[spiralx]

Having nothing but random comments by $8 subscribers at the top of every post has been pretty terrible for any sort of discussion between posters and followers already, but at least you could ignore/filter posts by their blue checkmark. Now you'll still get the above but you'll also get a bunch of $3 subscribers straight after the $8 posts, but without any obvious marker to show they've been boosted artificially.

People have often accused Twitter of being full of people trying to shout the loudest and drowning out useful discussion, yet all of Musk's changes seem to be aimed at making this issue worse and worse. Soon there'll be a caste system where the only actual discussions will be between people on the same subscription tier.

[jjkaczor]

Oh, you must have missed the update where blue checkmark people can HIDE their blue checkmark... So, you cannot even reliably filter/ignore based on that anymore...

[kibwen]

I have good news for you: all major browsers have partnered with X to make it easy to filter out people who pay for Blue. If you look closely at the browser tab, you will see an "X" icon expressly for this purpose.

[jjkaczor]

Slow clap... Bravo, well played!

[Freedom2]

I think the X button is there for other reasons, I'm not sure if it has explicitly anything to do with X?

[cced]

Mate it’s a joke, he is saying you can always close the browser window that has Twitter opened.

[Freedom2]

My mistake. Seeing the lack of humor and pedantry often on this site, I'm often led to take things literally.

[spiralx]

Of course they did that. So you'd have to use a user script to read each account's profile to see if they have a tick, which would be a pain even with caching the results.

Just opened Twitter to nose at their HTML, it still hasn't managed to load the homepage in the time it's taken me to write this entire comment lol.

[sbarre]

> Soon there'll be a caste system where the only actual discussions will be between people on the same subscription tier.

This would actually be great, it would make it easier to filter out.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Apparently old-Twitter had a feature where blue checks had a special DM inbox for messages from other blue checks.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I don't use X, but can you explain more about why this change has been harmful?

"People have often accused Twitter of being full of people trying to shout the loudest"

It sounds like maybe the subscriber change has actually addressed this problem? Instead of people trying to should the loudest, you get "random comments by $8 subscribers"?

Given the choice between people paying for attention, vs people being deliberately inflammatory for attention, I think I'd prefer the former. But again, I don't use X, just looking for more details here in order to understand.

[Barrin92]

The like and reply system is an organic and representative method of what comments people find interesting, pay2win is not. Especially because it is precisely the most inflammatory, spammy, and annoying people paying to have their opinion boosted. If their takes were interesting or pleasant they wouldn't be paying for someone to read them in the first place.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>The like and reply system is an organic and representative method of what comments people find interesting

I think maybe you've got rose-colored glasses on? See e.g. this post from Nate Silver about old Twitter:

>If you’re one of those annoying people like me who thinks there’s value in pointing out hypocrisy ... you will get absolutely shat upon on Twitter. People feel extremely threatened when you point this stuff out. They will go great lengths to deter it. They will launch all types of ad hominem attacks against you.

>...

>Twitter’s architecture makes this worse, particularly the quote retweet and the Trending Topics module. It is a medium where dissent from the consensus is treated punitively.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo...

Or here's another post about old Twitter:

>Really, the problem with Twitter is just that it’s ruled by shouty jerks. All of the other problems — ubiquitous fear of “cancellation”, disruption of organizations, toxic status anxiety — ultimately come back to the Shouting Class.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-to-fix-twitter

It's interesting to me that HN threads about Twitter seem uniquely toxic, e.g. namecalling Elon. My hypothesis is that there's been a population replacement. Twitter was previously dominated by a certain group of shouters. The old shouters lost their power to a new group of shouters, and now the old shouters shout about the situation here on HN.