Over at New York, John Herrman voices a common complaint: Twitter used to be a decent place to get news about breaking events but it's now just a cesspool.
If, yesterday, you found yourself in the path of Hurricane Milton or were concerned about friends or family in Florida, you might have logged on, out of habit, to see what was happening. You would have encountered something worse than useless. On a functional level, the app is now centered on the algorithmic “For You” page, a sloshing pool of engagement chum in which a Category 5 hurricane gathering power in the Gulf is left to compete with videos of car crashes, posts from Elon Musk–adjacent right-wing maniacs, and a dash of whatever poorly targeted interest-based bait the platform thinks you might engage with, all collected from the past couple weeks.
Genuine question here: If you care at all about what you see on Twitter, why would you ever use the "For You" feed? Of course it's garbage. But no one with a room temperature IQ should ever go near it.
And yet I hear endless complaints about the "For You" feed even though Twitter is by no means "centered" on it. If you simply curate who you follow normally and then use the "Following" feed, Twitter will be fine. And if you want breaking news, hashtags and trending feeds still seem to work OK.
Of course, this assumes that Elon doesn't do away with the "Following" feed someday. I wouldn't put it past him. But he hasn't done it yet.
BY THE WAY: Elon has reportedly lost upwards of $30 billion on his acquisition of Twitter. Given that he now uses it primarily as a forced firehose of support for Donald Trump, should this be considered the biggest campaign contribution in the history of the world?
Exactly! Never use anything except the Following feed, and block liberally when you encounter idiots in the comments. No other social media service has even 10% of the real news and information. Of course Musk could wreck Following tomorrow...
The "Control Panel for Twitter" add-on for firefox makes Twitter behave the way it ought to. You see just the people you follow, plus their retweets. I used it for a couple of years, and was delighted by it.
However, even with that in place, the actual shit that was going down on Twitter was still in my view of the world, so I cancelled my account about 4 months ago. I don't feel that I'm missing anything at all.
Unfortunately for me, Twitter is the only place to get reliable updates from my local government, representatives, and media, And I have to be logged in to see any of it - because if I'm not, even looking at those accounts won't show me anything up to date.
So when I need to know about weather or evacuations or road closures, well...
If I recall, Musk made it such that his tweets got through no matter what. And he's now saying that blocking someone will no longer prevent blocked people from reading your tweets. There's an eventuality where Musk introduces an exclusive -- re extremely expensive -- paid service where tweets get into your feed even when you block someone.
So, follow-up genuine question: If you know that ads help defray Musk's losses and Musk promised over a hundred million to support Trump, if you're still on Birdside, aren't you indirectly contributing political money to Trump?
I have never seen a Musk tweet in my "Following" feed unless someone else has retweeted it to mock his stupidity.
Blocking the key words 'elon' and 'musk' still works, though.
i don't use twitter and i don't buy teslas
+10
+1
I saw a Tesla the other day. It was absolutely covered with dust and debris. I have rarely seen a car that needed a visit to the car wash more. So, I was wondering, does leaving it that dirty and driving it around somehow violate the guy's purchase agreement? I can easily imagine Elon trying to re-possess the car because the guy doesn't keep it clean enough.
Not just an Elmo-image issue here! As I understand it, Teslas depend completely and solely on visible-spectrum cameras for all safety and driver-assist functions. This means driving around covered in shmutz like that is profoundly stupid and dangerous. And probably voids any company warrantees about effectiveness, if the lawyers have been awake.
I terminated both Twitter and Facebook in the late summer of 2016 and never looked back. I use IG to share pictures with family and friends and recently signed up for Threads. I've found Threads to be what twitter was back 10 years ago and is the only social media platform where I actually engage in conversations
yup. dropped it as soon as his purchase was completed and never miss it.
The reason one would choose to look at " for you" instead of the timelines one follows, is that a large disaster or other public event the tweets you want to see are going to be those from people you don't follow, for almost all people. I mean, most the people I would follow would be either deeply technical or strongly political as Democrats. But in a natural disaster I want to see peopleWho are tweeting about the disaster it's a different kind of interest area than the interest area I normally follow. It used to beThe Twitter algorithm would suggest tweets For me to see Based uponThe popularity of those tweetsPerhaps to people like meOr perhaps just generally popular. But musk has broken all that,And now he's basically showing people tweets because he Wants us to see them.
Exactly.
Twitter repeatedly shifts the focus from following to 'for you' and tries to pollute following with replies and features from 'for you'.
And if you search for a news event, the amount of crap goes up and down, but at least the influence farming accounts have to be cleverer but the amount of stolen and misleading and just wrongly timed content is up.
The new method of putting the paid account replies first also encourages trolls to pay to use the site.
Lastly, keywords, marking something to be disinterested in (especially specific ads) no longer works, and most of the advertisers are scams. And the moderating basically doesn't get involved unless it's reported by one of their pet conservative accounts.
Just stop using Twitter, period. Local government and services all have text alerts and email alerts. RSS feeds still exist. Plenty of other social media outlets exist that aren't run by a raving fascist. Any information you get from twitter can be found in other places.
Stop giving it legitimacy, let it rot and become the glorified Truth Social that Elon wants it to be.
+1
The question is not only how good or bad it feels for you. Xitter by now is a tool that Musk uses to mess up public life in the US, and using it helps Musk to do it.
or just hop on once a year or so if there truly is an emergency you need real time updates on. otherwise, yeah, just drop it.
"Given that he now uses it primarily as a forced firehose of support for Donald Trump, should this be considered the biggest campaign contribution in the history of the world?"
I believe that distiction belongs to the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court.
It's debatable whether it's worth the money he paid for it, but Musk now owns one of the world's biggest communication outlets as an advertising agency for his other businesses. In the latest example, he got global publicity for his Starlink network while painting himself as a benevolent philanthropist who was willing to stand up to a bungling federal bureaucacy. I imagine that will do Starlink's reputation more good in the long run than any amount of conventional advertising, when all he in fact seems to have done is make the kind of "sign up and get your first month free" offer that's commonplace in the subscription business.
If you care at all about what you see on Twitter, why would you ever use the "For You" feed? Of course it's garbage. But no one with a room temperature IQ should ever go near it.
I rarely look at the "for you" feed—it is indeed garbage. That said, it certainly appears to my eyes like Musk is putting his thumbs on the scales of what pops up in my "normal" feed in favor of pro-Trump propaganda. Every time I use the site it seems I have to actively block/mute bread dead MAGA accounts and actively "like" non-MAGA tweets to reset the algorithm.
May I suggest a remedy? Don't use X. Read and comment on blogs like this one (jabberwocking.com). There are a lot of them. Look at the "blogrolls" of the blogs you read for hints about what other blogs might be of interest to you. And start your own blog. You can write anything you want, at any length you want. And you can design it to look the way you like. You won't have a potential audience of millions but your readers will be genuinely engaged with you (Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong here), and everybody knows those who read and write blogs are smarter and sexier than X users.
Just a thought.
I don't think he bought it to help Trump. I think he heard himself describe himself as the greatest genius in history and started to believe it. He got irritated by bots and decided that he alone could fix it. Then he realized he way overpaid and tried to get out of it, but he signed a contract. So he turned it into an Elon Musk Admiration Society and realized he could get all the praise in the world by becoming a right wing bigot, something he was well practiced at since he was 25 already when apartheid ended.
In short, he's a narcissist completely ruled by his id and dumb as a bag of hammers.
I've been trying to shift my attention to Bluesky but it somehow just isn't there. There's a few people, who are ok, who fill it up with endlessly third banana remarks about oh my god who cares and crowd out everything else.
Nothing yet gets close to Twitter for the sense of immediacy.
It's really bad. Basically just a porn site with other content.
Elon Musk’s X now officially allows NSFW content on the social network formerly known as Twitter — with some restrictions.
In a recent update to its official usage policies, X says, “You may share consensually produced and distributed adult nudity or sexual behavior, provided it’s properly labeled and not prominently displayed.”
The company estimated 13% of all posts on the platform contained adult content.
I wanted to send around this evening some of Mr Obama's Pittsburgh speech, and X was good for this purpose. I don't often use X, but since this was being sent into the Bible belt South...X was effective for this purpose. See Here:
https://x.com/theTortmaster/status/1844533716464320576
Also, since I was there, I also took the time to tell several people on different tweets that they were Un-American P o S's, for this or that that they were posting.
This was fun...I don't get to say stuff like this here...lol. Traveller
The following feed is less useful because many of the more informative accounts (including some bots) no longer tweet. Also the search function doesn't work reliably. Also, Twitter on the app is so bogged down with insane ads it's no longer useable. Used to be a great way to follow breaking news or watch sports. Now, not so much.
Elon has some algorithm that somehow fails to show tweets from many of the people/entities I follow, requiring me to periodically scroll through my list of follows and click through to see what they've been posting and I've been missing. Very frustrating.