Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
Just saw the CEO of Substack celebrating traffic from X/Twitter shooting up thinking they stopped suppressing tweets with links[0]. Actually, this traffic is because now any time you open a tweet with a link, the in-app webview loads in the background, and displays when you press the link.
I run an ecom store that gets a lot of its customers from Twitter. I was also shocked to see my traffic double or triple overnight and thought the algorithm had blessed me and my business. Soon realized what was actually happening. Thought other traffic-monitors might appreciate this explanation.
Meanwhile Nikita Bier is pretending they never suppressed tweets with links to begin with, offering the alternative explanation: "a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and people forget to Like or Reply. So X doesn't get a clear signal whether the content is any good"[1]. A bit of a rewriting of history since Elon and his mom both tweeted about how it wasn't fair to use his platform to promote other links/platforms, even banning people who shared profiles of other social networks (including Paul Graham for a period). They suppressed all links shortly after.
[0] https://x.com/cjgbest/status/1985464687350485092
[1] https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1979994223224209709
I've been a long-time Twitter user. I don't hate Elon, so when he bought it I was cautiously optimistic.
I deactivated last week. The platform is bad and getting worse. It's scammy and spammy. Everything is designed around garbage engagement, so that the X team can brag about how good the product is doing.
Nobody wants a damn web view. If I'm clicking off to a link, I may want to click to another app and back in and still be where it was... If it's in a webview that's gone as soon as I click out. Yes, you can open in Chrome or whatever, open in a browser, but that's a pain in the ass to do an the time. I hate web views, in all forms.
I clicked a link in IG once and and it opened via a webveiw. it was one of those "give us your email for a discount" popups so I put in "mark@aol.com" and at a later date, IG asked if I wanted to associate that email with my account (or something along those lines). I tend to take the extra step to "open in native browser" whenever webveiws popup
In the settings you can configure to open in the configured external browser. I recently switched phones, so had to adjust several apps for this. It's a pain and would be nice if it was a global setting to always open links in the browser.
You know what to do..... ')
Why would the web view be gone after you've multi tasked? On my phone the web view stays open inside the parent app.
idk but I’ve definitely experienced this. Presumably it’s a bug.
Since we're doing PSAs, isn't it also now just a completely broken platform on mobile for everyone who isn't logged in?
> Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another shot.
This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error, does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb oversight in the funnel
Serious question: Why doesn't Google de-rank content that requires a login? I remember they used to claim they did but they clearly do not anymore.
That would be equivalent to demonetizing the entire web. Free content would win out over paid content regardless of quality. As the old adage goes, "when you're getting something for free, you're the product being sold." Only sites making money by, shall we say, "indirect" means would be able to survive. A search engine which prioritizes free content over paid would become nothing but a propaganda engine.
Because people can get a login. If the best quality result is behind a login and a paywall, I still want it to be the first result. Only quality should decide ranking.
Well I sure don't
No, it's also completely broken on desktop. Still have one or two friends who insist on sending twitter links. I don't click.
remember when part of the commentary was "ha! twitter fired one bajllion people and it's still operating fine". I keep seeing errors, much more than in the flying whale era, just now they appear to be in the frontend.
I remember that, people were convinced that twitter had a load of woke lib employees or something
I don't?
Always been like that. Twitter, Instagram, ... None of those platforms have usable UX if you're not logged in.
This is not true, this change is a recent phenomenon, I believe it came into effect sometime around 2021-2023 (maybe earlier even). I believe it changed when OpenAI showed the value of data.
Before, there was no problem using Instagram or Twitter while not logged in. Now there is a dark pattern that forces you to create an account, or log in.
My recollection is that this happened pretty much immediately after Twitter became X.
This is my recollection as well when they all realized they were feeding the bots that the free use became broken
That’s roughly when I stopped opening Twitter links, I still sometimes see posts from that platform, but mostly just as screenshots and with the discussions elsewhere. I don’t care for their dark patterns.
Instagram's been a pita to use without a login for years, they've recently got even worse though.
Instagram has always redirected me to a login page. Twitter only did after Elon and his friends went batshit ruining the website.
Following an Insta link gives me a dismissible login modal, but still shows the linked page when dismissed. Following any link becomes login only unless you right click to open link in new. Now it does the same previous behavior. I don’t use Insta, only when every now and then someone sends me a link with what looks like might be some other interesting post, but the game becomes boring and and I just close the tab
People already knew the value of data long before LLMs were popularised and web scraping has been a thing since the very beginnings of the web.
Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.
Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the same dark patterns you described too.
False. You used to be able to read Twitter fine without being logged in
[dead]
When was that? Already pre-Elon it was terrible.
Sorry, are you actually five years old? Until just a few years ago Twitter was entirely open. You could view any and all public tweets, replies, threads. All exactly like you were logged in. Their APIs were open and you could literally plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users on the actual planet in real time into your own application.
Actually, you definitely could not plug the entire stream of all tweets from all users in real time into your own application (without huge cost). You only would ever see a subset of tweets via twitters API's and search results, if you wanted the full thing you had to pay for 'the firehose' which was very expensive.
No, I'm with GP: Most of the time I'd just get errors and retries that don't work, even years before Elon. I also never had an account there and assumed it had something to do with that.
From UI perspective you are right, but not for APIs.
The APIs definitly used to be open enough that you could hit a "Generate token", hit one endpoint with cURL and then receive a firehose of all public tweets from that moment on, no reviews or validation at all, all you needed was an account + token.
I think this is a huge reason for the initial popularity, because it was trivial to build really fun experiences on top of that, until they cut it off for whatever reason (guessing money, one way or another).
At the same time, you could also view tweets without being logged in, and you saw replies too.
Some years ago you could even subscribe to an RSS feed for each user.
Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
And if you click on an account you just get top posts of all time instead of a chronological feed, so it's impossible to even find the context while being logged off.
Here's me complaining[1] about the login walls way back in 2021, this was before the Elon takeover.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365
Edit: Some more posts -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
Both are correct, at least according to my memory: you used to be able to read tweets without an account, but that stopped, and it stopped before Musk took over.
There were similar trends at other social media sites that happened around the same time.
That's a completely unrelated issue. Once someone sent you a link to a tweet, you could read it.
Is it unrelated? From the parent comment:
> Come on, pre-Elon you could click on a Twitter link and read the entire thread as well as the replies, now you just get a single tweet with no context above/below.
I don't want to nitpick stupid shit like this mate. But my point was to emphasise that Twitter had been going downhill before the takeover.
(And fact that it was always a toxic cesspool regardless of who owned it, but that's a different matter altogether)
Interesting; if you'd have asked me when Elon took over I'd have said something around 2020-2022. Probably why everyone assumes it's a result of him
Instagram explicitly tells you need to be logged in. Twitter/X just appears to be broken
Obviously wrong. The typical user-hostile thing isn't this dumb, you'd see a teaser that's probably vaguely sexual and get some "sign up for the full experience" prodding. Literally any 2-person startup that's a week old would do better than this at being thirsty and awful
Twitter never worked on my on desktop without account since Elon took over. It came down to security settings not allowing 3rd party cookies. If you allow it, it loads up.
change the url to xcancel.com
or nitter.net
This past week I rarely see quoted tweets now in the main timeline, it just says not available. So something about viewing RT is broken.
It's been broken for anyone not logged in since Elon turned a bunch of servers off. It costs too much to make Twitter freely available. If users who weren't logged in could see the site it would crash constantly.
Not really sure how that's possibly true considering CDN caching exists
I find it so sad that Twitter still gets traffic at all. Even if we put aside the super shady content on this platform (free speech, lol), the app, either on the web or mobile, has a sub-par user experience.
I wish all the devs that I respect were using another platform.
X has a lock on live information that no one else has figured out yet not from a technical perspective but from an adoption perspective.
Well, there are platforms that did figure it out, but it's quite fractured. For US, you have Bluesky and Fediverse (Flipboard, Mastodon). In Ukraine, you can use Threads. Germany seems to love Bluesky and Mastodon, given the amount of independent Personal Data Servers and Mastodon instances located there.
Who is using Bluesky in the US?
Whenever something big happens I keep getting x.com links from friends. Is it just my friends?
I am.... For what it's worth.
There are a few old FinTwit people who have migrated over. Mark Dow, IvanTheK. It works for me.
And Mastodon works too, once I had customised my feed. There are a lot of makers on it, and Cory Doctorow. I did have to filter out the "activists", but twitter has the same activist problem.
Believe me, you can live without Twitter.
> Who is using Bluesky in the US?
A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness).
> Is it just my friends?
If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely.
I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a year ago.
It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
My government has been posting a lot of information (weather alerts, road works, etc.) on their own, dedicated Mastodon instance. They don't really advertise it, but it's good they have a platform to publish live information to in case the Americans continue to get weirder.
It's network effect, same as Facebook
The app consistently shows me things that I want to see from the social circle around the people I follow and the topics they talk about. Alternative platforms like Threads are worse at this; the platform I hear the most about, Bluesky, brags about not having this. Maybe the Twitter experience varies by which topics you are interested in, you might get served more slop the more mainstream topics you follow. But the reason I have not quit due to unusability is because there isn't any unusability.
BlueSky brags about not having what, exactly? Nazis?
There was a real attempt earlier this year to move to BlueSky, but it's become even worse than Twitter for different reasons.
BlueSky's definitely gotten a lot of the technical side of things right (as compared to the fediverse, the complexity of which blocks mainstream adoption). Unfortunately, it's also now an incredibly unpleasant place to be unless you want to swim in constant political ragebait. Twitter also has a mountain of awful shit, but for whatever reason I've been able to curate my feed enough that I don't usually see it.
They're both mostly unpleasant, and we'd all probably be better off not using either, but I still find myself going back to Twitter because there's nothing better. Same way I feel about Reddit, honestly.
I would try again, but not use discover, and aggressively mute/block.
Interesting, BlueSky's non-algorithmic feed makes it really easy to avoid political ragebait and focus on tech accounts imo
Really depends on who you're following
I'd love to give it another try and be proven wrong. At the beginning it felt like "old Twitter", before it became mainstream, because it was almost entirely software engineers who had left Twitter. After Trump took office it felt like a constant deluge of hand-wringing and people shaking their fists at clouds, and it was tough to immerse myself in it.
Make sure you stick to your "Following" feed and not "Discover" or even the feed dedicated to what your friends are into
[flagged]
If you think that true "free speech" is possible on any platform with an algorithmic feed, I have a bridge to sell you.
Maybe MechaHitler wouldn't have happened.
The algorithm is a mirror: it show more of what you interact with. You see “shady content” because you pay attention to it.
But you can also follow people and read only what they write, reply to them, and write yourself.
That isn't true. I signed up for a fresh account for a project I was working on. Despite following no-one and not having interacted with anything, all I was pushed were racists, bigots, and extremist political content.
Oh, and the owner's account.
The discussion over X is always the same:
"It's gone to hell"
"No, it just reflects your tastes"
"That's objectively false: create a new account and see what happens."
"..."
A whole lot of machine learning practitioners use X. Makes it difficult to avoid if you're interested in the news. It's definitely a network effect issue.
I find this a bit disingenuous.
If I visit a buffet looking for a healthy snack, but 90% of the dishes are fast food, then I'll probably spend a lot of time looking through the fast food, and may even eat some as the best worst option.
Similarly, I have found the overall content pool to have significantly worsened since Musk's takeover. The algorithm keeps serving me trash. It doesn't mean I want trash.
Open a private tab, navigate to x.com. All you see are heinous neonazis casually discussing the jewish question and fantasizing about race wars.
If you do that all you get is a login wall. Have you actually done this or is this what you imagine it to be?
Well, I can confirm that this is the case with a brand new account.
This seems like a fairly reasonable UX improvement. Unless I'm missing anything, it doesn't seem like this has nefarious intent, it's just there so that when a user clicks a link, they see the content as quickly as possible.
---
It's astonishing how quickly discussion disintegrates when Musk is mentioned on HN. He really is such a divisive figure, with incredibly polarised language both in support and against him.
Normal reasoned arguments are just absent here. Sometimes when two people disagree, they can still have a nuanced conversation/argument about it. But not about Musk.
There are some opinions in this thread that I vehemently disagree with, but it's not worth escalating by adding my opinion to the pile.
It reminds me of that phenomenon where you read the newspaper and notice an article in your domain of expertise and it's riddled with errors! Then you turn the page, read an article about something else, and completely trust it. You somehow didn't transfer the knowledge that the newspaper is inaccurate to the new domain.
It makes me wonder what other discussions on HN (and elsewhere) are completely devoid of nuance and reason, but I just don't notice it.
Preloading links is often avoided because it creates a wide range of issues. Using up newspapers free stories a month on articles users never see etc. Speed just isn’t that useful by comparison.
Incompetence is obviously still a possibility, but the likely intent overcoming such issues is to make X seem to generate more traffic and thus appear to be more relevant.
I hadn't considered this.
> It's intriguing how normal reasoned arguments are just absent here
No 'reasoned arguments' were provided in your take. I'll give you one against this though -- it's all fun and games until you end up on a list because of Musk's UX.
How are you supposed to have a "nuanced discussion" about a guy doing literal Hitler salutes in public?
I’m just happy they got rid of the system web view and replaced it with the one which they can inject their own JavaScript into. Bonus points that it covers the thing I want to read and I can’t turn it off. Truly, a masterpiece of engineering from the guy whose entire schtick was coming up with was to boost engagement from kids.
What about links to malware or other illegal content that will be downloaded without me clicking on it...?
Is it only in the app, or also with the browser?
Crazy.
If you link to a page with ads on it, will that webview load count as an ad impression?
Again, anyone still using Twitter should know they are contributing to the richest man in the world actively pushing to disrupt the core fabric of our society.
I don’t have the same take, but the algorithm and site is so broken, the patterns so dark, that I’m down to maybe 5 minutes of X a week at best.
Everything is posted to get views, even from the more quality people. It’s ironic that I hear about “brainrot” the most on X, but it’s full of brainrot masquerading as valuable information.
I fully agree with your stance on Elon but I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit. I've tried Bluesky and although I am very left-leaning on sociocultural topics I just find them too... annoying over there. (I'm closer to neoliberal on economic topics and that's also a bit of an issue there. And I like AI and they pretty much all deeply hate AI.)
> I simply find Twitter too useful for too many things to quit
Like what precisely? Infosec twitter is gone, science twitter is long dead. Visiting my timeline in non-algorithmic mode yields a post from months ago. In algo mode it's just ads and rage-bait.
Building rockets, moon bases, making fossil fuels less critical… yes, I agree
Literal moon shots, while he contributes meaningfully to worsening conditions on Earth. His dismantling of USAID will have a more consequential effect than 90% of his fever dreams ever will.
Not only that, but his @grok bot is now completely unhinged too (the public version) spewing an even more polarized version of his exact views without any ability to consider new information:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632336
His only legacy will be the deaths of millions. Fifty years from now he will be known for nothing else, his other projects merely footnotes. Joining the esteemed ranks of Stalin, Mao, Leopold II, Hitler, Pol Pot.
"Consequential effects" to the pockets of the billionaires running public contractors that embezzle all the money, perhaps.
But hey, maybe those gay Nicaraguan's really needed that $3 million. Perhaps another $70 trillion to Israel, just to round it off.
On October 22nd the US national debt passed $38 trillion, a record number. That is the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars in debt outside of the COVID-19 pandemic. We only hit $37 trillion in in August.
Further, unless you are in the top .1% of earners, or you live on tips (I somehow doubt there are many stippers on HN) your taxes will not decrease as a result of any of Trumps "cuts".
In short, you have been lied to and are celebrating unnecessary cruelty for the sake of cruelty which will save you personally $0.00 and which only further increases America's debts.
Worse the ridiculous tariffs are pushing us toward a recession that only AI investment has forestalled. AI investment now represents the single largest investment of capital in human history, and if that bubble bursts we will enter into what could potentially be the worst economic collapse in not only American history, but human history.
Sigh, these talking points are beyond expired. There’s no evidence DOGE has ever saved the government a notable amount of money, they just straight up lied about the value of things they were cancelling.
I understand having a favourable view of Musk in the past. But to continue to do so today is to put your hands over your ears and say “la la la la” while confronted with overwhelming evidence.
The effects of shutting down USAID are extremely clear. Kids are starving and dying:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12150160/
Even if you truly genuinely believe USAID must be shut down then you phase it out over, at minimum, months. Doing so overnight means you have made an active choice to kill people. If your response to that is to completely ignore the suffering and pull out some absurd right wing talking point then I truly worry for you.
"Kids are starving and dying"
Emotional blackmail paired with dismissive ad hominem had a good run, admittedly.
He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all to stay on X.
Starship will never get to the moon.
https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4
those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of us are holding our breath on that one.
What does he do except making fossil fuel MORE critical? What do you think rockets are powered with?
> making fossil fuels less critical
Tesla for years made billions by enabling others to pollute, and it still does so.
Every EV Musk sells enables more ICE cars to stay on the road.
If you want to drink the kool-aid thats fine, but the facts are not on your side.
Cutting food stamps. What's the point of a moon base if we can't even feed people?
Escape from pitchforks
Shooting the billionaires into outer space would make the world a better place.
Schumer isn't engineering anything lol
Republicans control all three branches the government.
Not the Senate. That takes 60 votes to end the democrat's filibuster, which is why the last dozen attempts by republicans to pass a clean CR with no changes to the current budget failed. (The last one yesterday[1] failed with 54 in favor 44 against. Three democrats voted with the republicans in that vote, still not enough.)
[1]: https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2025-10-03-senate-again-fa...
[flagged]
Next time the party in power should consider not burning its reconciliation power on handing tens of billions to create a new secret police.
thank you for acknowledging this is Schumer's shutdown
Either the democrats vote the budgets in which republicans have removed all healthcare funding and millions die of preventable diseases, or they don't and millions starve because republicans are illegally holding onto the money for food stamps. How is it on the democrats again?
You are ignoring the possibility of a CR, which would continue SNAP funding while allowing discussion on healthcare funding to continue.
Not only is SNAP already funded via emergency funds, the administration was just told to resume SNAP benefits and they are unsurprisingly doing the absolute minimum.
If congressional Republicans could guarantee all funding will continue under a CR, I bet the shutdown would be over by now. But they can't, because in July they ratified Trump's authority to cancel any appropriated funding he wants. When challenged on rescissions, the Speaker said they're going to continue regardless!
How are budget negotiations supposed to work if one of the sides won't even promise to honor the agreements made?
>Cutting food stamps.
How is Musk involved in the current budget debacle aside from being "republican"? It's easy to blame stuff on him when he was running DOGE, but since his falling out with trump blaming every cut on Musk is a tired and expired meme.
Given how much he contributed to the election outcome it hardly seems tired to blame him for the consequences.
Plus he's on Twitter every week publicly discussing how much he uses the platform to put his thumb on the scale of discourse towards his personal beliefs.
In what world is he not involved?
Actions speak to the character of a person. And some actions have long lasting consequences.
"He gave the federal government organizational cancer, but he left now so he's not to blame"
Americans will be living with Musk's legacy for decades.
It's not because he no longer works there that he doesn't have the exact same ideology. And now he's trying to push a Trump-like figure in the UK
What moon bases?
It's near the middle of Musk's pile of vaporware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_III
These don't exist.
They did say building, not built. Starship R&D work is… tough to deny.
Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware. Unless it actually exists, it's safe to assume that it never will.
I'm very much in the Musk hater category, but it really takes some doing to dismiss SpaceX as vaporware.
This is the problem with the dialogue around Musk. He's not 99% vaporware, he's 80-90% vaporware. That's problem enough.
In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his personal brand. This is not going to end well.
> Musk constantly promises to build things that never get built. He's 99% vaporware.
Absolutely laughable motivated reasoning. Hate the guy if you must, but claiming one of the most impactful business leaders in American history is "99% vaporware" makes you look silly.
Yet
More Musk vaporware.
That was 5-10-15 years ago Elon.
Is the implication here that the core fabric of our society isn't otherwise being disrupted, or that this particular disruption should be viewed as exceptionally egregious?
YSK, it feels like the implication of the framing of your question is that you're suggesting it doesn't matter and nobody should care.
The disruption is egregious. It is notable and worth pushing back against, even if you don't view it as "exceptional".
I am concerned with attacks on freedom, dignity, culture and national character. King Elmo of Twitter is "bad", but mild.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Nice triple play: whataboutism, false equivalence, and a red herring. All in a single sentence.
Not sure why it's so bad what the person wrote.
There are studies showing how objectively bad Facebook and Instagram are for people, leading them to depression and so on. Isn't this hitting the fabric of our society? Our youth has severe issues also because of Zuckeberg, probably even more than due to Musk.
Or is the fabric of our society only what's convenient to pick, such as whatever you guys dislike about Elon?
Social media the way these companies run it is s** from all point of views.
Remind me again what is the subject of this thread?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Ok then how about we stay all in topic and focus on the "links will now be open in background when tweets are shown"? Instead of focusing on the rich billionaire who wants to conquer the world....
BTW: it's normal to diverge or even say "also xyz does that s*". The issue is bigger than X, and more related to social media itself. As long as there is some respect or some argument...
Agree with your overall thrust but there are degrees here, Musk performing a Nazi salute and pushing for fascist party takeovers globally makes him a larger target than Zuck (who seems more worried about his future MMA career than any societal impact, positive or negative).
I prefer a guy that performs a show like Musk to a Zuckeberg that is leading our youth to a very bad path - probably worse is only Tiktok. And all for some coins.
At least the guy says what he thinks, which you might agree or disagree with. And yes, in the meantime he is getting richer.
Not sure what's bad about that.
> Not sure what's bad about that.
Parent commenter pointed out Musk performing a nazi salute during the inauguration of the President of the United States, and supporting fascist party takeovers across the world. If you are not sure what is bad about that, then maybe you should just admit to having nazi inclinations?
[flagged]
On a related topic, I've been following with some amusement the outrage on Reddit/r/Grok because Grok will no longer make porn. Apparently Grok was trained on all the NSFW material on X and Twitter before it intentionally so Grok could have a "spicy" mode. And spicy it was. Some of the stuff it made was really good and people loved it. But (allegedly) Musk changed his mind to go after enterprise and government accounts so spicy mode was killed and now there a lot of angry users complaining on Reddit.
My interest is this: It appears that it's not possible to over-ride the training effectively since NSFW material bleeds into normal image requests. Musk had this problem before trying to over-ride Grok's training, so at one point said he would have to retrain Grok. It's interesting to me that LLMs can't be steered effectively, which makes me wonder if they can ever really be aligned ("safe")
I mean isn't this just considered data poisoning?
The training data was considered good by Musk to start with, so he could have spicy mode, but he changed his mind and now Grok is considered poisoned with porn. My question is, can that be fixed or does he have to start over again?
There was research on LLMs training and distillation that if two models have a similar architecture (probably the case for Xai) the "master" model will distill knowledge to the model even if its not in the distillation data. So they probably need to train a new model from scratch.
(sorry i don't remember the name but there was an example with a model liking howl to showcase this)
That's precisely what Wechat is doing. Most chinese "mega apps" do this.
Elon absolutely on his track to copy this important feature [1]
The webview works as a traffic faucet. Elon can turn it on or off for every third-party site, you know, for "Internet safety".
My take:
Next step is X.com proprietary APIs inside the Webview, like payment and everything.
The ultimate goal is a "mini-app" framework that use PWA-like techs to run everything based on the Webview and circumvent Appstore.
And last a phone that runs the "mini-app" framework because why not, as an "AI edge node" like Elon recently proposed.
[1]: https://x.com/danmurrays/status/1683446630245187584
In January the (now former) CEO announced the X Money payment platform will debut "later this year". "Yaccarino says the Visa partnership is the “first of many big announcements” that will be made about X Money this year." https://www.theverge.com/news/599137/x-money-payments-servic... I don't remember any other big announcements.
If there was ever a good reason to stop using Twitter, this is it.
I don't think this would even make it into top 10 good reasons to stop using Twitter.
A crazy ass billionaire trying to develop an "everything" app seems like a pretty damn good reason to run the other direction. I wouldn't want anyone controlling an app like that, much less Elon fucking Musk.
the same story applies to Wechat. Pony Ma was crazy rich for QQ and games already, he created another Wechat. Lots of ppl tried to boycott it, but network effect forced everyone to use it.
I'm fascinated with the number of users of this site who seem disproportionately invested in getting people to stop using Twitter.
Yeah it's so fascinating that people want an open internet rather than a small group of billionaires and big tech companies controlling everything. Truly bizarre.
"open"?
That's an interesting word to describe a platform that was previously the undisputed playground of Feds and NGOs.
What does this mean?
Pre-2022, Twitter was subject to heavy editorial oversight from D.C. and northern VA.
Censorship and propaganda at breathtaking scale.
This is a good place to start: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/
I like how you complain about "propaganda at breathtaking scale" and you fell for the Twitter Files, which was... precisely that.
Please show your work.
Musk's own lawyers did the work for us.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyers/in...
> “Nothing in the new materials shows any governmental actor compelling or even discussing any content-moderation action with respect to Trump” and others participating in the suit, Twitter argued.
> The communications unearthed as part of the Twitter Files do not show coercion, Twitter’s lawyers wrote, “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove content—let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”
> “Instead,” the filing continued, the communications “show that the [FBI] issued general updates about their efforts to combat foreign interference in the 2020 election.” The evidence outlined by Twitter’s lawyers is consistent with public statements by former Twitter employees and the FBI, along with prior CNN analysis of the Twitter Files.
> Altogether, the filing by Musk’s own corporate lawyers represents a step-by-step refutation of some of the most explosive claims to come out of the Twitter Files and that in some cases have been promoted by Musk himself.
Don't worry, though. Under Musk's leadership, free speech is well protected. Just ask https://x.com/elonjet, which Musk specifically promised (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456) to protect! They would never ban a news story just because it was from a hack! (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255298/elon-musk-x-bloc...)
Yes - it wasn't with respect to Trump. It was silencing negative stories about Biden and his son that was the proximate issue, and the general silencing of mostly Republican voices by mostly Democrat voices (though sometimes it went the other way, it was much less frequent[0].
[0] https://twitterfiles.substack.com/p/1-thread-the-twitter-fil...
If that were the reason we'd see even 10% of the same fervor for cutting out AWS or Cloudflare but we don't
the webview messes up tokens and passwords managers so I don't see this happening. The US is too culturally different to have mega apps. In Asia their supermarkets also have a lot of information in the menu for example.
Replace "mega app" with "platform" and that's pretty much what Apple and Google are, Apple especially.
no I will not replace mega app with platform, WeChat app is totally different from the App Store.
In and Out has 5 menu items, similar to an app made in the USA, not too many features
A Chinese market can list 50 items similar to WeChat that has 50 different features.
The culture is reflected in the app design.
source: https://digitalcreative.cn/blog/how-china-ux-is-different
The App Store moved the clusters of icons to the home screen, but the messages and wallet app are right next to each other, and tightly integrated. You get to re-arrange and hide most icons, at least.
The UI looks different (information density etc.) but in the end it's still a collection of external applications neatly wrapped inside a platform with strong walls and a strict gatekeeper, with a basic suite available by default. In China, you could ditch most of iOS if you could trick a phone into launching directly into WeChat.
[dead]
Who in their right mind would give X/Elon money or even enable photos or contacts access on their phone. At some point is just another money laundering thing for our (least) favourite billionaire.
Totally. Mini apps and mini-app stores are already developing in crypto (Farcaster, World,..) and the approach may well become the primary way to deploy advanced and secure apps going forward.
Does this mean an attacker can turn any impression into any GET request?
It'd be an interesting way to count how many impressions your tweets get: add a URL to every tweet, put a tracking "pixel" in the webpage (assuming the webview loads all assets; if not, then just add the "pixel' URL to the tweet..
Not sure how much of an attack that is. FWIW the preloading is nice as a user.
Is the request coming from the user's IP or via a Twitter proxy?
As a plain webview would mean that you can grab everyone's details.
Nikita should be ashamed of how BAD the android X app is.
It seems like they changed the strategy and enhanced UX. Feels like now there would a lot of worthless traffic in the web
I understand the rationale and I am happy for the authors and I think the distribution will be way better.
As a user I like to get out as soon as I click because I can trace back the link and I can do clipping or bookmark in my browser.
Why are you using twitter for anything at this stage?
It's still the most interesting platform for AI
I block X and related domains at the router.
what do you recommend instead?
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
What's 'reddit tier' about it? As opposed to your contribution it was at least on topic.
Melodramatic + use of profanity generally indicates an appeal to emotion rather than a rational well-thought out statement. A rant about the CEO is not on topic.
[dead]
https://x.com/BernieSanders
https://x.com/AOC
*Pretend gasp* How could they?
I completely predicted this comment. Maybe give it five minutes and you'll figure it out. Or not. Hint: when you're a politician, you don't have much choice, no matter what your preferences are. But when you're an ordinary person, like you or me you actually have a choice.
Naturally, the comrades at the top are more equal than the rest of us.
It depends. There are other professions that also rely on Twitter for work. Granted it's a shell of its former self, but a better alternative is yet to emerge.
> when you're an ordinary person, like you or me you actually have a choice
To use a dead platform or an actual active one?
I don’t even follow politics on Twitter just video games and some fandoms but it’s actual alive compared to Bluesky where nothing happens basically. Especially true if you follow non-english content.
Until the media starts following other social media, politicians will be kind of forced to stay there, not for the reach on the platform itself, but because in regular medias, tweets are being given the same visibility as a book nowadays.
There's more than enough critical mass on other platforms that there's no excuse for them to still be on X, and it's a shame they stay there. Journalists would go to (for example) Bluesky if it were the only place they could get AOC dunking on the tycoons that they're obsessed with covering every utterance from.
Blue sky has only 5% as many users, and isn't growing fast.
Yes of course they're forced to. I just knew there would be some excuse for fascist billionaires and their supporters.
"To each according to his needs" works out really great when you are the one deciding who needs what.
Don't care, I'll go where the funny is. Simply amassing that much money makes one complicit in The System, effectively ceasing to be human and embodying the will of the money itself, so let's not pretend like Jack Dorsey is any different or better.
> so let's not pretend like Jack Dorsey is any different or better.
I wasn't.
[flagged]
Another example and incentive not to use apps and to be held hostage, when an equivalent web service is available. On Android, just use Hermit or some similar app to sandbox a webview of their webpage.
What bugs me is the sheer number of people, and organisations, who still link to images and video or '1/20' long screeds on twitter, while the next article on their own site is bitching about how bad twatter/owner/politics etc is. Seriously if a site, blog, forum etc you know ever links to twitter then just stop interaction with them, they're lazy mofos need to do their own groundwork.