buy this on principle/will bug others to raise
| awareness on ethical concerns") eventually making the industry
| raise the bar higher.
|
| Beats outright malware (auto-installing IE toolbars, yay!) and
| popup/popunders on a click anywhere eras of the past, but
| despite any possible illusions, the bar isn't particularly high
| still (modern web is still nauseously popup-ridden), when
| viewed through the modern first-world optics.
|
| Not that I like anything about this - just an observation.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > if you are scrolling on mobile, they've changed the behaviour
| on iOS so that if you touch the ad at all, it considers it a
| click and opens it,
|
| They did it for Android, too. Just the other day, I tried to
| view replies for an ad, and thought I'd accidentally clicked
| the ad multiple times before realizing that the replies
| indicator and even the timestamp (which is the normal "just go
| to the tweet" valve) were behaving the same as an ad click.
|
| Edit: Re-reading your comment, not sure if that was exactly
| what you meant, or if you just meant that it'll e.g. open the
| ad if you try to scroll on it.
| thm wrote:
| Day One Twitter user; built the very first API app and the first
| Android client. Launching a "competitor" next month - Keep an eye
| on https://flipso.com
| crnkofe wrote:
| I stopped using Twitter somewhere around the time of Musk
| takeover. Only used it for event coverage live during events for
| which I found it genuinely useful at some point and of course
| doomscrolling. Can't say I miss it. Its like nothing changed in
| my life. I also managed to miss the LGBT exodus after Musk policy
| changes and learned about it later at a random FOSDEM talk.
| Global "social" feeds do everything in their power to steal
| attention and having it all back is great for sanity.
| tmaly wrote:
| A lot of teachers also stopped using it around the same time.
| This was unfortunate as it was an amazing source for project
| ideas for students.
| porygonz wrote:
| The new behavior is much better from a user perspective. When you
| tap on a post, it'll start loading the link in the background so
| once you are done reading the post the link will load immediately
| and the post will shelve on the bottom of the screen. It is very
| fluid, especially with blog posts / news articles.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| deleted my account a few weeks ago and it actually feels like my
| health has improved because i'm no longer constantly bombarded
| with ragebait and doomerism
|
| i hope they keep ruining the experience of using it some more
| tmaly wrote:
| Reddit does something similar in some way but not like this.
|
| I often save links to posts from Reddit in my Obsidian note app.
| Just copying the link marks it that you shared the link and
| artificially increases stats in that manner.
| ronaldsvilcins wrote:
| whaaat a surprise....
| millzlane wrote:
| The only way to win is to not play.
| qwm wrote:
| That explains the extra traffic I've been getting from Twitter.
| joeyoungblood wrote:
| Wait, so it's all just pre-loading traffic? Ugh.
| reddalo wrote:
| Mobile users with data caps must be super happy.
| joeyoungblood wrote:
| Wait, so it's all just pre-loading traffic? Ugh. Why would they
| do this? Speed? Confusion? Both?
| throitallaway wrote:
| The UI/UX of Twitter has always been a dumpster fire. The non-
| sequential view that you get when accessing a page when not
| logged in is horrible.
| orsenthil wrote:
| How does displaying the webview increase the traffic? Is it
| because when you scroll through the site, even if you have not
| openeded the link, it gets opened in the background and counts a
| visit?
| carlosdp wrote:
| What evidence do you have that the webview "opens in the
| background"? I just tried it, and it definitely isn't preloaded
| when I click a link...
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