On one hand, this is unfortunate since X always directs me to a login page, and Nitter was the only way I could view whatever gets posted nowadays. On the other hand, the cynical side of me is thankful that I have no more desirable means to see the contents of posts on X.
Edit: a similar thing happened with Reddit and Teddit(?). API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore. I am aware of old.reddit.com, but in the case of Reddit I preferred the alternative frontends not only for no-JS compatibility, but also a (possibly false) sense of privacy
There's a weird world of outrage about twitter ... on twitter by people who keep providing content for twitter. I don't get that.
The further downside being that all the alternatives I've dipped my toes in, the content is pretty much similar to twitter and all the alternatives are offering are various back end type differences, but the same content. So personally I'm not particularly happy with those either.
People are working through their grief, knowing that a utility that is essentially the modern postal service was sold to someone who is essentially the modern Hearst.
But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square” (before someone tries to bring up that terrible analogy too) and really doesn’t deserve people’s grief. It’s yet another corporate-owned and controlled messaging app and we are seeing the inevitable result of that control.
I've found no substitute for getting breaking news on a specific topic (e.g. natural disasters, war, politics, sport). Google News is second best, but the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter.
Zite was my favourite app from many, many years ago. But it was good at collating daily reading, not for up to the minute/second curation.
For certain topics that are time sensitive, I haven't found anything that comes close to twitter.
> the sites it indexes are at the absolute least 20 minutes behind twitter
Genuine question: who cares?
There is almost no news where the difference between getting it now, twenty minutes from now, or tonight makes a meaningful differ to your life. Much of the information in the first twenty minutes of an event will be confusing, misleading, and/or wrong.
E.g., when I saw police helicopter that seemed to be doing a low altitude search pattern about 300 m away, and a TV news helicopter hovering higher up in the same area, I wanted to know if this was something I needed to be concerned about.
A quick search on Twitter and I found a recent tweet about gunfire in a store in that area and a shooter on the loose.
it’s not just big news though, twitter was very useful for hyper local news in cities… to the point that if there were helicopters overhead or some loud noise nearby… usually someone posted about it on twitter - this has been irreplaceable for me, I know less about what’s around me now
Trivial, but salient: sale drops for things like electronics or tickets. The only reason I got Pax East passes in 2014 is because I got a Twitter alert. They were gone 10 minutes later. An email alert showed up a half-hour later. I'm sure people have had similar experiences with more significant events.
True for the most part. But occasionally there's good reason to want to know some information sooner rather than later: outbreaks of war, dangerous/breaking events in your localised area, dangerous weather alerts etc.
Twitter was useful when you didn't know the source. Keyword searches brought you everyone talking about a topic, and trending showed you topics people were talking about (and, by extension, the people talking about them). Not everything that might be significant to you is necessarily going to be discussed within your close networks or covered adequately by media-of-record.
If CNN has decided not to cover the protest happening outside your downtown office and you don't want to go up to a rowdy crowd to figure out what's going on, Twitter would (have) be(en) the place to drum up intel (with which to decide if you need to go home early that day or not).
Twitter was great for reporting on court cases. For example, last year the Biden administration essentially made millions of Americans into felons via an obscure ATF rule change. The rule has since been enjoined by at least three federal courts, which anyone who follows @2aupdates would know about because he crawls the PACER feeds. My local newspaper has been following this story, but as recently as last week reported that the rule was still in effect. I submitted a correction and they fixed it.
Twitter was really good for some things. For example, there was a thread yesterday contrasting public data on fertility rates with the latest official data as collected by Twitter users. In short, the UN, Macrotrends and CIA World Factbook are publishing data that is extremely inaccurate. For example, Macrotrends reports that China's TFR was 1.7 in 2023, when the official data says it was 1.09. Accounts like @morebirths and @birthgauge even report estimated fertility based on monthly data so following those accounts is like having a time machine.
I don't really get into the news enough to want a real time feed. Even if I did, I think I'd look for something more reliable than a collection of posts from Twitter users. It probably even goes deeper than not getting into news for me though, because heck, I don't even watch much TV really.
But I am into sports. And I think the best real time sports feeds out there are the reddit game threads. Now maybe the threads on X are better for some people? I don't know? But reddit game threads are far superior for my purposes. ie - Finding out if everyone else is thinking "What The Actual F--- was that?" Whenever Drew Allar threw the ball in a bowl game for instance.
Similar to you not having found a substitute for news over Twitter, I haven't found a substitute for reddit game threads where these kinds of sanity checks are concerned.
This is a void that should be filled but is akin to tv or news paper of the past which were as close as you could get to breaking and also privately owned.
The tech is there now for the government and other entities to distribute with open protocols or things like rss, but Twitter never was that
> But Twitter is/was not a utility, not a “modern post office” not a “town square”
Yes and no. The thing that makes a social media useful (not necessarily good) is the same thing that makes it hard to leave: userbase. Centralization.
I think it would be weird if people __weren't__ upset. You act as if it is easy to make a collective decision to move platforms. I can't get a collective decision in my friend group for where we should go get food and drinks, and that requires far lower consensus and the stakes/effort needed are much lower. People also frequently complain about places they visit in real life, including restaurants they frequent.
> It’s yet another corporate-owned
Btw, being privately owned doesn't mean it isn't a public space.[0] This should be a bit unsurprising when we look around places and how people organize. People go where other people are, full stop. Doesn't matter if it is public or private property (clear example being malls or cafes). Doesn't matter of online or offline. The major difference is we don't treat online spaces as abstracted versions of offline spaces despite them often being built to serve as that exact thing.
Not really a utility, but it meant that someone at the parks and rec department with virtually zero computer skills could let everyone know when things were closed due to rain and when they were open again.
Yeah, in 2008 when we signed up for it, we didn't realize the implications of that -- now we're learning, between Myspace, FB, and now Twitter. I made a LOT of connections on Twitter, a lot of meaningful interactions, and it absolutely had a large effect on my life. It's without a doubt one of the biggest disappointments to me in modern web/internet tech, that it has gradually been eroded into the trash it is now. Well, as I can say about so many things, "it was good while it lasted".
While I don't disagree, it requires that both the members of government and the public have a decent technical literacy. I'm not sure how true this is even on HN.
I'd personally love to see the government build a lot of frameworks that can be considered "public goods" and be less reliant on private entities who must generate a profit. I happily pay taxes to serve many networks which operate as natural monopolies, such as roads. I'd also be happy to have that extended to such things as telecommunications. I'd happily pay more taxes if it got rid of my phone bill or internet bill. Though I'd say that personally this is conditioned on them being E2EE and privacy focused, since I consider that information having a higher potential for abuse in a single governmental entity than distributed among corporate powers (even if they still want to abuse it, they can do less and there are competitors).
I disagree. I find Mastodon to be much more like the Twitter of '08 that we all loved.
It's like watching over the shoulder of a stranger as they go about their day. But you're welcome there! You can say hi and the stranger is happy to have you.
It's real people sharing their weird hobbies. The often-boring minutiae of their daily life. Their feelings and hopes and dreams.
I've made friends. I feel like I know people. I love it.
It's the same enshittification we're always talking about now. Something you once enjoyed strategically turns to shit once it believes people are too locked in and docile to leave.
Yep, it will be easier to cut the X habit off. I'll miss Nitter, but I'll be happier in the long run.
I was a Reddit Apollo user, and it was easier to wean off of Reddit when I had to use their horrible app or their website. Even using old.reddit has been painful.
I lurk Reddit for local news without ever logging in. They recently started restricting anonymous users to a limited amount of comments on long threads. That finally motivated me to switch to Firefox plugins that re-layout old.reddit.com to be usable on mobile. Thanks Reddit for the much improved free web experience.
> Scientists, mathematicians, journalists, authors, comic book people, and so on.
Intersting, I haven't had a single person leave. People make a big fuss about leaving, but the traffic you get from Twitter is too attractive to leave.
> What I now see are people with demented political opinions about women and American politics. It sucks.
As I said, that's because you're not using lists. It's literally impossible to see posts from accounts you don't like if you're using lists.
As a journalist who has been involved in newsroom analytics at three organizations since Twitter launched, I can assure you that most online news outlets have seen very little to no referral traffic from Twitter in nearly a decade. Journalists love to point to some viral retweet of their story, but most of the time: the number of likes/retweets > actual referrer traffic.
i follow about a thousand physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, try searching keywords like “quantum mechanics” and then “follow all” when recommended. Really no place like twitter for math/science content
Tweeting screenshots of text demonstrates how poor a platform Twitter is, IMO. A core feature -- sharing text -- must sometimes be done in the least efficient way possible, as an image or a series of tweets (that can only be viewed while signed in).
> must sometimes be done in the least efficient way possible, as an image or a series of tweets
Try tiktok and instagram, they’re to kids these days what twitter was to us 10 years ago. There’s a huge trend on those platforms of people sharing a single tweet as a 20s video with a face grimacing and pointing at the text as commentary.
Literally 280char of content turned into a 20s full screen selfie video.
There's also a much higher character limit for paying users, so you can post an entire essay in a tweet now. Look at basically everything Bill Ackman[1] posts, for example.
"Yeah, the best content is on twitter, you have everything from links to Medium to links to personal websites, sometimes there's even screenshots of them!"
You know how Stallman browses the web by emailing a scraper that replies only the text? And he avoids all the Medium flurry of popups and overlays and trackers and cookies and other rubbish?
Seeing a screenshot of the text in Twitter accidentally does that too, and provides a better experience than visiting the site for anyone who doesn't need to customise the text for readability.
Can you please not cross into arguing that way, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are? I know how frustrating it can be to defend a minority position (believe me I know this well), but even in that case the onus is on you to remain thoughtful and respectful. If you're feeling to strongly to do that, this is understandable, but in that case please wait to post until you can.
I mostly follow L7+ SWEs, creators of popular tech like dynamoDB, and professors in AI/systems/DB/PL. The ones who tried to move to sites like mastodon eventually came back, or are now using twitter much more than these alternatives. There's been more top SWEs and professors especially in AI and systems sharing content there.
Noticed as well that twitter is also more optimistic about tech than HN, especially with subcultures like e/acc, learning/building in public, etc.
> Interesting because the content I get on X is far, far more valuable than HN + Reddit + Facebook combined.
That has been my experience as well. Easily. I learned a ton about LLMs, open source projects, growth hacks, marketing tips, a lot of great from the trenches lessons. Best site on the web.
Yep exactly. I’m also a big formula 1 fan and it’s the only place where I can get insight from engineers who are involved in the day to day of building race cars for ex.
Reddit’s f1 subreddit has really degraded in quality unfortunately (just people posting clickbait articles).
It’s the same for investing, politics, cars, poker and everything else I enjoy.
I follow subject matter experts on Mastodon/ActivityPub. Scientists, engineers, librarians, mathematicians, doctors, programmers, designers, artists, musicians, retro computing enthusiasts, amateur radio operators, etc. etc.... They've been migrating away from Twitter for a long time, because it has shown us how horribly "millions of people in the same room" works out, especially when a sociopathic algorithm rewards conflict and sensationalism at the expense of thought/consideration and kindness.
1) There are people who dislike E. Musk but you can't know whether the downvoters are those people or not.
2) Twitter hasn't shutdown, but you can't know if that's connected to the downvotes.
3) Same as 2)
4) You can't know that the parent was downvoted for happily using Twitter.
For something which claims to be "the reason and reality", it's really "things I imagine are the reason without evidence, because that lets me feel superior to strawHN users". The reason I'm writing this is to intercept you going "downvoted for telling the truth" because what you are telling isn't the truth.
> For something which claims to be "the reason and reality", it's really "things I imagine are the reason without evidence, because that lets me feel superior to strawHN users".
By inspecting the greyed out comments and its content, you can find your evidence of this by simply seeing more of the flagged / dead comments supporting Twitter / X. No explicit admitting is needed.
Thus, this is indeed an over-reaction to the four facts and given the HN sentiment has already been cemented to detest the fact that Twitter / X did not shutdown as incorrectly predicted and any user reminding of this or praising Twitter / X and still likes using it gets downvoted. They will never admit to downvoting themselves.
> The reason I'm writing this is to intercept you going "downvoted for telling the truth" because what you are telling isn't the truth.
When faced with the harsh reality that Twitter / X is still running after 2 years of a prediction of its collapse perhaps that truth hurts many folks here the most.
You are missing the fact that, for many of us who used to enjoy Twitter in exactly the way you described, X no longer fills that need, because the subject matter experts whose real-time thoughts we used to follow have left the platform, and all that remains are people whose real-time thoughts we don't generally want to hear.
That may differ from your experience - your real-time expert community might be different than mine.
But for a lot of us who actually used to enjoy Twitter, what you're describing is no longer to be found there.
Nah, you're probably wrong about HN users not knowing how to use Twitter. You're assuming the worst - perhaps assume that people have good reasons for avoiding it and ask what those might be?
I have about 5k followers on Twitter and have posted roughly 10k tweets over the last 16 years of having an account there. I'm pretty familiar with how to use it. I've moved to mastodon - the part of Twitter I used to value is a dumpster fire, many of my colleagues have moved, and I don't want to contribute to monetizing hateful garbage. And that includes preferring not to log in, which means threads don't show up any more. So it was nitter or nothing.
I used to use Twitter and I simply disagree with it being more useful than HN. I suppose it depends on the focus of content you want to learn or read about
For me it's the abysmal SNR no matter where I look, except if it absolutely needs to be real-time. Even considering just the "content" and ignoring the unfathomable interface that we're left with now.
It’s HN. Everyone here has encountered many true believers who, when confronted with a criticism of their favorite tool, responds “well, you are using it wrong. Change your workflow to match mine, which is superior anyway, and then you’ll see.”
It’s tiresome, and I for one have little patience for someone patronizingly suggesting that I'm being stubborn for refusing to allow them to enlighten me.
Is that what you were doing? Maybe not. But you certainly matched my regex, so to speak.
I've recently learned that Twitter can actually be quite good for building genuine connections online, but it takes a very conscious effort and a lot of diligence
I was cynical about X like that too, but recently learned some good techniques that make a lot of difference to the overall experience. And then there's really nothing like it, in terms of reach.
Also, it's easy to see bad in everything, and then all we see is bad. But there're good things to find as well, it's just a matter of what we focus on..
Ironically enough, to me what it bothers me the most on twitter is how bad and slow its front-end is. Sure, I'm not a fan of having to use an account, but if twitter at least had a nitter instance, like literally the same front-end, I would have way less problems with that.
While it is unmaintained now due to the API changes, Libreddit (reddit frontend) is still working for me. Granted, I self-host it, and I'm the only user so I never hit the rate limit, but no issues at all, save for some of the changes reddit has made (namely the new share links)
The repository says at the top in a HUGE FONT that "Libreddit is currently not operational" and the website just shows a oneliner saying Germans are not allowed to read that page. The issue tracker talks of forking and stuff. Doesn't feel too welcoming or functional.
But in actuality it works just fine? Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?
If they don't want you to use their API just respect their wishes and scrape Reddit. https://github.com/JosephLai241/URS it's the only moral thing we can do.
I think that message was to let users know it's basically on it's last legs and could 100% stop at anytime. When the API changes started, most all of the instances ran into rate limits due to the number of requests. But it works just fine until that rate is hit.
Like I mentioned, I've been running my own private instance and I've never hit the rate limit so it's been working fine for me.
And I don't know about any API key. AFAIK, Libreddit uses the publicly available JSON, no need for a key (hence why it's read-only). Since it's still working for me, those JSON endpoints must still be available, just highly rate limited now
Oh, that's cool! Sounds like it should suffice for my usage also, which is extraordinarily light since they shut down reddit-is-fun. I've mostly replaced that with mastodon, not the same concept but serves a similar "let's scroll and see what's new" function.
After doing some analysis (a while ago) on reddit comment/submission rates before and after the boycott and new rate limits, it seems either only a tiny tiny fraction actually left reddit and/or reddit benefited from the negative publicity as much as or more than they lost. Since nothing has changed since then, I suppose there's no point in me staying off the platform anymore, especially if I'm not contributing with OC submissions or comments. Libreddit sounds like a good way to do that, thanks :)
One of the top search results was this page, <https://libreselfhosted.com/project/libreddit/>, which links to <https://libredd.it> as homepage. Domain sounds plausible so I just assumed that's the official one. The project github page has as "website" one of their tickets listed... can't say if that website field once contained something different
twitter and facebook have mostly been garbo for me, what i would like to know is where are the interesting mathematicians and software engineers posting now? or have they had enough too. i suspect that may be the case.
> API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore.
They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.
Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.
Well the “experts” among us here, WaPo, and the NYT predicted Twitter would surely collapse after firing their SREs and admin that were crucial to keeping the servers running. Any day now Twitter will collapse and all of us will be saved. Surely
Here's a challenge: find an article from either wapo or nyt which actually predicted a sure collapse. And I mean a collapse as you said rather than issues with operations. (which they had many of since the takeover) I may have missed one if it exists, but I'd bet they didn't publish anything that certain.
The first link is reporting about users panicking and one of the few comments from NYT itself is "Though there are no official signs that Twitter is going anywhere,...".
The second documents actual issues and makes no predictions.
Even the third one which is just an opinion piece about how bad of a decision maker Elon is doesn't come close to suggesting a collapse.
For the “Newspaper of Record” to report such fantastical news stories, as if anecdotal reports and opinions are real news, shows the obsession with the left wing media against Twitter and their hope and vibe about its imminent collapse.
Why write such articles at all? It’s “The NYT never said it would collapse, they just reported numerous articles implying it MIGHT collapse and everyone says it will!” OK!
Knowing what many people believe is itself useful, especially if you annotate it with "there are no signs that this is actually going to happen".
> obsession with the left wing media against Twitter and their hope and vibe about its imminent collapse.
Yet, you can't show me an article that says this. Is this left wing media obsession, or is this what you believe about NYT? Twitter was a hot topic and they reported on what's happening there. It's not like there were many positive things to say since the takeover.
Sure sure, down the memory hole. No one said Twitter would collapse after firing 7500 people. Everyone assumed it would be fine. All of these articles were simply conjecture, just something to speculate.
When facts are uncomfortable, just rewrite the narrative.
> When facts are uncomfortable, just rewrite the narrative.
The sources you presented failed to substantiate your argument, and instead of looking for different ones or considering you might be mistaken, you've doubled down.
Are you quite sure you are willing to take a hard look at uncomfortable facts and hazard having your mind changed?
Sorry but the 'twitter will die any day now' narrative was utterly pervasive across reddit and endless media sources were cited on a daily basis in the 6-month period that followed the buyout. It was basically the _only_ topic on r/whitepeopletwitter which had 3+ posts hit the frontpage daily.
It isn't something you can gaslight away. Everyone who was there saw it. It happened.
Interestingly enough most of the reddit posts were deleted after 3 days once they'd fallen off the frontpage. It didn't matter, there were always more being made lol. Does make it awfully hard to cite, though. Odd.
None of these 3 articles "predict a sure collapse".
One of them reports on what twitter users were saying, one reports on technical problems occurring at that time, and one is an opinion piece titled "Elon Musk Has No Idea What He’s Doing at Twitter" (but which doesn't predict a collapse AFAICT).
They just had a very high-profile event involving deepfake porn of one of the world's most popular musical artists. They appear to have belatedly responded to this by shutting down all searches of that famous artist's name. This does not suggest an organization that has the capacity to quickly or effectively manage the systems they are running.
Edit: a similar thing happened with Reddit and Teddit(?). API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore. I am aware of old.reddit.com, but in the case of Reddit I preferred the alternative frontends not only for no-JS compatibility, but also a (possibly false) sense of privacy