X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled • Hacker News Board

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#221

Post by Quothling » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 7:07 AM UTC

heraldgeezer wrote: post #154

Quothling wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Twitter will probably remain popular for a long time, especially for people with a more right leaning perspective on the world. That's not really the people I associate with, and it probably needs to be mentioned here that I'm Danish. Which matters because the sort of people who post right leaning stuff here are kind of your crazy uncle on Facebook kind of people. Which means that Danish Twitter is slowly bec…

>especially for people with a more right leaning perspective on the world. Why add this without any source lol? Things like the leftie Palestine protests and the news streamer Hasanabi extensively get news from and use Twitter.

I can give you some Danish source.

(Prominent news paper - paywalled): https://www.information.dk/kultur/leder/2024/01/dommedagspro...

(Prominent news paper - paywalled): https://pro.ing.dk/datatech/artikel/twitters-algoritmer-fors...

(danish national human rights institution - note that it's a NGO that works with our government but isn't an actual government institution): https://menneskeret.dk/lgbt-barometer/diskrimination-had

(Democratic analytical NGO - note that democratic is democracy not a political party): https://www.ogtal.dk/publikationer/ytringsklimaet-for-skeive...

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#222

Post by plonk » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 9:25 AM UTC

jajko wrote: post #206

plonk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'. It's not because of lag time, and it's not because it's different from mainstream, it's due to growing frustration with older media that I slowly developed before I even knew about Twitter and my experience following interesting people on there. It's gotten worse since…

Well, charitable for normal situations IMHO it isn't. Some sort of OCD-ish behavior re info feed. I see it on myself - the less I focus on all crap coming from news, regardless of form or source, and more I focus on my own wellbeing, my close family and friends, the happier I am. There are truly very few news which are seriously relevant to my life, and I suspect its the same for rest of us. Just because there is a b…

Longforms from papers like the Economist actually really interest me, and I look forward to opening them even when my life is pretty happy already. But you need to find non-extreme papers that match your interests and keep reading time under control.

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#223

Post by Anthony-G » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 9:41 AM UTC

talldayo wrote: post #210

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agree but if I have to bet on one or the other I'm not putting my money on the Twitter user. Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources, moreso than conflicted profit-seeking media outlets. In particular, a lot of them are subject matter experts in a particular field, instead of generalists trying to summarize something they don't really understand or put a partisan spin on it. The…

> Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources Some of them are teenagers that pay for a blue "Verified" checkmark with their mom's credit card. Modern Twitter is about as deserving of your trust as an email from a Nigerian prince.

I don’t use Twitter other than – very rarely – following Hacker News links but I still know that being “verified” has no bearing on trustworthiness.

The person you’re responding to comes across as quite media savvy so I’d assume the trustworthy sources they’re referring to are people whose previous posts have a solid track record of being reliable, factual and/or insightful.

Disclaimer: not being on Twitter, I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts – without interference from Twitter’s engagement algorithms. Or if it’s still possible to use third-party software to consume Twitter posts (I used to have an extension that converted Twitter links to Nitter).

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#224

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:10 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #69

phailhaus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's defending X. The point is that it doesn't matter that FF has strict privacy controls if sites can afford to just...not support FF. Its market share will dwindle to zero and privacy will be dead. FWIW it seems like the browser market is shifting away from third party cookies anyways, so I'm not sure this is a huge issue.

yep this is why cracking open ios was a mistake, especially for the android crowd who’d never be caught dead owning an iPhone anyway. there was barely a slope to begin with, you’ve got chrome in a majority and safari in a minority and then Firefox as a rounding error. Obviously if you crush safari, google is just gonna go mask-off full-manifest-v3 and plenty of other sites would be happy to follow. it was obvious fro…

[deleted]

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#225

Post by talldayo » Mon, Jul 22, 2024, 2:13 PM UTC

Anthony-G wrote: post #223

talldayo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources Some of them are teenagers that pay for a blue "Verified" checkmark with their mom's credit card. Modern Twitter is about as deserving of your trust as an email from a Nigerian prince.

I don’t use Twitter other than – very rarely – following Hacker News links but I still know that being “verified” has no bearing on trustworthiness. The person you’re responding to comes across as quite media savvy so I’d assume the trustworthy sources they’re referring to are people whose previous posts have a solid track record of being reliable, factual and/or insightful. Disclaimer: not being on Twitter, I don’t…

> I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts

You should try it, then. Part of the... uh... "appeal" of Twitter is the algorithmic timeline that suggests content from people you've never seen or heard from before in your life.

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#226

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 2:17 AM UTC

manuelmoreale wrote: post #186

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agree but if I have to bet on one or the other I'm not putting my money on the Twitter user. Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources, moreso than conflicted profit-seeking media outlets. In particular, a lot of them are subject matter experts in a particular field, instead of generalists trying to summarize something they don't really understand or put a partisan spin on it. The…

I don’t disagree with your assessment. But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting? I’m not saying there aren’t trustworthy people on Twitter. After all there’s plenty of journalists. But there’s also plenty of shitposters. An…

> But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting?

Eh. When the set "journalists" contains all the people who work for the likes of 24 hour cable news networks and the National Enquirer it's not obvious this is even the case. But the bigger point is that you don't select sources at random from the entire population of Twitter users, you select the ones you've observed have a track record of getting it right.

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#227

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 2:51 AM UTC

eqvinox wrote: post #208

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, the necessary resolution to the paradox is inherently narrow. Suppose you have some fools who assert that their opponents' ideas are too dangerous to be heard and have to be censored. Actually doing this is itself too dangerous to allow because once the censorship is in place it would be used to quash dissent and suppress the truth and people would be punished for challenging the prevailing dogma, even…

I totally agree. The problem is that we don't have such a system, and as a result, the proposition of harm is in itself already a credible threat and therefore harmful. Personally speaking, to reduce that harm, there's not a lot I can do to make these propositions less credible, so I'm left with trying to give these threats less of a platform. I will note that from my perspective it is a logical conclusion that the i…

> The problem is that we don't have such a system, and as a result, the proposition of harm is in itself already a credible threat and therefore harmful.

But we also don't really have an airtight system for censoring people we don't like, and we certainly shouldn't build one.

When you have to make a change from the status quo to get what you want, make the good change, not the ugly hack someone is promptly going to use against you as soon as you turn your back.

> I will note that from my perspective it is a logical conclusion that the insufficient policing and regulation of violence (and tools of violence) in the US in particular is directly detrimental to the expression of free speech.

Eh. "Tools of violence" are largely a red herring. The tool of violence for a lynch mob is rope. The most common tool of violence for acts of terrorism is explosives, which can be made from the stuff in the average garage or kitchen. You don't get there by banning rope or cooking oil, you get there by deterring would-be murderers with the threat of prosecution.

Notice the circumstances under which these things happen. The first is when the government isn't prosecuting the offenders for acts of violence, e.g. the KKK in its heyday. The second is when the offenders are zealots or otherwise mentally ill and thereby undeterrable, e.g. religious terrorism or lone wolf mass murderers. The first, then, is easy; you prosecute them and they're deterred.

The second is extremely difficult to eliminate, because what are you going to do, institute a police state? Try to restrict access to elements necessary for human life because a chemist could make them into a weapon? But it's also rare. It's not the real problem.

The real problems, in terms of fatalities, don't work anything like most people think they do. The large majority of firearms fatalities in the US are suicides and accidents. Then the people who use a partisan frame or think every problem looks like a nail will still argue that you could get somewhere by banning guns, but since that doesn't pass, a realist might want to direct their efforts to things like improving mental health services or subsidizing gun safes.

But then we're into politics. If you subsidize gun safes or similar and that actually reduces the number of kids playing with daddy's guns, you can't run on fixing it anymore. "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#228

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 2:57 AM UTC

talldayo wrote: post #225

Anthony-G wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t use Twitter other than – very rarely – following Hacker News links but I still know that being “verified” has no bearing on trustworthiness. The person you’re responding to comes across as quite media savvy so I’d assume the trustworthy sources they’re referring to are people whose previous posts have a solid track record of being reliable, factual and/or insightful. Disclaimer: not being on Twitter, I don’t…

> I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts You should try it, then. Part of the... uh... "appeal" of Twitter is the algorithmic timeline that suggests content from people you've never seen or heard from before in your life.

There are ways to turn that off if you don't like it.

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#229

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 3:01 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #204

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a service that doesn't suppress some opinions you don't like is not an endorsement of those opinions. Or else you'd better figure out whether it's easier to cancel your home internet after you no longer have a phone number or the other way around so you know which one to cancel first.

What’s your point? How does it relate to my comment?

> GP must make an account and, in their view, endorse those opinions

The view that having an account on a service is an endorsement of every opinion of everyone else who uses the service is baloney.

Re: X.com refuses to open with Firefox strict tracking protection enabled

#230

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jul 23, 2024, 3:28 AM UTC

jimnotgym wrote: post #178

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a service that doesn't suppress some opinions you don't like is not an endorsement of those opinions. Or else you'd better figure out whether it's easier to cancel your home internet after you no longer have a phone number or the other way around so you know which one to cancel first.

Twitter does suppress opinions though. Go on there and criticise Donald Trump or Israeli policy in Gaza and see how quickly you get shadow banned. It probably works for liberal causes too. A few years ago criticising Jeremy Corbyn could get you shadow banned. I think any subject where you get a whole community sharing your heresy with each other and mass reporting you will suffer...except somehow the far right seem t…

Their shadow banning system is and always has been just completely broken. It's probably the single most broken part of the site.

A major problem with it is that the site is organized by user, so if you reply to someone then it's disproportionately their followers who see it. The quickest way to get shadow banned, then, is to try to debate zealots, because by doing it where they congregate they'll mass report you for contradicting their dogma and then you get shadow banned.

It's not about what the dogma is, which is why everybody thinks the site is biased against them. They see reasonable people they agree with getting shadow banned, and yet tons of buttheads don't because they are mostly congregating with people who agree with them and the feed then showing their posts to random people doesn't get them shadow banned because most random people aren't zealots who report non-abusive posts just because they disagree with them. The algorithm is just asinine.