This will eventually shift. There is legitimately very little reason to use X unless you're a Musk-stan. Case in point: I started using twitter regularly during the CA fires & blackouts in 2017. I was amazed at how quickly I could get a read on a situation and actual on the ground facts at near real-time speed.
For the Palisades fire, I'm struggling to make X nearly as useful as it was. There is a lot of random diatribe and speculation but on-the-ground facts just don't appear.
I chuckle at the argument that you're entering an echo chamber when you leave X.
News flash: X is already an echo chamber!
Maybe the "oh no don't leave for an echo chamber!" assertion is a case of people remembering the pre-X version of twitter, and comparing competitors to that - rather than what X is today. Or maybe it's a case of "boiling a frog," where people on X are actually unaware of what it has become.
Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber.
> Or maybe... it's actually just a bad faith argument by people who like the current X echo chamber.
I won't pretend to speak to the motivations of any HN users, but I've seen some of these conversations play out where someone invokes the concept of an echo chamber only when it means LGBTQIA+ people can just exist without being harassed. That's an undesirable outcome to those folks.
I would like to think HN is better than that, but more frequently in the past few months, I've been disappointed by commentators on this website, so I wouldn't put any money on that bet.
Echo chambers can be dangerous, but misinformation and unchecked bigotry are more dangerous. Whereas the consequences of an echo chamber are abstract, I can measure the consequences of the latter in deaths.
So my go-to question is simply, "What are your priorities?"
For real, those people just want to spew their hateful eliminatory rhetoric towards trans people, and asking them not to is somehow creating a left-wing echo chamber. I feel like I'm losing my mind.
Every major LA fire hashtag is a 10-1 ratio of political nonsense and engagement farming to actual content. Maybe 20-1. It's depressing to try to sift through for actual information. The LA local news was light-years more timely and informative than twitter.
Is there a personal reason you have to keep with it at all at that level? Not doubting you do, but I feel like people are generally addicted to keeping up with shit that affects their emotions and really doesn't need to.
The thread was about quitting X. I quit X because it was designed to make me chronically scroll through emotionally charged but irrelevant tidbits of information constantly. I'm not making an inherent value judgement about the fires, and perhaps it wasn't the best choice of subject to make a point about, but it's just that if it's not fires, it's always something else. If I'm not in LA and don't know anyone in LA, I can realistically do without moment to moment updates, even if I have sympathy for the sorrow they might be experiencing, but I'd also sure as hell hope that if I needed those updates, they would be available on a publicly accessible platform.
Saying I'm calling someone out though seems a bit of a reach.
Ya, I'd assume so, they just said they started using it regularly then, but not that they needed to, so I'd assume that'd be why, but it's not like LA people are the only ones chronically checking up on the situation.
I remember during covid and after when we had nearby wildfires. even during a mass shooting event a few years back how useful twitter was for realtime information sharing between public and agencies. There was a few years I'd regularly know things before radio/news picked them up. I also remember how during major world events twitter would explode in volume and reactions to the point third party systems would struggle (I once upon a time worked on one of those third party systems)
Now I struggle to find regular updates and half the accounts I used to follow are idle. By the time that third party twitter processor I had worked for shut down, the cadence of posts were so scheduled it was obviously driven by bots and not organic reactions. Even major world events would be gamed by bots as fast as real reactions which had significantly decreased on their own.
I haven't found a replacement to be fair, but I definitely see the enshittification of it from an incredibly useful short form broadcast channel to an engagement-gamified advertising megaphone.
It definitely doesn't predate the song, at least by my memory. (and fwiw, Wikipedia, Know Your Meme, Urban Dictionary, and Oxford English Dictionary all credit the song and have no references prior to that.)
For the Palisades fire, I'm struggling to make X nearly as useful as it was. There is a lot of random diatribe and speculation but on-the-ground facts just don't appear.
The juice is gone.