151–160 of 181 posts
Meta: when I hear people talking about "X" I (still?) think they are referring to X11. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
and yes, I know it has its problems, but it is still a fine platform for many things and many people!
This is, excuse my French, either incredibly fucking stupid or extremely disingenuous. I'm not going to go over every case of censorship under previous management, but it was all astoundingly evident: there was an aberrant woke bias whereby they strongly silenced everything even just a tad unaligned with that reality-denying, pseudomoralistic, corporativist ideology that the powers that be has so brutally taken advantage of.
If I quit X (I did), it wasn't because it turned into an echo chamber--on the contrary, it stopped being one, as it is now pretty balanced, according to data on it. It was rather because its fundamental design was already focused on compulsive, mindless consumption of junk, and now it's that, but increased manyfold, exactly the same as the abhorrent characteristics that make it more of a walled-garden. I cannot use it just on principle. To my mind, the web should be open and discovery of content should respect intentional and sovereign behavior, not promote addiction and lack of mental hygiene.
The underlying issue is that the structure of these services is short form and uni-directional. It's the internet's megaphone. This is great celebrities and media outlets, because it acts more as a megaphone than as a discussion forum. However, it is also great for low-information, bumper-sticker politics. The limited text entry deliberately disincentivizes nuance, thus will not be conducive to good-faith disagreement, and instead forces participants into a team sports style of arguing.
Perhaps there is a local minima where each political paradigm ends up on a different system, but social networks are natural monopolies, especially when they take the form of a megaphone. Thus, they should always try to reorganize themselves into a single provider, leading to the exact same conflict-prone environment that was created on Twitter. That Bluesky now feels peasant now is exactly that the user base is a self-selected group, as one of the platforms becomes dominant again, one can only assume the conflict-prone structure of the service will again assert itself.
For now, I'll stay on Reddit. Admittedly imperfect, but it's a place where nuance can and does show up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
X is already a far right echo chamber, if you create a new account and navigate to the "for you" page, all you see is Elon Musk, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate and other far right "role models". It's unfortunate that X still retains a greater reach than its alternatives, but that can change in the medium term.
Then just don't navigate to For You. I wish I could just see my friends on Facebook (those are the people I care about), but I can't turn off crappy suggestions. With X I can control my own feed by using the followers tab.
There was a part of the suggestions that I liked! The algorithm was working for me!
Now it’s 100% pure toxic outrage bait.
Anecdotal, but so many people in my circles have jumped ship to Bluesky that the transition is pretty seamless at this point. It feels more like Twitter than what became of Twitter does.
Curious :why Bluesky and not Mastodon? I would have thought that decentralization would be a better safeguard against Bluesky becoming Twitter after being successful... Honest question: I left Twitter so long ago (I guess that I never got it) and am not really using Mastodon... so I think that I'm not the right people
Anecdotal, but so many people in my circles have jumped ship to Bluesky that the transition is pretty seamless at this point. It feels more like Twitter than what became of Twitter does.
Curious: what happens when Bluesky has all the same people/posts as Twitter? Will it be any better? Or will it just be the same thing on a new website?
I moved over from Twitter to Bluesky with the big wave (I've been using it since mid-2023 however). It's everything I've wanted from the community to the engagement. What's more, I'm not punished for linking to my blog! Everything I could have asked for. My profile in case you want to follow: https://bsky.app/profile/xeiaso.net
[flagged]
If it were just one comment, I'd post a warning instead, but your comment history is replete with ideological battle and personal attacks. Not cool. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
X is already a far right echo chamber, if you create a new account and navigate to the "for you" page, all you see is Elon Musk, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate and other far right "role models". It's unfortunate that X still retains a greater reach than its alternatives, but that can change in the medium term.
Then just don't navigate to For You. I wish I could just see my friends on Facebook (those are the people I care about), but I can't turn off crappy suggestions. With X I can control my own feed by using the followers tab.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I chuckle at the argument that you're entering an echo chamber when you leave X. News flash: X is already an echo chamber! Maybe the "oh no don't leave for an echo chamber!" assertion is a case of people remembering the pre-X version of twitter, and comparing competitors to that - rather than what X is today. Or maybe it's a case of "boiling a frog," where people on X are actually unaware of what it has become. Or ma…
> Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber. I won't pretend to speak to the motivations of any HN users, but I've seen some of these conversations play out where someone invokes the concept of an echo chamber only when it means LGBTQIA+ people can just exist without being harassed . That's an undesirable outcome to those folks. I would like to think HN is bette…