[Aurornis]

I don’t know if I buy the explanation that this was due to the feed algorithm. It looks like an artifact of being exposed to X’s current user base instead of their old followers. When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

So changing your feed to show popular posts on the platform instead of just your friends’ Tweets would be expected to shift someone’s intake toward the average of the platform.

[SecretDreams]

Is this the result of a feedback loop from musk joining or did they just accelerate the overall decline of the platform with him joining? Some might say it was going this way even before he picked it up, but it was certainly an inflection point when he joined either way.

All modern social media is pretty toxic to society, so I don't participate. Even HN/Reddit is borderline. Nothing is quite as good as the irc and forum culture of the 2000s where everyone was truly anonymous and almost nobody tied any of their worth to what exchanges they had online.

[bpodgursky]

The moderation changes absolutely changed posting behavior. People got banned for even faintly gesturing the wrong direction on many issues and it frightened large accounts into toeing the line.

[tokyobreakfast]

> Even HN/Reddit is borderline.

It's the proliferation of downvoting. It disincentivizes speaking your honest opinion and artificially boosts mass-appeal ragebait.

It's detrimental to having organic conversations.

"But the trolls" they say.

In practice it's widely abused.

Using HN as an example, there are legitimate textbook opinions that will boost your comment to the top, and ones that will quickly sink to the bottom and often be flagged away for disagreement. Ignoring obvious spam which is noise, there is no correlation to "right" or "wrong".

That's one advantage old-school discussion forums and imageboards have. Everyone there and all comments therein are equally shit. No voting with the tribe to reinforce your opinion.

What's worse is social media allowed the mentally ill to congregate and reinforce their own insane opinions with plenty of upvotes, which reinforces their delusions as a form of positive feedback. When we wonder aloud how things have become more radicalized in the last 20 years — that's why. Why blame the users when you built the tools?

[SecretDreams]

I like voting (up and down) but I also agree with your take. Reddit salts the votes, but maybe the solution is to allocate a certain amount of reasonable votes (up or down) total that a user can use weekly. Make it so when you are voting, it's much more meaningful and truely reflect an opinion you either really agree with or really do not agree with.

Ultimately, I think it comes back to people value their online persona way too much and this is something we've intentionally marched towards.

[tokyobreakfast]

>but maybe the solution is to allocate a certain amount of reasonable votes (up or down) total that a user can use weekly

Slashdot did this back in the day IIRC.

[Hobadee]

I was just gonna say that!

Yeah, you had to have sufficient rep on Slashdot, then you were randomly allocated a certain number of votes (5 or so, IIRC) that you could use to vote. There were fixed categories you could vote an item for, such as "funny", or "off topic". Once your votes were gone, that was it until you were randomly awarded more. The max score anything could get was 5, and a minimum was -1. You could use the scores to filter what you saw. (ie: show full text of >3 insightful, and summaries of 1-2, hide <1)

It worked pretty well. Obvious trolling was still down voted, and insightful stuff was up voted. The ability to just show a blurb of lower-voted stuff was nice as well; you could ignore obvious crap, but expand it if it caught your attention.

[SecretDreams]

This was good insight. I do think this system would work better. I like the min rep aspect too. The things you've listed would go a long way to preserve the filtration effects of a voting system while possibly mitigating abuse and bot proliferation.

[noelsusman]

I'm not sure what your point is. How is "being exposed to X's current user base instead of their old followers" not equivalent to "turning on the feed algorithm"? You doubt the effect is due to the algorithm, but your alternative explanation describes exactly what the algorithm does.

[excalibur]

I don't know what changes have been made more recently, but I know there was a definite change to the Twitter algorithm a few months ago that filled the feeds of conservatives with posts from liberals and vice versa. It seemed to be specifically engineered to provoke conflict.

[TiredOfLife]

> When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

Do you have any numbers. In my experience it's still majorly communists

[thrance]

Open the front page in a private tab. Most posts are far right conspiracy theories, ragebait or grifts.

Look at that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504404