I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like. It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive advantage you are talking about.
I keep hearing this about Twitter and Facebook but my experience is completely different. I believe the default experience is as you describe, but after I started following dozens of retrogaming groups, old games are all I see in both places. Even the ads became relevant and, believe it or not, interesting. I've clicked on a couple, which took me to small creators in the retrogaming and RPG areas.
The same is true with Reddit. The default feed is absolutely awful, but the bar required to curate something individually interesting and useful is too high for most new users, given the toxicity + banality of the default.
I finally quit my barren Twitter when the Musk takeover resulted in my feed being flooded with porn (including illegal content) and arabic carpet cleaning ads. I seriously doubt anyone's default Reddit front page has ever looked like that.
I keep seeing people say they've experienced this, but I've been on twitter for years (pre Musk and stayed post Musk) and I've never once seen porn on there. How does this happen by accident?
They're going to have a pretty developed and stable picture of you and what you respond to by now, especially of their view of you aligns with high- value placements already.
So they probably don't bother to audition that kind of content for you very often because they already have strategies that milk your attention, engagement, and wallet better.
When you hear other people share their experience as new or different users, keep in mind how customized all these platforms are and how idiosycratically optimized they'll already be for you as a long-time, engaged user.
Most people can't go back in time to get where you are, and don't have any sure (or worthwhile) road to get there.
In my case, my (now deleted) account (which was primarily read-only) would get several porn bot followers per day. If I didn't log in for a week, I'd have dozens of new "p#i#c#s#i#n#b#i#o" type accounts following me.
Towards the end, there would often be porn in replies of many posts on all kinds of topics, like politics, news, etc.
On reddit the defaults are shit and the rest of the site bans you by default until you've karmawhored yourself past an arbitrary threshold on those defaults. Trash website.
I used to use it years back. Some subreddits were really great but they all inevitability devolved so I lost any interest in maintaining active accounts there. r/skookum had really interesting content for a while but devolved into idiots reposting the same skookum brand wrenches over and over again.
I'm sorry but reddit is trash. Every subreddit, no matter how niche, is basically cringy phrases being repeated or photos of some "home set up" or said niche product someone bought who is looking for validation of their decision. It's so bad I blocked reddit from my search engine results.
There's a lot of interesting discussions on r/science but like the rest of reddit it's such an echo chamber that you end up with bizarre one-sided arguments that discourage all opposing views.
> Is there much space for opposing views on a forum answering science questions?
Perhaps more than anywhere. Science is a process of challenge and response, not a static body of knowledge.
> Presumably the purpose is to answer from established science.
"Established science", which is still subject to debate itself, isn't what link aggregators cover. They bias towarss stuff more like science news and novel study outcomes, which are nothing to do with established science except as a seed for critical discussion.
If something is "established" and has no "space for opposing views" it's the opposite of science. "Dogma", perhaps. In science, by contrast, every belief is at best contingent, subject to rejection when better evidence becomes available. That's what makes it science in the first place!
If you prohibit arguing about the shape of the Earth, you're banning people from explaining that EGM08 is generally more accurate than EGM96—and where it isn't. That is a significant harm. Trolls advocating obvious nonsense like flat-Earthism isn't a significant harm, because nobody over the age of 6 will be misled.
Even if you were right that debate on the shape of the earth had no benefit, forbidding it still wouldn't be science. Science is not coextensive with beneficial things.
Fully grown adults believe the Earth is flat or that we have never been space to and dismissing them as just trolls is doing the same thing you are accusing me of doing and not allowing "space for opposing views."
This is precisely what I was talking about when I said that reddit turns all communities into echo chambers.
If you assume that all opposing opinions come from flat-earthers and idiots that couldn't possibly be right about anything you will never even think about changing your opinion on anything. You'll continue to chat with other reddit yes-men and pat yourselves on the back about how you're all so right.
The upvote / downvote self-censorship system simply does not work for any serious discussions. It might be ok for sorting the snarkiest comment under an article but that's about it
You're contradicting yourself. You yourself say there is plenty of interesting discussion but what interesting discussion is there on reddit if it is just people patting themselves on the back?
There do exist paranoid schizophrenics, yes. Science generally doesn't have much trouble dealing with them, unlike, for example, institutional censorship regimes, which can transform minor personal delusions into major collective catastrophe.
I am not, in fact, denying you space for your views. I'm giving you the space for your views and explaining to you why they are incorrect.
Yeah the upvote based ranking basically means that every comment section is basically dogpile on the same points of view and every dissenting opinion is hidden... Terrible
Broadly appealing subs like that should be the last subs you cite if your goal is to provide evidince that Reddit isn't lowest common denominator trash.
Even in fairly niche subs I find that "surface level" content quality dominates and nuanced takes are frequently unpopular which is basically a recipe for anyone who knows anything to leave. I find the best subs are satire subs because having to know enough about something to be able to satirize it weeds out all the people who create and perpetuate surface level content. I assume there are some super niche subs that are similar.
Agreed. The X ads were terrible and annoying until I flipped on that "Let X ad track you" and at least I get tolerable ads on mobile. (uBlock Origin blocks them on desktop)
The For You feed varies week by week but is generally okay. I make heavy use of lists, mute words, etc to clean things up.
X is a train wreck, but an interesting and useful one, depending on who/what you follow.
I have Bluesky, but I don't really like it as much. The UX is much better than X, though.
On Bluesky, I pretty much follow the people I followed before they fled Twitter. However, they complain a lot about politics, Elon Musk and the US President Elect on their timelines. I could unfollow, and do in some cases, but that would pretty much leave me with nothing to read on Bluesky.
That, and the weird tech people I get the most value from still post primary on X, so I deal with it.
That's their right, but complaining about it isn't how I like to do things. I don't want to read it, so I don't visit Bluesky much at all.
I'm more interested in ideas on how to adapt and move forward and be resilient. To be honest, I kind of like to have my beliefs challenged as well, and X provides that.
I run a number of business X accounts which are post-only.
The very second the US election got underway all of our accounts started to heavily promote right-wing political content. Even though we specifically said when we signed up that we aren't interested in anything like that.
This happened to me on imgur, i explicitly filtered out politics but once the election got underway I started seeing it everywhere (except in imgur's case it was left-wing content). I turned off the politics filter and then turned it back on and they vanished for a time but then slowly leaked back in. If i reset the filter every week then i could keep political related content hidden for the most part.
same, people keep complaining that their twitter feeds are full of violence, porn & political bullshit but I get 0 of that
I haven't gone out of my way to restrict my timeline either, I follow ~1000 accounts I just don't follow or interact with accounts that post any of that crap.
I don't understand why you were being flagged, it was actually my experience then deleted my account, of course it was some months ago, but still think that is the current one. (September of 2024)
They all suck. But the user experience is practically irrelevant to the business of selling ads and operating sentiment manipulation channels, which is the business that all of the large social media companies are in.
And whether their ideas and strategies are well-grounded or seem optimal or ethical to the rest of us, the top leadership at most of those companies lean strongly towards corporatist, libertarian political ideals and see most regulation (and preemptive self-regulation) as both philosophically immoral and an existential threat to their businesses.
> which is the business that all of the large social media companies are in.
I agree with you.
If this is the case and money is speech, can a well-intentioned organization just collect donations to advance their message? Like when Philip Morris uses this to sell cigarettes to kids we say that is bad. But what if the EFF used it to ensure net neutrality? Or if Planned Parenthood used it to add reproductive rights to the bill of rights?
Do my donations already pay for social media campaigns?
You have to follow people you’re interested in, and continually curate that list. X is garbage in the same way /r/all is - you have to find the subreddits you like and aren’t too large
are you suggesting the company's staffing policy influences what users post? I don't agree the arrow points in that direction. or that there's an arrow between those topics at all
As someone that uses Twitter quite a lot for consumption, I actually think it's great. I've learned so much on Twitter (and yes, I'm aware there is plenty of disinformation), and it's also extremely entertaining. Maybe I've just used it long enough so I my feed is quite curated.
The fact that you're being downvoted for accurate reporting that can be easily verified by anyone who makes a Twitter account.. lol
Before I deleted my Twitter account, I tried really hard to just block every account that posted content I felt was pol-tier.. it just doesn't work. That platform is FUBAR, and the prime example is the owner of the platform who has been completely brainrotted from staring into the orb for 12 hours a day.
It seems like public sentiment is trending towards rolling over and letting channers run society. We'll see how that goes.
I had my Twitter account for almost 15 years before deleting it.
I hadn't blocked ANYBODY for 13 of those years, but towards the end I was blocking dozens of users per day.
Not not just, "I don't agree with this person" but "Wow this person is genuinely hateful and not contributing anything meaningful, and I would rather not see that."
I will rail on FB just as hard as the next guy, but realistically, from a business perspective, if facebook's wild popularity and 3 billion active monthly users still says "unusable" to you... well, do you really think most people would agree with you? And more importantly to the company... whose opinion matters the most?
They were talking to someone else so not sure what the point of this reply is?
If you don't want to use the site there's no problem with that, just don't use it. But this is in direct response to a claim "this site [with a brand new user account with no history] is unusable" which - if your goal is to use the site - is easily fixed.
If your goal is just to go "well I don't even use the site and you should try it and be as Good a person as I am" then it doesn't really matter either way.
I was responding to the claim that it’s sensible to go and tweak the algorithm to make the site usable - it think that’s a waste of life time and humanity as a whole would benefit if people don’t waste their very limited time on this stuff - idc what anyone here thinks of me, I just don’t want to lose more of my fellow humans to the mindless algorithms
IMO Twitter has a core failure in promoting premium accounts over regular ones, then compensating those users for the amount of traffic they generate. Almost any post that goes viral will be swarmed by trolling/low effort responses from premium users who are looking to capitalize on outrage clicks. It's an exhausting user experience, IMO. I don't miss it at all.
Disagree, I still have my account and check it periodically when I get linked to something on Twitter and the feed and trending are both pretty crap (maybe it would be different if I used it every day, but I never used it every day, even when I created the account ~10-ish years ago. But my feeds are way worse than they used to be).
And it keeps putting things I really don't want to see in my feed, that aren't by anyone I follow.
Facebook has also gotten worse with its feed as far as sometimes injecting things into it I don't want, but most of it is still decent or at least relevant to my interests, and usually product or harmless news related (I get a lot of Kickstarter and mobile game ads, or celebrity gossip for some reason, even though I couldn't care less about most celebrities' lives) instead of political outrage and misinformation like I tend to get on Twitter.
