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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

#501
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?

bluesky is mostly populated by fringe elements and that's putting it nicely

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

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Checking in - it's not possible to disable from the app anymore, is it? The preference setting is still there, but ignored, afaict.

That's right. Several times they sneakily reverted my preference, and I reset it. The most recent time I went to do that again and learned it's no longer possible.

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

#503
post #494

Banning PG was a mistake [0] > [George Hotz] I'm upset when I see PG get banned for mentioning mastodon > [Elon] yeah, that was a mistake [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=42m14s Meta note: it's worth listening to this historical 'space' in full (well, the first ~1h while Elon's on). The meta-pattern becomes obvious: people (esp nay-sayers) are outraged about ~20 different issues, X since addressed mo…

counter point: x active usage is down. the “ragey mob” were engaged users who have since left, along with the user growth and MAU.

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

#504
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This gimped viewer in the browser is not what I want. The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira. I agree website viewers are pointless. But most of the time I actually like the browser viewer better, if it opens links directly, than offline viewers. Because I regard PDFs as websites (similar to jpeg files), and I normally don't…

>The previous comment was not talking about the browser viewer, it was talking about various website viewers, like the one by Jira.

Which tend to be, imo, even worse! I think I'd rather have a toner container explode on me than try to suffer through the experience of using Aconex's PDF utility ever again.

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

#505

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 lo…

> just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any)

What if those errors are trying to tell you to install one?

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

#506

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.

Instagram does that too, I never accidentally like any post when scrolling, but I accidentally like ads every day.

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

#507
post #503
post #494

Banning PG was a mistake [0] > [George Hotz] I'm upset when I see PG get banned for mentioning mastodon > [Elon] yeah, that was a mistake [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=42m14s Meta note: it's worth listening to this historical 'space' in full (well, the first ~1h while Elon's on). The meta-pattern becomes obvious: people (esp nay-sayers) are outraged about ~20 different issues, X since addressed mo…

counter point: x active usage is down. the “ragey mob” were engaged users who have since left, along with the user growth and MAU.

Depending on the metric (e.g. MAU, DAU, web impressions etc) X is generally down about 3-20% since Elon's takeover. Seems fair to say X is a 'break even' investment at best.

It will be extremely interesting to re-visit this thread in 10 years. X is currently a gateway for promoting Grok (with 11-figure DAU potential), and X is acquiring financial licences in US states, with a view to becoming an 'everything app' (something which the East seems to have - in the forms of wechat, Grab - but the West weirdly doesn't). If X can be the West's first 'everything app'.. trillion+ dollar valuation isn't out of the question.

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

#510

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 accoun…

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 t…

I think the assumption is that without emotions there is no agression or evil intent
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