the worst change, the original sin IMO, of Elon's twitter was heavily elevating blue check accounts in replies. The first 100 replies to any big tweet being posts by people so dumb and unfunny they had to pay to get their replies up top completely ruined any sense of "conversation" on the site - ThreadSky

josephpolitano.bsky.social • 113 days ago

the worst change, the original sin IMO, of Elon's twitter was heavily elevating blue check accounts in replies. The first 100 replies to any big tweet being posts by people so dumb and unfunny they had to pay to get their replies up top completely ruined any sense of "conversation" on the site

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scolerkolo.bsky.social•113 days ago

and under that would be a swarm of bot accounts selling shitcoins

nickup.bsky.social•113 days ago

My personal grievance was the down ranking of links and substack and external content in general. That was why I went on Twitter!

bwarzy.bsky.social•113 days ago

Hard yes. It went from a place where people had organic thoughts to a place where people astroturfed the worst versions of themselves overnight when they made that change.

mavill.bsky.social•113 days ago

Better to live by the law of the "FIRST!!!"

bygonebegotrisk.bsky.social•113 days ago

Yep. I would scroll down until I got to the first non-blue check reply and start reading from there. For a really famous person, I'd scroll down for awhile and eventually give up.

ennui.org•113 days ago

You mean swapping out blue checks verification for subscription. The reply boosting doesn't happen without that swap.

bribleck.bsky.social•113 days ago

This change suggested to me that the new leaders of the Bad Place did not understand social media as multilateral exchange. I explain the change by comparing to Reddit that prioritizes comments by upvotes.

batess.bsky.social•113 days ago

Correct, and even people with high follower count that weren't blue checks had both posts and replies buried. The equivalent of making the flying experience so miserable you happily paid to get out of steerage.

mikewilsoninoz.bsky.social•113 days ago

Thanks. summed it up perfectly.

syntheticus.bsky.social•113 days ago

I started paying for Twitter just so I could be up there as a liberal

presidentgoku.bsky.social•113 days ago

imo the worst change was the racism and sexism

jopawiz.bsky.social•113 days ago

I used to really enjoy reading the replies. This just made it into a tedious chore to the point where I just didn't bother anymore... 🙄

irishenglish.bsky.social•113 days ago

It’s giving off Calico Cut Pants.

josephpolitano.bsky.social•113 days ago

used to be you would click on a tweet about immigration and the first reply would be Ryan Radia using ACS data to track the average age of Cuban immigrants to the US over time. Now it's a 3-like reply from gothic_maga_88 telling you they relish the idea of deporting 3rd-generation Filipino-Americans

andrewtk.bsky.social•112 days ago

aaronsojourner.org•113 days ago

Me realizing I miss Ryan.

tripencrypt.bsky.social•113 days ago

This miscreant? @ryanradia.com

aaronsojourner.org•113 days ago

Yes, that @ryanradia.com

ohschiesse.bsky.social•113 days ago

Just sad that blue checks are a shitty subscription instead of being used to be the "definitive identity" of something

presidentgoku.bsky.social•113 days ago

yeah, paid verification really would have been fine without the prioritization

nextdoorsv.bsky.social•113 days ago

It’s hilarious how Musk genuinely thought that credit cards would stop Russian bots

https://www.threads.net/@mac_ryan_/post/DBmFiyrvcZK?xmt=AQGzdrudqOOTr2mmkyMuM5skZqUbsvDHztPBqIYzgFmdPQ

andrewjdavison.com•113 days ago

I was reply guy on Twitter for a while… before it got really bad.

Used be fun trying to get witty one-liners to land as quickly as possible.

Made $18 in the process! Then the bots came in…

cursed.monster•113 days ago

tbh the worst change was in subverting the verification system in the first place, but this was certainly one of the worst follow-on effects.

andykgreen.bsky.social•113 days ago

Also made it totally pointless to reply to things as a small account. Nobody would ever see it beneath the pile of blue check replies

tom4okstate.bsky.social•113 days ago

Completely. Also having ads included in replies.

magicrabbit.bsky.social•113 days ago

The revenue sharing program exacerbated this. Just tons of accounts copying non-blue checkmark comments and reposting them, or replying with one word or nonsense answers to farm engagement and make money.

magicrabbit.bsky.social•113 days ago

It seemed like a lot of them were Indian and I can’t fault the spammers for trying to take advantage of a potential income stream and make some easy money, but the reply section on any viral tweet from the past two years is now an object lesson in why that arrangement helped ruin the platform.

green496.bsky.social•113 days ago

💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯

punt1.bsky.social•113 days ago

even when it wasnt actively abhorrent replies, there were also 100 that were just 'wow' or emojis or ai generated text. couldn't even enjoy sports highlight clips anymore

christophmolnar.bsky.social•113 days ago

Another change for the worse that affected me as a self-employed writer was the heavy downvoting of links

timkellogg.me•113 days ago

it is unfathomably dumb that you can’t simply and clearly paste a link, you gotta go through this long drawn out dance of alluding to the idea that you might have an interesting link and then, somewhere, subtly, you pop in the real link in the hardest possible place to find it

christophmolnar.bsky.social•112 days ago

Yeah, and then people comment below "Why don't you just post the link"

viet.bsky.social•113 days ago

Yes but imo Joey if it did one thing, it prepared us for the fact that we don’t rely on verification to believe in an account’s credibility on here

hyperlexic.bsky.social•113 days ago

this is what caused me to go cold turkey ~1 year ago. I think there was a precipitating incident, I don’t remember what, but the basic sense of “this app is now for these assholes” was the main feeling.

atcl.bsky.social•113 days ago

Getting rid of the headlines on URL preview cards was what got me to delete the Twitter app on my phone. I guess that dumb experiment only lasted a month, but by the time it ended I think the bluecheck debacle was in full swing.

claiborne.bsky.social•113 days ago

distilled to its sin form, it was envy--Elon's circle was filled with people jealous of the blue checks, the historic Twitter elite, the one social circle staring them in the face that they couldn't buy their way into

and they thought everyone else thought the same way they did

lowrhoufo.bsky.social•113 days ago

It's interesting that it nuked big accounts immediately and then the small ones only later trickled over. I think that's at the root of why a lot of large accounts over here didn't get why a lot of people still stayed

hmibird.bsky.social•113 days ago

This plus the bot problem getting objectively worse. I had a lurker account on Twitter, never posted. Before Elon I got no follow requests as you’d expect. A few months after Elon I have two dozen requests from very obviously bots…

mclean.bsky.social•113 days ago

That and removing the threaded reply view. And suppressing hyperlinks. And eliminating almost all trust and safety moderation.

unavaleable.bsky.social•113 days ago

absolutely poison

brr.bsky.social•113 days ago

it made the app useless for any sort of discussion

frosst.bsky.social•113 days ago

This will sound crazy, but go to the replies of a Fortnite content page like IFireMonkey and look at the replies of their tweets, especially ones specific things (i.e. not the automated posts about the daily shop rotation). It’s horrible

josephpolitano.bsky.social•113 days ago

amazing discussion going on here lol

frosst.bsky.social•113 days ago

I was trying to find the screenshot but can’t, I was reading about a Lego set coming to the Fortnite shop and one of the replies just said “This Lego can be bought”. I know Elon has an echo chamber but nobody in his inner circle willing to admit the bots exist is crazy

nerdyorc.bsky.social•113 days ago

I remember some celebrity died, I don't remember who, and the replies to a CNN tweet on it were all bots sharing crypto and MAGA bullshit

brianromanchuk.bsky.social•113 days ago

Replacing the clumsy verification for blue checks to being paid was perhaps an even originaler sin.

But yeah, blue check boosting and crushing (Substack) links are my main observed problems with that site.

michaelchirico.bsky.social•113 days ago

🤣🤣🤣 @friend

andycraig.bsky.social•113 days ago

It was also the main mechanism of putting such a thumb on the scale for far-right chuds.

jonpennington.bsky.social•113 days ago

But Elon is dumb and unfunny. So in a way, he was elevating his own people.

mattherdman.bsky.social•113 days ago

Close tie with deboosting all links, when “finding interesting links” is my favorite use case for twitter

doctoracularf.bsky.social•113 days ago

Moreso than any real sense of moral imperative I quit just because I was sick of scrolling past blue checks running one grift or another

jawcounty.bsky.social•113 days ago

Irony is the “verified” accounts became the least trustworthy

jawcounty.bsky.social•113 days ago

Replies were the best part and now it is the worst

cliffordbanes.bsky.social•113 days ago

If the goal instead was to destroy the toys of his enemies, the change was a rousing success.

He drove the blue checks off Twitter, turned the checkmark itself into a dunce cap people pay HIM for, renamed it to X and it is now functionally Gab.

Valleywag Delenda Est.

dspacefear.bsky.social•113 days ago

Probably also part of why anyone with an even remotely large account is noticing way higher engagement here. Why bother replying if you're going to be buried under 900 of the dumbest motherfuckers around? Unless you wanted to QT instead, might as well just move on.

dspacefear.bsky.social•113 days ago

The other half is just people excited over that new website smell, though.

waterclosetl.bsky.social•113 days ago

Plus the introduction of LLMs meant that bots started being better than replacement level blue checks, so if they said anything mildly interesting i assumed they were a bot

jmelville.science•113 days ago

the irony that Elob broke a free marketplace of ideas by making it pay-to-win

stephencsmith.bsky.social•113 days ago

I blocked so many blue checks in an effort to make Twitter work correctly. It was like trying to mop the ocean.

lantro.bsky.social•113 days ago

It worked for a month or two, but even with a blocker browser extension (it blocked anyone with a blue check unless I followed them) it didn’t even put a dent in those numbers, and I think I had something like 10k users blocked by the end.

duelingrecipes.bsky.social•113 days ago

I think it's the main reason the site is in decline

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