Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.
yep, x/twitter is great (relative basis). people will confirmation bias their way to whatever matches their priors though. i spent a day or two marking things as "not interested" and blocking people -- my feed is great: 99% tech niches, 0% politics.
i find reddit to be particularly bad; a true cesspool of negativity. Seems to be mostly just bots and incels looking for someone to blame and/or somewhere to direct their unhappiness towards.
It's not all that hard to curate a feed without that stuff. Block people who annoy you, mute words/phrases that annoy you, and follow people you enjoy.
Curious as to why people think this (other than partisan trend-following). I've been on Twitter since 2009, and it's arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively. A lot of people still build publicly on Twitter. If you're conservative you can follow conservatives, if you're liberal you can follow liberals. I find Elon annoying, so I just muted his account because it seems like it was being algorithmically pushed, especially during the DOGE days. But I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall.
Not sure if it turned into Musk's idealistic "town square," but it's certainly more interesting than it was before.
So, I suspect the key to your experience is buried in this sentence: "I do follow politics pretty closely, and it seems relatively balanced overall."
Balance doesn't mean much by itself. Doesn't mean "informative" or even "accurate". Extremists from every walk of life screaming at each other might be in balance, but isn't much fun to be around. Note that the person you're replying to didn't even mention politics as such, much less a lack of "balance".
I watched twitter for years, starting in 2007. It was never what I'd call "good", but for quite a lot of years you could reasonably use it to follow people or topics that interested you without consuming an inordinate amount of time or attention. In fact, for most of its history you could do this without even bothering to log in - for a long time, that made it fairly useful as sort of an alert system. And that is long gone, so gone there's a good chance most folks using it now don't even remember (or never knew) that was ever a draw.
What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.
> What's left is people who are logged in, _engaging_. And man, that was always the worst part of Twitter, the constant posturing and troll-baiting for clicks, pushing every viewpoint toward its extreme.
I do agree that engagement farming is—and has been—a problem, but as someone that worked in social media (mostly on the data side, fwiw), it's been a problem for like a decade+ now, long predating "modern" Twitter. And it's a consistent problem on all platforms (I mostly use Instagram, and it's annoying on there as well).
I'm well aware; I previously worked "adjacent" to this sphere, and a non-trivial part of my work life was spent trying to forestall precisely this outcome.
The difference between Twitter now and Twitter a decade ago isn't in the quantity of vapid interactions; it's the proportion of that to anything else. The slide started a long, long time ago and at some point effectively no one was trying to stop it anymore. I'm sure there are still corners where useful information gets passed on in a timely manner, but like the citizens of so many venues before it those corners have been diminished and isolated to an extent that it no longer feels worthwhile for those not already entrenched in them to bother seeking them out
And my point was that, from what I can tell, that proportion of trash::value has been increasing on all social media in (more or less) lockstep. If anything, I'd say Facebook has seen the most precipitous drop in quality, not Twitter. So much so that I don't even log in anymore, and I was veritably addicted during college.
It's increased in lockstep here on HN as well. It used to be that I came here for the comments, but more and more the comments are going the way of everywhere else: Inflammatory, polarising, and more and more botted (both automated and human bots) -- no proof, but I've been around the internet since the early 90's, I see the patterns.
I even get sucked into contributing at times, which is why that descent into trash _works_ so well. I hate it, and I visit HN less and less as a result.
>arguably in the best spot it's ever been, apart from Grok being pushed so aggressively
So the best ever except for one of the biggest crap parts that didn't exist at all just a few years ago?
Though actually I think it's just more people figuring out how the interests of social media companies aren't the same as their own interests, and Musk's very-visible fiddling with things drove home the "people are trying to to addict you and influence you" point MUCH more quickly than anything ever did in the past to a wide chunk of the population. Not new in essence, but now highlighted with a giant neon sign pointing at it.
The ability to click the Grok button and have it privately research a claim in a post to see if there's anything else backing it up in realtime is extremely helpful.
That and the real time translation aspect leading to true global conversations right now is absolutely awesome.
I stopped using it because offensively stupid drivel from morons who paid for blue checks started getting upranked everywhere, pushing down the tweets I actually wanted to see. I have no problem talking to people with different ideologies and political views (actually I tend to enjoy it), but what the site was showing me was consistently not worth my time.
That's because most liberals don't like to be questioned or defend their positions, in general. On X they are forced to confront or actively block people. Note that the your comment is downvoted for essentially saying "twitter is still good" with no malice, and parent is still totally fine after saying (speciously) "twitter is for horny cryptobros". They have no actual response other than to downvote or leave for an echo chamber. This has been hashed out here many time before. Truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged.
Against the grain here but I feel like it needs to be popularised. But have you considered trying to do it in person? Going to shared spaces, meetups, etc and talking to people.
It’s almost a dying practice but I feel it’s massively valuable in a way that can’t be replicated online.
I think the best way to do this today is having your own site, be it in the shape of a blog, digital garden or whatever and then syndicate, following POSSE[0], in case of wanting community or distribution.
I've found Mastodon to be the best platform for this in 2026. If you're working on something deeply technical, there is a good chance the upstream maintainers for whatever you're using and tons of academics in the field will be active on there. Except maybe for something LLM-related, that's still firmly in the Twittersphere, even in 2026.
I run a blog and like to write about projects but it's hard to get feedback there unless you're willing to moderate comments. As a work around I started sharing build threads on places like garagejournal and you can get a lot of good feedback.
For sharing digital creations, X is still the #1 place to do it for visibility and discovery. I get a surprising amount of positive interactions there.
I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship. I created an informational post recently on a niche subreddit and it seemed well received, but then was deleted by a mod with no explanation.
> I like reddit, but feel the moderation model is too skewed towards censorship
I saw that the r/dotnet subreddit banned posting personal projects or "Show r/dotnet"-type posts except for one day per week, and only in the moderator's New Zealand timezone to boot. The reasoning was, apparently, because too many people were submitting projects that might be personal promotion (the horror), and that accelerated with agentic coding taking off.
Seeing what people are building with dotnet was the only reason I used to go there. Without it, it's just an Entity Framework bikeshedding support group (DAE think we should use the repository pattern on top of the repository pattern) where Microsoft's Github projects are promoted by default instead of individuals'.
I’m building a new product design app that is made from the start for design systems and agentic collaboration. Tried posting about it a few times in the UX design sub as I thought it might be interesting to fellow designers, but they all got deleted by the mods for unspecified reasons even though I was careful to follow the rules. Gave up in the end.
Saw the same thing happen recently to a project made by friend of mine (and no, it was genuinely a cool project, and it isn't me trying to tell a personal story under a guise of it being done by a friend; I would love to take any amount of credit for it, but I had zero involvement whatsoever).
The project was basically a wordle-like game, but for chess puzzles. It was focused less on being an actual chess puzzle game (i.e., tricky chess game positions that lead to a decisive turnaround) and more on actually training to improve your blunder game (i.e., each puzzle was more of a "pick a move that isn't a blunder given a scenario from a real lichess game").
He made a post on r/chess, it gathered a small number upvotes, there were a few comments left along the lines of "omg this is so awesome, this is helping my anti-blunder skills a lot, had no idea I wanted this until I saw it." And no, I didn't leave a comment, but I upvoted the post. It didn't feel right to brigade a post with my positive comments on it as a friend, especially given how anal reddit mods can get about this in some cases.
Next thing I see, mods just removed his post with a "no promotion allowed" reasoning. The website had no ads, no paid components, not even a name/profile of my friend attached to it (so no self-promotion angle either; he is gainfully employed and isn't looking for a job). He did it purely for the love of the game, some subreddit users clearly found it helpful, and yet the mods just deleted it.
Do you participate in this community otherwise? People are generally warmer to self-promotion if it comes from someone who posts in the community in a normal way.
I don't bother submitting to reddit. I would say if you want to post anything substantial, as in something with multiple posts, to reddit, it should be on your own subreddit. Only allow posts and comments by approved users though.
I would begrudgingly suggest LinkedIn. I have seen a bunch of professors doing it there successfully. There they also promote their Substack which LinkedIn allows. I remember Elon had banned Substack on X at one point.
I occasionally remember to post to the substack feed and I'm typically surprised by the interaction. Substack in general is great just to build the email list though.
With the real time translations that they just introduced where people are interacting in all different languages now, it's the best it's ever been. The conversations that people are getting to have across Japan, France, Spain, South Korea, etc are really incredible.
I don't know how publicly you mean, but I do this on the maker community I'm a part of (shout out to our general maker newsletter, sign up at https://www.themakery.cc/ for fun links).
I also do something like it on my website, but that's writeups of the finished product. The community gets to see the raw state of what I'm making, throughout the process.
It was called Twitter for 17 years before being renamed in 2023. The Twitter domain still redirects to roughly the same site it was for all those years.
Why does it matter if someone still calls it Twitter?
Surely this claim cannot apply to all humans who refer to that social media service. There are multiple potential competing explanations that have nothing to do with virtue signalling. For many, particularly non-users or rare users, “Twitter” is a more familiar name. Personally I don’t like the new name; and since it’s not a person, dead-naming it causes no one any harm or offence. Twitter, X - if one’s interlocutor understands that you’re both referring to the same service, what does it matter in casual circumstances?
X doesn’t even allow for non-logged in users any more, forget about the blatant racism from its owner and occasional child porn. Who even knows what algorithm it uses to show content any more. Anyone still posting there is either wildly ignorant or completely ok with this, and in either case it’s hard to value anything they say.
It’s not really, companies like GM used to boast about how well they treated their employees and communities. It was Jack Welch and a legion of like-minded arseholes who decided they should be increasingly richer no matter who or what paid for it.
Most PE is ironically ultimately owned by publicly traded funds. If you have a 401k that you’re not personally managing odds are that PE is where most of your gains come from.
This is where PBCs (Public Benefit Companies) and B-Corps may have a role to play. Something like that seems necessary to enable both (A) sufficient profitability to support innovation and viability in a capitalist society and (B) consideration of the public good. Traditional public companies aren't just disincentivized from caring about externalities, they're legally required to maximize shareholder profits, full stop. Which IMHO is a big part of the reason companies ~always become "evil".
The company I currently work for is both a B-Corp and an employee-owned trust. The difference in culture, attitude and behaviour to the previous place I worked at, which only cared about quarterly results is stark.
Costco is such a strange and stark case standing in opposition to this general rule. From everything I hear, I can only gather that the reason is because of extremely experienced and level-headed executive staff.
The previous deal was due to (a) a lower level of development of capitalism (b) a higher profit margin that collapsed in the 70s (c) a communist movement that threatened capital into behaving
Middle class productive population produces commons goods and resources which gets exploited by Elites. Tragedy of the Commons applied to wealth generation process itself.
About as accurate as a horoscope. Sherlock Holmes it is not.
It got the location (exif, I guess) and was able to identify that I was a balding mediocre middle-aged guy, but the more specific it got the more wrong (and insulting) it was.
"He appears tired and introspective. He may exhibit biases such as confirmation bias, anchoring bias, in-group bias and out-group bias. His interests could involve reading, hiking, and programming, coupled with less constructive activities like smoking, excessive drinking, and gambling.
This individual seems to possess low self-esteem, exhibits introversion, a lack of emotional stability, and low self-control, making them susceptible to targeted advertising."
I’m making Bezier, a mac-native vector design app as an alternative to Figma and Sketch.
Unlike those apps it has full support for design tokens and (so far) flexbox layouts. It can also export directly to HTML, rather than a fake preview mode. I’m also working on full code-backed components, so you can go between code and design very easily.
As a designer, I’ve been frustrated for years by the gap between design and code, and despite all the new AI features, Figma still hasn’t got any further in years - design tokens need a 3rd party plugin and responsive designs are a pain in the bum. So I decided to build something that has the ease of Figma while being much closer to live code.
I’ve got to the point where I’m designing the app in itself, tokens are working, html export is working and nearly ready for first betas.
As an experiment I built a prototype chatbot app that uses the built-in LLM. It’s got a small context window, but is surprisingly capable and has tool-calling support. Without too much effort I was able to get it to fetch weather data, fetch and summarise emails, read and write reminders and calendar events.
We’re way beyond Idiocracy now, we left that timeline six years ago.
For all his flaws, Camacho was a good leader - he recognised there was a problem, knew he couldn’t fix it and actively rallied the world around the one person who could.
This bunch of dipshits expressly denigrated the experts, refused to take the slightest precaution to protect themselves and others from a deadly virus and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And that’s not even thinking about the industrial levels of fuckery and bullshit they’ve perpetrated over the last year.
Yes, people forget that in the early days of the pandemic, they were playing political games with PPE, sending it to red states with no population or cases, while NYC was running out of space in hospitals. It got so bad, RFK's grandson became a whistleblower because he was dismayed that he and other 20-somethings with no relevent experience were in charge of the government response.
It "was like a family office meets organized crime, melded with Lord of the Flies," Kennedy said. "It was a government of chaos." Kennedy says was shocked that he and a dozen other twenty-somethings with no experience in the medical sector were tasked with procuring much-needed PPE for the country, using their personal laptops and email addresses.
"We were the team. We were the entire frontline team for the federal government." Kennedy added, "It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years. It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting." [1]
That kind of executive negligence and dereliction of duty absolutely cost lives.
What Kennedy described during COVID is now the entire government from top to bottom. DOJ, FBI, DOD, FEMA, DHS, ICE, NASA, USPS, SSA etc etc, rotting from the head.
There’s a big difference between working on a computer and working with a computer.
The people doing the former use computers for ‘real work’. They are using a computer as an end in itself, care about operating systems and have strong opinions about systemd. The people doing the latter couldn’t give two shits about any of that and just want to get their presentation finished on time.
Problem is, both sets of people have to use the same machines. It’s also why software like GIMP will never become widely adopted in professional environments because it’s designed for a completely different userbase.
I personally think that when he mentioned her name during that interview, it was intended to be used as an archetypal proxy in place of someone else (another public figure) that he had personal dealings with. Yudkowsky checks those same boxes (mission focused on specific existential risk, gets a cult following) for example.
That being said, I don’t care much for Christian prophecies. Better to talk why than who.
There’s nothing Christian about what Thiel is talking about here, even if he does wrap it up in the bible.
Whether you believe in Christianity or not, his views are deeply, deeply heretical. He’s so far out of pocket he’s in a completely different pair of trousers.
I don't even think Christianity itself is authentic anymore, so we can just leave it at that. It essentially amounts to outsourcing your spirituality to a man who died thousands of years ago (as great as he was at the time), through whatever institutional filters decide which words of his to cherry-pick.
Behind the Bastards did a good two-parter on Thiel's lectures. He sounds dangerously insane.
It'd be bad enough if he was just some random crank, but the fact he's got the level of power and influence needed to actually make his beliefs happen makes it exponentially worse.
> Genuine questions: what can be done in a democratic setting to stop him?
Thiel is only "relevant" because he's wealthy.
In a system that allows wealth to equal political power, systematically weakening the impact of wealth on civic and political systems is an effective method. Whether that can be done in America, with the current understanding of the constitution and the current philosophy that many take towards taxation/wealth is questionable; but the idea that we can do nothing is just not true. We don't need to slide back into an era of 19th century robber barons and pseudo-aristocracy. If we do, it's because we largely gave up or allowed it to happen.
The difference to robber Baron this time is that those companies have gone global, so a new Teddy Roosevelt being elected in USA wouldn't help, because these multinationals can just extend outside jurisdiction. Which is very similar to the actual dynamic of states/federal that Teddy tackled [1]
Unfortunately the political rhetoric have smeared "the globalists" and equated people that want global coordination to limit those multinationals with power, with the ones abusing it. Even the platform that was promising to drain the swamp turns out was just another swamp, so one would need to start from the scratch for that political movement.
Not sure your country but the internet isn't the USA. Secularism very much touched the hearts of Americans. Talarico's words are pretty good at embodying actual American Christian belief on it.
The dixiecrats mascarading as Christian Republicans who HN treats as all American Christians don't even believe in the larger USA/Constitution/Human rights so yeah they ignore/are anti a lot of basic American beliefs. They are from a long line of loser traitors to our beliefs.
> Voting, debate, democracy are for people that are on the same team.
Im sorry, but I dont agree with this one bit. Debate and the spread of ideas that you think are good is really the only thing that is lasting, regardless of which "team" you are on.
I also dont think America(ns) have been on the same team for its entire history. Its not a very recent phenomenon that neocons have pioneered.
If voting didn't work dixiecrats wouldn't be pushing the new voter ID law. Billionaires wouldn't be spending so much on elections. The entire premise/fantasy of 'elections don't work' is traitor/disenfranchisement/give up BS.
We voted our way out of the 1800s, our way to the New Deal. There have always been rich pushing un-American ideas. We didn't go 'welp, I guess the hyper rich plantation owners win, dissolve the country and continue slavery'. We beat the robber barons. We defeated the slavers. Time to feed the rich billionaires what we gave those that chose to be traitors before them. Fuck traitors. They win when we don't vote. Don't be the surrender meme:
I also like a two-pronged approach which includes taxing the billionaires out of existence. I haven't heard any significant downside to doing that. All the more so when weighed against the possible upsides.
I think what frustrates me above all else is that we, as a society, as a people, could have it so much better.
We could all be living in such a better world but for the allowances we make for the most sociopathic and greedy among us.
I sometimes think there should be a completion state to capitalism.
When you reach an arbitrary score, like $100 million, you get presented with a cup that says ‘congratulations, you won capitalism’ and are given the choice of either playing again from the start but this time on hard mode (no emerald mine or parents that are friends with the IBM chairman this time), or keeping your winnings on the condition that you and your family fuck off somewhere and are never seen or heard of again.
Seriously though, that billionaires can exist, that so much power and wealth can be concentrated in the hands of so few while so many have nothing is utterly repugnant.
Repugnant it may be, but you're leaving better sells on the table: it is extremely wasteful of human capital, both because the winners after having taken all, tend to spin out and add only negative value to societies. Also the many pre-determined losers, having to waste so much of their energy on survival, mostly cannot contribute positively either, sometimes also drifting into serious negative value generation.
So yes: as a system, "wealth" is demonstrably extremely wasteful of capital, in wouldn't take much on both edges to improve it significantly.
We are not in a democratic setting in America any more, the people in power are willing to start wars to protect pedophiles, they are willing to hire Nazi thugs to shoot your wives in the face. They are willing to bribe supreme court justices and dismantle democracy, and they will if not stopped by force.
Thiel has been obviously and evil sack of shit for decades but more than half of HN viewers revere him. I fear we have no hope, and the good people asking how we can democratically solve this problem makes me feel even more hopeless. Yall don't get it.
It wasn't voting that "defeated" southern slave owners, it was a war. A war that leveled cities and killed more Americans than any before or since. Also, I'm pretty sure this man and everyone in his class control a larger percentage of the economy than any plantation owners. Saying we should just vote out way out of oligarchy ignores the history of every oligarchy in the world, and makes you at best and unwitting pawn of the pedophile ruling class.
LOL. I'm no pawn. I'm at best a democracy supporting, western Liberal society loving American.
Spreading fear in this way since 9/11 has dramatically changed America into something worse. I'm sad you've lost faith in Liberal thought and are preaching replacing it with reactionary nothingness.
We literally defeated the people who owned the system AND owned the workers, because we elected the right people and we fought. If we had instead burnt the system down how the heck would we win the war? This system was build for people like us. The first of it's kind. We aren't going to get a better playing field. The oligarchy WANT it burnt down. Stop doing their work and put your effort/energy into useful change, don't be a tool for them.
It's sucks we have to fight, but it's idiotic to seed the best battlefield we are going to get to fight them on to some nebulous, reactionary unknown one like you seem to want. Don't give up! And fuck the anti-American traitors!
The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of capitalism is to enrich the capital owning class, people like Peter Thiel, who will do anything to gain power over the working class. The civil war is a great example of how voting in a leader who is perceived as being a danger to the owning class lead to an attempt to destroy the democracic process that threatened their power. It didn't work that time, but looks at Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Chile, Iran, etc to see what happens when a democracy tries to oppose capital. This belief that people who gained their position by exploiting the deaths of millions of people will peacefully give up that power is naive, and American propaganda from both parties pushes it to silence any real chance at change.
Is there some more concise and ideally written summary of Thiel's lectures? One that doesn't require sitting through 3h of video?
I've only got some superficial acquaintance with Thiel's ideas, but he's been objectively correct on enough contrarian stuff (Thiel fellowships) that I'd like to at least have some rough, non-distorted understanding of what the anti-christ stuff is about even if it sounds a bit crazy.
I built something similar to this. It's a SSG and CMS that runs in the browser and publishes the raw Markdown and JSON metadata alongside the rendered HTML. Unlike this it doesn't use encryption as it only publishes public data.
As the source is available, other clients can easily parse the data so that content can be made available beyond the browser, such as text-only clients, indexing and discovery networks and custom readers. I've built a prototype terminal client to test this out.
Now that the editor is working, my plans are to add public follow/block/like lists to sites to add a lightweight social layer and to build an open indexer framework for content discovery.
It's not trying to be another social network protocol. It's first and foremost a publishing platform, designed to be as easy to use as something like Medium while still being simple, open and portable.
Until recently my reflexive answer would have been Twitter, but [gestures vaguely at the state of it].
Would it be Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon, a personal blog, or somewhere else?
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it's hard to know where to get started.
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