The not needing an account is obviously not minor, but honestly, the UI is just better, by a lot. I made a twitter account a while ago using one of those throw away email address sites, so I have an account that I don't care about that I can use for twitter....but the experience just sucks. I don't know how any stands it, even if they don't mind needing an account.
I remember the days that Bibliogram worked for Instagram. They've given up. A decade ago I could have an RSS feed for what my friends posted, besides the toxic short-form content of IG reels that everyone is now obsessed with post Meta acquisition and their battle to compete with Tiktok.
And that idiot, Zuck, thought he was getting a good deal when he poached former head of design, Alan Dye, from Apple. We were relieved to see him go. Our desktop OS is already making small improvements now that he's gone.
Context: the guy doesn't understand fundamentals of UX and has made MacOS worse for years.
Good UI makes it easier to be selective. social media owners dont want you to be selective, they are selling you to advertisers and influencers after all.
Zuckerberg and his minions have changes html and obfuscate it so much, it is impossible to block ads these days. They are worst than google. Imagine google decided every video will require widevine & there is no way to block ads just like twitch.
Last I was on the platform, they eventually added a tab for only chronological posts on the timeline a-la how IG used to work. But they gave no exposure to it, _and_ it completely hid the IG stories of your friends so nobody would want to use it in the first place.
The UI/UX is the main thing. I technically have an X-Twitter account that I rarely use, but loading plain HTML with a bit of JS beats loading a whole SPA experience just to read a post.
At that point though, it's like why. Reddit is, well, trash. It's barely worth visiting without an account, and if you're going to make me jump through hoops to visit, it's time to accept the message of "we don't want you here" and go somewhere else.
If you're browsing Reddit for its front page, yes, that's trash. But it can be a great source for getting information on narrow, specific topics on well-moderated subreddits filled with enthusiastic and obsessive people eager to share their knowledge. It's been very helpful for me when researching coffee grinders, refrigerators, solar battery backups, headphones, and other such things.
The reason to use it is that Reddit does provide the occasional answer to questions like "how to get a Samsung SCX 3400 to run on a Raspberry Pi" (etc.).
Now all that's missing is Chatlib, a self-hosted proxy for ChatGPT which makes it possible to a) query the service without leaving a personally identifiable trace and b) separate out the facts from the dreamt-up fiction. Using Redlib I at least get to see the original posts which makes it easier to separate fact from fiction.
I've been making money from reddit, and for about a decade and a half and at this point, why bother? It's basically drained and what remains is of zero value.
The same is and has been true for Reddit for a long time, the difference lies mostly in the ideological sauce flavouring these places, i.e. Little-endians vs. Big-endians. If you're a Reddit-endian you'll despise the Tube-endians and vice versa.
I could use it without an account and know that any comment I clicked into would take me to the thread of posts under it without sponsored ads or posts.
There was a brief moment when smartphones first came out but the rest of the world's companies weren't taking them seriously yet that was a truly brilliant time and ever since then it's been nothing but downhill.
Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).
Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).
I think it's great. My feed is people posting tech/AI news, scientific publications, videos of rockets and self-driving cars, things made with coding agents etc. It's full of people who do meaningful work as well and you can see who they are.
Dark mode, ability to easily copy images, link to posts, see posts of interesting people by going to their profile. On top of that the feed algorithm is open source and actually sane. What else would I want?
It's by far the best designed social media site out there. I know it's a low bar but still.
Why would I doubt it? if you think they are deploying something else then it's quite a claim but it's you who need to show some evidence.
It works great anyway. I get a lot of junk I don't want to see on FB/Insta. Reddit is not even worth discussing. X is the only place with where you get a lot of people who work on interesting/important/big stuff and post frequently.
I understand you can still tailor a good experience, but if you create a fresh X account the density of Elon Musk posts is genuinely absurd. There's no way he isn't putting his thumb on the algorithm to boost his reach.
Also the density of pure hate & ragebait by mask-off fascist accounts! It shocks me how much of that I saw unprompted right away after making a new account recently.
I made a new reddit account for a side project a few months ago and I couldn't believe how terrible reddit is when you don't have 10 years of subreddit curation. The default experience is to be dumped into what basically amounts to "Facebook boomer slop" mixed with a ton of hustle / small business / get rich quick content.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
Their "open source algorithm" (Which is actually a random code dump that does not constitute the algorithm) contains enough evidence that Elon posts are massively boosted, though no smoking gun. It also classifies politics as democrat or republican and then acts to maintain echo chambers.
I mean I went from fresh account to unprompted groypers posting hitler hype edits and white nationalists posting happy merchant memes about the great replacement.
This is uniquely an X thing. It wasn't like this when I used twitter, and it isn't like that on any other socials I know.
The Dutch PM for some reason uses X (or his PR agents do). There is always a lot of impotent homophobic rage coming from the retweets. It is all very sad.
The US first amendment has nothing to do with what a private company chooses to host on their platform. That content is there because the users and owners of the platform want it to be there.
I can concur though. I have a rarely used account and I get Elon on top of the feed all the time. Even as mobile notifications. I don't click on them and scroll past, but they keep coming.
