I wouldn't mind RTO so much if the cities where most tech jobs are were affordable. I'd rather be a millwright in my middle-of-nowhere mining town with a 10 minute commute in a 250k house versus a software developer with an hour long commute and a million dollar mortgage in big-metropolis. For now, I am making hay while the sun is shining and getting the best of both worlds while squirreling away as much cash as possible.
They should have leaned into becoming a developer community (the developer community) instead of focusing on Q&A. StackOverflow jobs were a great resource. Add an ad-hoc discussion forum and chat and it would have be great, like the modern IRC.
Disagree, the Q&A format is good, but the moderation isn't.
Instead of current practice, they should make a separate "hall of fame" Q&As that meet their standard, and no more "too broad" "duplicated" closed questions.
Only close / deletes questions that aren't relevant, like jokes and out of topics (careers) questions.
I am nobody important living in rural middle of nowhere, but visited SF twice for work, and it was the most horrific city I have ever been to. I am a big man and didn't feel very safe.
About 20 years ago I was visiting SF for work and, in a moment of weakness, let someone else book me a hotel - they booked me into a rather rough hotel on Geary. When I got into a taxi at the airport the driver said "Do you really want to go there?".
Grass is greener and so forth but as a Canadian I find our current government paternalistic, pandering, reactive, and stifling. Not every problem should be solved by the sledgehammer of our public service, regulation, and bureaucracy, all of which are highly inefficient and wasteful. It's tax season - I pay nearly half my wages to the government in income tax - all so they can redistribute it to those who they deem worthy and unworthy (similar how to they might deem some content harmful and other content unharmful). Let me make my own decisions!
From what I can tell, the opposition party is paradoxically for the also questionable proposal to hold porn sites accountable for minors accessing them, but not the Online Harms one.
I recently had a fake account follow me where they replaced the letter L with an I in the user name. Whatever font Twitter website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the difference. The fake account looks 100% the same as the real, even has thousands of 'followers'. I reported it, and it is still up.
It is unreal to me that the platform hasn't developed a way to automatically deal with fake accounts like this. Just check to see if the profile image is the same!?
I had a fake Yann LeCun (Meta's AI chief) follow me. It looked and read like the real thing. I was happy about it for a couple of days until I realized it was fake. It fooled a lot of people. I didn't report it because obviously Musk doesn't care.
I can't imagine working for Twitter, in a position to fix things like this, and having to listen to Musk tell me to 'stay the course'. I know that everyone has a price, so their salary must be insanely good.
I suspect that only the true believers are left. There were _so_ many actions and warning signs over the last year I can’t imagine anyone thinking it was a good/stable place to work unless they really liked Musk.
I think there's still a bunch of people who have an audience and don't really care about the drama. They're there not to engage, or sell anything, but just to use it as a broadcast medium. But yes why would I ever talk to anyone there? I can just use nitter to read my neets and call it good.
For creators, I’ve heard other services offer much more useful interaction per follower, which would mean either Twitter followers often aren’t shown posts of a large cube of followers don’t care (likely bots).
I don’t think Musks behavior and obvious preferences should be ignored. But even without that it sounds like it’s dead at the core and more people figure it out every day.
I can't imagine the hell it must be to be stuck this way at X. Can you imagine being the engineer that gets the email "Elon wants Séamas O’Reilly suspended because he said some rude things about X" and you happen to be Irish?
Journalist says he finds it ‘surreal’ to have account on X suspended after writing critique of platform
Dunno how “new” it is… I’ve definitely got a big price difference and I’m pretty sure others will to…
Twitter, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring… all the non space Musk corps…. Quarter million if I don’t have to move from Australia, half million to a million depending on where I was going if it requires moving to the USA… I’d do it… but I’d basically have the resignation letter already drafted from day one…
For the rockets… I’d probably be happy with their normal pay offer… not being a US citizen basically makes it impossible for me to apply for a job with SpaceX so I’d take what I could get lol… and since Elon is clearly just glued to his phone tweeting… it’s not going to be the Elon show… Gwynne Shotwell is running the company like a level headed and competent management executive, the place is full of competent engineers who seem like pretty well adjusted people when they talk about their experiences after leaving, and they all seem to leave for normal reasons…
Was the fact this was not as significant an issue due to Dorsey and then Agrawal being really good moderators as individuals?
Or do you think maybe business leaders are accountable for the behavior of the system beneath them, especially when they personally overhauled exactly the system in question?
> Whatever font Twitter website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the difference.
Doesn’t it? When I view the profiles you listed (before that horrible login wall pops up), the ‘I’ is of the crossbar variety, and the ‘l’ has a finial, making the characters visibly different. In fact, I recall that Twitter started using that font (which also visually distinguishes 0 and O) after the Musk takeover as an anti‐spoofing measure. Spoofed usernames were completely impossible to detect before the font was changed.
Sure enough, 17 new bot followers today after blocking 14 only a few days ago. There's precisely zero reason any legit person should be following my entirely passive, unengaged account. Twitter truly is a cesspool.
It's interesting to me how hot and cold descriptions are of Twitter. You get posts like these, but then someone chimes in about how much better the conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over.
I'm not on Twitter so i can't really make sense of it. I feel like i see more negative than positive.. but still.. it's bizarre to me that there's people in both camps. More than likely some of them are biased.. but still, i find it "interesting".
There are a lot of people for whom everything Musk touches is the worst thing ever created, then a lot of people for whom everything he touches is gold, then some people who just like a pretty reasonably stable social media site that's not overrun by bots and pay-for-engagement morons.
IMO it seems objectively true that the bot problem is worse than it's ever been. It's definitely objectively true that boosting paid-for comments above organically high-engagement comments means your signal:noise ratio is way, way worse.
It's not really clear at all to me, since, eg some people here are talking about getting several bot account follows daily, while for me it is the opposite, where I used to get a lot more bot follows than I have gotten over the past year or so (down from 4-5 per week to less than 1 per month).
On the other hand, I do see a lot more bots in replies (haven't had any reply to me yet though).
Overall my opinion has been slightly positive, my usage of the site is up and I'm hearing far less of people I follow (or those they follow) who have been unreasonably suspended or forced to delete tweets. It feels a lot "wilder" than before, but that's kind of what I enjoy anyway.
But I also don't really engage with political Twitter, I only use it to keep up on space related reporting and weeb stuff. The worst part has just been a lot more engagement farming through dumb statements from content creators who are circling the drain.
Yeah, I also engage little on Twitter, but so far I’ve seen no notable worsening of spam. When I clicked to see popular announcements (from HN or somewhere else) I also saw crypto spams and other stuff but from my perspective, it’s not much different from the situation on FB, for example. When I replied to some interesting GTP-chess posts, I still got replies clearly from humans (ask questions, do some follow up etc.). Thus, I don’t have a clear feeling whether it got better or worse.
The most striking change I have seen is the percentage of Musk’s tweets on my feed. It looks like he is everywhere now! That was definitely not the case before. But yeah, he is the owner and he likes to tweet :)
Please share some examples, I never see crypto scams anymore and pre-acquisition you could go in the replies of any popular account and it would be nothing but that. I'm guessing it's still there but I don't see it because I don't scroll for hours on end and verified posts being boosted at the top suppresses the visibility of any bots. Either way considering how bad the bot problem was before the change in ownership I feel like people have a very selective memory about this problem. I did get a handful of catfishing bot accounts following me a few months ago, but that's about the extent of what I've seen as far as spam goes recently and feeds are much cleaner than they were a couple years back. If you're comparing to how it used to be several years ago then it's a different story.
> It's definitely objectively true that boosting paid-for comments above organically high-engagement comments means your signal:noise ratio is way, way worse.
I'd like to see an objective proof for this alleged objective truth.
The bigger problem that I see constantly nowadays is cherry-picked information and people outright lying about a picture or video that they're sharing, but thankfully the community notes help a lot with that.
Go ahead and flag this comment for not being prefixed with "Grr I hate Elon Musk!"
I don't care about Musk one way or the other and I don't see any evidence to support your claim. The level of bot activity is no higher than before in terms of comments on tweets by accounts that I follow. But why bother reading comments anyway? That has always been mostly a waste of time.
To the Nazis that were kicked off or fled when Twitter had decent moderation to let them know Nazi conversations are flowing like wine and they're welcome back.
Rephrasing for people who will react negatively to that. You're making an important point but "dog whistle" assumes some things:
Those are people speaking abstractly about how much more free their speech is*.
I've never heard that common phrasing used, in any setting, to refer to a change in Twitter user makeup, or it becoming a kinder place. Whether I'm in the company of team left or team right, and coding as same team or opposite team.
* yr humble author refuses comment and does not endorse this viewpoint, or that anything changed on this front
I ended up in a really unfortunate position, pre-elon I never really "got" twitter and so barely used it. When he took over I'd log in every now and then to see how much it was plummeting, and in the process of doing so found the (ever shrinking) value of the platform, so I only started enjoying it when it started going downhill (for me at least).
I guess though that's less the platform or the people running it and more the users. There's nothing particularly unique about twitter that I like other than the other people who use it
Is this based on the kind of politics you are into? E.g. if you are from US you either have one side or the other where one side likes it and the other dislikes it?
For people with interests or opinions that were heavily censored by pre-Musk Twitter, the end of this censorship alone compensates for the countless new annoyances.
This seems vibes based. Twitter censored in the past and continues to censor. If you were in the out group and now are in the in group you’re happy even tho you were unlikely to have been censored
I've always found Twitter to be kind of dumb, most of my interaction with it is when twitter bullshit gets plastered over UFC PPVs or "news" articles report on what people say on twitter.
Censorship hasn't ended, it is simply impossible not to censor.
There is obviously illegal content (child porn, ...) and copyright infringement, you have to censor it or you will get sued and lose. Related is libel, doxxing, harassement, revenge porn, etc... that may also get you in legal trouble. And there are countries other than the US with different laws, for example many European countries ban some categories of "hate speech", and if you want to do business with them, you need to follow their laws.
And there is spam, if you let all of it pass, it will simply drown everything else.
And at some point, you may want to make money. Usually, you start with advertising, and if you want people to advertise on your platform, so you have to be at least somewhat socially acceptable. You also have to please payment processors, if you bring the wrong kind of people, Visa and the likes won't want to deal with you. On that last part, considering Elon Musk past, he may have workarounds, but the reason Visa has a problem with porn is not just because they are prudes. That's because there is a lot of fraud happening here, and it will happen too on a socially unacceptable network.
I somehow doubt that the audience that's going to make Twitter money with subscriptions or advertisers are Nazis, MAGA, Crypto Bros, and OF performers. But you do you.
Instagram is the same. They have bots to give you the feeling that you jumped right into a group of people, while it's actually a desert like environment.
And the stupid optimization tricks even legitimate users do to increase their clout: post several pictures - "Which one is your favorite? Comment below" so they get engagement points by the number of comments when it's just a stream of numbers that no-one (probably not even the creator) cares about.
I encountered a niche but common bug and figured out a workaround. Mentioned my blog post about it in the relevant GitHub issue discussion for the bug. Gets a low but steady amount of traffic to-date.
Laravel or Rails spitting out Blade or ERB templates respectively. As a solo dev you have everything you need in both ecosystems and you aren't doing 2x the work with a separate front end and back end.
This is because of Wordpress. Wordpress work pays less than application development typically. Writing an application with Symfony or Laravel pays market rate for an equivalent dev in your ecosystem of choice (Rails, Django, whatever).
Most applications that would leverage this (e.g. server-side rendered Rails or Laravel or Django) already have those templates as partials for their views, so leveraging the functionality is trivial.
