Sir, you are controlling the buttons you push. I.e. it's up to you who you follow and what exactly you read on Twitter - just like any other social network.
There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine). There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
> it's up to you who you follow and what exactly you read on Twitter
The Twitter experience is a highly algorithmic feed where tweets from the people you follow are not guaranteed to be in chronological order, or even shown to you at all. The default experience also mixes it other tweets "you might be interested in", that is, things they want you to see.
There's also the fact people could freely see tweets and follow discussion threads, that's now locked behind an account requirement.
A half of Twitter's point for me was the trending section, that you don't have any control on now (you used to be able to disable the personalization of that section but since X you cannot, if you want the actual trends you need to go in a subsection). The whole section is full personalized ragebaits (because at some point I used to reply to those), now it just makes the experience of trends quite unbearable and I can't change that.
Even if you tried to ignore ragebait the X algorithm is going to prioritize them because it is highly tuned to promote high engagement content. Any given feed is going to have white supremacy, flat Earth, climate change denial, immigrant hate, vaccine harms, and of course Elon shilling for his AI products.
I get news from Ukraine just in a good enough pace from various bloggers etc on youtube. Then there is telegram, thats arguably even a better source for the "this just happened on the front lines" news (ofc without any sources, just like twitter).
Bottom line is you DONT need twitter if your only want is "i want rumours called news the minute something happens"
A number of decent news accounts cross post on Twitter. I wish they would pick a platform other than Telegram or Twitter but it is what it is.
A lot of non-Western accounts were recently demonetized so maybe they will move elsewhere. Although the best ones don’t seem to be doing it for money, they usually have some personal grudge.
Sir, you are voluntarily using a website owned by an unstable Nazi, who purchased it because his feelings were hurt and people were making fun of him there. Now his brain droppings make it into everyone’s feed by default, from what I understand.
> There are news that are circulating much faster on Twitter than anywhere else (for example about war in Ukraine).
I am certain that Twitter is not the only place where you can find these updates, if you really care for up-to-the-minute news. But I don’t.
> There are people and companies that post only on Twitter and nowhere else (especially in tech).
These people and companies are (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting a Nazi billionaire and they are not worth paying any attention to until they change their behavior.
Default Reddit mainpage is strictly what you subscribe to. And from a tech point of view, Reddit has old. CSS, it has tree style comments with sorting and collapsing, it has no dumb character limits, and on big screens it properly fills the screen with content instead of dumb emptiness or fluff or just infogarbage (do people remember that hashtags are literally just a useless character dumps, born out of the limitations of the SMS tech).
So no, Reddit is not worse than Xitter both on social and tech merit.
Option A: You occasionally encounter power tripping mods on a site where you are free to create your own community and become the mod yourself.
Option B: a power tripping drug-addled Nazi billionaire owns the entire site and can change the site behavior for every user on a whim, with no recourse.
An echo chamber isn’t inherently bad, and moderation is required to maintain any semblance of a well functioning online community.
Reddit can be good if you stay in your niche and off the default subs. Twitter is good if you similarly curate your experience and don’t let it push you into garbage.
> Twitter is good if you similarly curate your experience and don’t let it push you into garbage.
I want to follow the guy who tracked Elon's jet and documented its fuel usage and CO2 emissions. Oops, can't make that part of my "curated experience" on Twitter. So much for free speech absolutism.
The point is that when you're subject to the whims of an irrational asshole, you can't have any assurance that your curated experience will stay consistent. For this reason alone, Twitter is worse than Reddit.
Are you anti-drugs? Do you think drug users are bad people or using drugs is condemnable? I'm asking because anti-fascists are typically pro-drugs. So I'm confused.
I don't see any qualification on parent post, only saying Musk is bad because he's using drugs.
But you are right, so you agree that frequent drug users should not be offered jobs with responsibilities because for example they might drug and drive.
No, no one is a bad person only because they use drugs.
> or using drugs is condemnable
As a general statement, no.
But my answer is yes, your actions are condemnable, if you decide to let drugs affect your mental state in any way as you’re making important decisions that affect other people.
For example, if you’re making safety decisions for a vehicle that’s being manufactured. Or if you are making pretty much any decision at all for a company that you run which makes medical devices that are implanted in people's bodies. Or if you’re deciding to gut a government program that is responsible for feeding or medicating thousands of people (meaning that your decisions can directly lead to thousands of deaths).
Do you think an emotionally inept billionare Nazi with a drug problem should have been in charge of deciding whether poor people from other countries (who are often non-white) continue to receive life-saving aid? Do you think if that person makes the decision to cut that aid, killing those people, it's appropriate for him to brag about it publicly using the term "wood chipper" as a metaphor?
Everybody who's not totally limited in their mindsets. Twitter/X is uncensored. I think open minds who are hungry for the raw, real truth prefer such platform, rather than one that's regulated by one political party of one particular country.
If X is so open, why do I have to register an account to see practically anything? Why are they banning mirrors? If an open source project banned mirroring, there'd be an outrage.
Why did Elon ban PaulG and many for posting a link to Mastodon?
Why did so many get suspended for sharing the location of Elon's private jet?
It doesn't become more true if you claim that multiple times around here. X under Musk is well documented to censor widely. It's just that the direction of censorship has shifted under him, so your particular bubble might get more left alone now.
> hungry for the raw, real truth
Haha sure. Why not go to the original where Tweets are actually literally called Truths?
There’s likely some information on there that some people must want to share if services like Xcancel and Nitter exist and allow you to share it without being on X itself.
If someone thinks Twitter is an echo chamber to the extent they can’t fathom how people tolerate it (and it isn’t just an appeal for easy upvotes), but they happily post on HN, they’ll be able to clear up their initial confusion with a bit of self reflection.
General sentiment might be this, but every social network (even Instagram and Facebook) can be good and productive if you change how you use them.
If you follow specific profiles/channels/pages and just read the feeds from them as if they were news, you are removing the toxic part (mostly infinite scrolling) and getting a resourceful feature.
If for some reason someone you need to follow is on X (twitter) only, you have to choose between losing a source or compromise with the platform.
I personally belong to the former group (and possibly you do, too), leaving behind sources, but not everyone likes it that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The platform compromise is a new thing. One of the reasons people used Twitter was its open nature, enabling its use as a bulletin board where anyone could post a message and being sure that the message link was free for anyone to see. This isn't the case anymore, as X forces people to make accounts to see messages.
Allowing more voices on the platform might've made it more toxic (who knows - you're not the judge of toxic) but at least we have left- and right-wing toxicity, instead of only left-wing. And we get a lot of additional non-toxic voices, which was the actual point.
> Allowing more voices on the platform might've made it more toxic (who knows - you're not the judge of toxic)
Allowing the nazi voices definitely did. And while that dude isn't the judge of what is toxic, a majority of people are.
I don't know what you personally want to call it when someone posts condolences about a tragedy or massacre killing many people in their home country, and the nazis pop up to reply "you're next, [racial slur omitted]". Pretty sure most people would call that toxic, so it's toxic, even if a small minority of people disagree.
Abdul Ballout drove a car into CSD-goers in Berlin on 25.7. Were affected parties able to discuss better on Twitter or Bluesky? As philipallstar wrote, in a chamber of only left-wing voices, the discussion is not better.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't use BlueSky, are there often people there threatening racially-based killings, with the reporters getting banned? That is the worst for sure.
Seems like a tangent either way: letting violent right-wing nazis do violent right-wing nazi things on twitter has definitely made it worse and more toxic than not letting violent right-wing nazis do violent right-wing nazi things on twitter.
Indeed, death threats are worse than whatever censorship one claims happened on twitter pre-elmu, because free speech is predicated upon appropriately responding to death threats. Otherwise, speech can be censored with violence, and on twitter, it is now (along with elmu and friends censoring accounts they don't like by banning them).
We were discussing right-wing death threats on X, and you tried to distract by bringing up something else, somewhere else.
You are free to continue condoning nazi death threats towards minorities on twitter since elmu started allowing it, but it has nonetheless made twitter worse and more toxic. Whatever you personally think about whatever drama on whatever other social network is irrelevant to that.
I am a minority. My point is relevant. You've misrepresented Twitter and people who use it. I don't use Twitter. It's not a crime to want to discuss things openly.
You and I being minorities is not relevant to whether the elmu-condoned nazi death threats on twitter have made it more or less toxic than it was before.
What some other random social media site did or does is not relevant to whether the elmu-condoned nazi death threats on twitter have made it more or less toxic than it was before.
Do you personally believe that nazi death threats are toxic? You can be honest.
It's ok to think it differently and have different opinions.
You just happen to value censorship more than free speech.
This is ok, don't feel sorry, but try also to understand that other people might value different things.
If you think a post is so bad to be illegal you have means to deal with that outside the platform.
Just remember that on internet you will find everyone, from 12 years old kids, to older people coming from different cultures, or more simply, trolls...
You have your opinions, but that doesn't mean they are objectively correct.
Also, if you are offended, doesn't mean you are right.
