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

#441

Post by michaelbuckbee »

bko wrote: post #328
itsoktocry wrote: post #205

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.

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/.

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.

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

#442

Post by [deleted] »

drysine wrote: post #422
metabagel wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#443

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #439
sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."…

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.

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.

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

#444

Post by degamad »

edent wrote: post #107
nomdep wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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?

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

#445

Post by mrguyorama »

boringg wrote: post #71
robinhood wrote: post #66

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.

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.

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

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.

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

#446

Post by csallen »

djeastm wrote: post #408
csallen wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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?

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.

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

#447

Post by afavour »

csallen wrote: post #398
toyg wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

“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.

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

#448

Post by afavour »

degamad wrote: post #444
edent wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-N…

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.

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

#450

Post by drdaeman »

noodlesUK wrote: post #301

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.

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.

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