Quick Google search shows engagement is down. This post references registrations not engagement. I wonder how much this guy believes what he’s saying. The flipping robots underneath this post which have nothing to do with his message demonstrates to me the ridiculousness of X, that is a reminder of the cess pit that these social media platforms have become. Not to mention the crypto scams, sensationalised untrue “new…
At least X has Community Notes. It's not present on reddit, substack, HN, etc. Easy to spread misinformation on reddit/substack while hardly anyone reads the correction.
I guess he decided he had ruined the platform enough. Before he joined X had already implemented the login wall stuff that only let you view a single post, by the time he left it would show a tapping animation trying to beg you to install the app, open the App Store immediately if you interacted with anything, and put up a bunch of popovers. I hope that his changes increased engagement in the way he had hoped.
People love hating on x and nikita but both the app & web experience have improved dramatically over the last year+. He's done a great job in a year and there seems to be even more internal stuff he's improved that we haven't seen.
I don't know how you wrote that with a straight face. The site is really bad now. Every time I log in I get a full screen upsell ad, most of the features don't work, people get banned at random (big scary "permanent ban, no recovery" then a silent restoration afterwards), there's CSAM all over the platform, and moderation of legitimate bad posts goes ignored. Remind me again how anyone over there is doing a great job…
I've been on the platform for 15 years, I use it for hours everyday and have never once seen CSAM. Idk what type of people you are following or looking up but I dont think your statement is true for many users (if any)
Setting aside any feelings about Musk, ad quality, or even product direction choices like locking down public access... I'm not sure I agree. My experience of Twitter was that the web app was reasonable and reliable. That reliability seems to me to have been collateral in the transition, a bunch of things broke, famously 2FA for a while, a few redirects broke in the domain switch, the public access lockdown also pres…
The new automatic translation is something that I would like to see all communities adopt. You can now follow folks who speak any language and each of you interact using your native language with no friction, just a tiny note of what language each message was translated from.
The translation feature was always there, they just made it so you don't have to press a button to translate a post. Which I guess is nice, but it's like a minor client-side setting. On the other hand, they switched from Google Translate to Grok, which means that now you can't even really trust the translation because, even ignoring the inherent imprecision of an automatic translation tool, Grok is subject to hallucinations has been caught making up posts wholesale.
In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election because they noticed they speak in a void (journalists don't care about Bluesky) and also they all blocked each other in the purity battle. They still hate Musk though. Personally I think they all suck for different reasons.
> In France the left is slowly coming back to X ahead of the presidential election Do you have a citation on that?
Twitter is indeed the greatest communication techonlogy if you do not count the telegraph, the telephone, the television, radio, almost every single aspect of the internet, etc. It beats shouting from your window in reach and carrier pigeons in needing less birdfeed, though.
> the telegraph, the telephone, the television None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions. Seriously: x disintermediates and offers distribution in a way no other communication tech does. Granted you can always post a blog or whatever, but X's ambition to be the "town square" is a valid one and it does achieve it in notable ways, even if there's still 100 years worth of improvement nee…
> None of those let a random person Hawk Tuah their way to reaching millions.
Uh neither did "X"... She originally went viral on Tik Tok [0], and then built a following on Youtube and later in podcaster circles. As near as I can tell, she doesn't even have a twitter account. So it's pretty weird to credit Twitter with building her career.
In fact, I really can't think of anyone who originally went viral just from twitter. Lots of famous people have used twitter as a microblogging platform after gaining notoriety but by itself I wouldn't say it drives much popularity amongst the larger internet.
if someone shares me a link to x.com, it is literally faster for me to edit the URL to xcancel, even on my phone which makes this awkward, and load that, than to wait for the original URL to load. xcancel does not have a login barrier, nor all the popup messages.
Of all the many ways to automate that redirect, https://einaregilsson.com/redirector/ isn't bad. Redirect: https://x.com/* to: https://xcancel.com/$1 and Redirect: https://twitter.com/* to: https://xcancel.com/$1 ( also reddit to old.reddit, various cdn image servers to deliver hi-res versions, etc )
The web experience has improved? You can’t even view a thread any more without being logged in or using a 3rd party site. They’ve actively made the web experience unusable for most people. But considering they’ve also drastically reduced the quality of content on the platform, one could say they’ve done casual users a favor.
Funny enough, one of the first thing Elon's team did after buying Twitter was remove login gating. There was a big bottom signup CTA on the old Twitter. Then at some point I guess they realized why the old Twitter team did that in the first place (financial pressure for targeted ads) and went harder in that direction to also push for subscriptions. I still disagree with it, since it's a poor first experience. Replyin…
I was hardly a heavy twitter user before acquisition but I recall generally being able to read threads and reply chains without logging in.
I’m not sure exactly when that changed, but it completely destroyed what little use the platform had left to me.