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Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

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351–360 of 577 posts

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#351

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.

I just use the "Following" tab (and not the "For you" tab).

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#352

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

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 swa…

> 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.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#353
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly curious what Elon would need to do for you to dislike him. That ship sailed for me long ago

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)

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...

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.)

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#355
post #165
post #154

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. No…

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.

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.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#356
post #170
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who is using Bluesky in the US? Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?

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.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#357
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.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#358
post #260

Huge fan of X, but it's pissing in the face of your fans to tell such obvious lies.

> 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.

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...)

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#359
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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,…

But Elon Musk is a Nazi who goes around doing Hitler salutes. By using X you are implicitly endorsing and supporting this.

Re: Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer the X now. Unlimited stream of unhinged, unfiltered thought stream from strangers straight into my feed.

Is this … sarcasm?

Maybe GP genuinely enjoys madness.
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