This is only tenuously related but every single Mac app I see advertised on X by verified accounts is malware. I reported one last week to them, they said it's not malware. I appealed it and said the install link is copy and paste obfuscated base64 into your terminal, and they said after review it doesn't break their terms.

So whatever else they do, they take money to knowingly promote malware.

>What is the main use case for X these days?

I use it to follow people who either have ideas I find interesting or do stuff I find interesting, and typically I'm looking for accounts that are small enough that I know they will at least see my replies, and often interact with them. (Something like 3K-15K followers for most of them, I think.)

I also think it's indispensable for real-time commentary and niche commentary on current events: always requires grains of salt but there's just no better place on the Internet for that sort of thing, in part because...

It's the one major social network I'm on where it is easy to view only posts from the people I follow, in reverse chronological order. A feed I TRULY control (and, if you follow the right people, insulates you from much of the nonsense on the site).

And every once in awhile, some insane viral nonsense pokes in that makes you say "how could I ever quit this site". There's a certain genre of satirical accounts that is very entertaining as well. Definitely a guilty pleasure component to it all!

>Is it still as popular as it used to be?

A quick search roughly aligns with my perception: it bottomed out a couple of years ago and has gradually recovered, though not to where it was pre-X.

I haven't left because there are still circles of people I follow that haven't bailed. Once a large enough majority move to Bluesky, I'll start browsing that app more.

On the other hand, I might start posting on Bluesky more because as of a week ago, I'm shadowbanned on X. I know people throw that term around, but nobody on the site can see any of my reply tweets, even me (unless I scroll my account's 'replies' tab); people who've followed me for years are asking why their tweet has a ghost reply.

I don't think X has that much of an incentive to filter out bots while keeping around accounts like me (200 followers, will never pay for Premium). The slightly higher effort bots that glaze tech CEOs will be basically indistinguishable from the real people glazing tech CEOs because they're wannabe founders trying to network/cloutfarm. And that style of dead internet is fine with Elon.

It's deplorable, but our president in Mexico recently was asked about some current affairs a d her answer was "ive written about it in X , go see it there" ...

As if X was an official government publishing channel . WTH, they should publish it on they official government pages.

In a UK context, journalists are on there because politicians are on there... and politicians are on there because journalists are on there. It's politicians that need to pull the plug - if they left en masse the journalists would go where they went, even if they stayed on X too - but nobody has the balls to do it. (Aside from one politician who for all practical purposes seems to do absolutely nothing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyrx1ee2r4o).

From what I can tell, most Twitter users outside English speaking countries don't care about who is the CEO at all. Business as usual.

Companies and celebrities are a major use case here. Lots of them (especially ones from non-English speaking countries) still use the site as their primary means of communication. For example, Nintendo doesn't have an official presence on Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon, just Twitter.

There's a decent number of old school companies and creatives who either don't know/care about alternatives, or who tried them and went back to Twitter/X.

Depends on the algos. My jp account sees none of that, mostly news, jokes and some random what’s happening in parts of Japan.

NA tuned account has more of what you said.

It’s still fairly popular, but the statistics show that X usage is gradually declining. Elon claims that X is more popular than ever, but the platform doesn’t publicly release its own stats, and publicly available stats say otherwise.

If you like AI and tech, there are some pretty thriving sub-communities. AI stuff, and a lot of tech stuff happens on X first. Claudebot/OpenClaw/Hermes all began on X months before I commonly saw them appear on other platforms.

>> What is the main use case for X these days?

More of a political echo chamber than anything else. I mothballed my original account when things were getting spicy which was primarily focused on dev, UI/UX, and InfoSec news. I finally went back and have had some great interactions with people about technical stuff that interests me. Right now, the data center and AI discussions are getting intense along with Omarchy, lol. If you steer clear of the political stuff, you can find some good stuff still.

>> Is it still as popular as it used to be?

Probably not but it still ranks ahead of sites like Reddit. Its like the 13th, 14th most popular platform right now. I log on mainly just to see if I'm missing anything. Other than that, most of the engagement I have is curiosity and just fun stuff like seeing people posting retro games, stuff like that.

>> Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.

X is now kind of the social media cul-de-sac . It used to be one of the go to places for breaking tech, popular cultural and political stuff. Now its usually two or three days late to the party on anything worthwhile. So the posts from the CEO probably made the rounds before you finally saw it on X. lol

I'm surprised people didn't mention this, but I find it to be unbeatable in these two areas:

1. Japanese community 2. Porn (good god, so much porn)

AI research, computer vision/machine learning academic projects and papers, conferences.

I've made a lot of friends in Japan through shared interest communities that are mostly on twitter. Most are people I've actually met whenever I am in Japan.

If you want alpha on things x is the place to be, aside from some discord servers. I've recently leaned off hn and onto twitter.

> What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?

No idea comparatively, but an artist friend of mine tried out Bluesky and then complained about how there's way more of a limited reach and engagement there compared to Twitter.

Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.

The biggest social networks can only die slowly. They have too much momentum for the the type of sudden exodus that was possible when the internet had not yet absorbed the entire population.

Its main use for myself was that posts were public by default so lots of government orgs and whatnot posted real time status updates. I never really used it except for occasionally checking those.

Now that more and more are going "walled garden" I don't get it at all

There is a lot of Ukraine war reporting on twitter.

> What is the main use case for X these days?

The same as it ever was. Short-form gossip. News, discussion, jokes.

> What is the main use case for X these days?

There are lots of interesting people/orgs on X from AI/ML circles, as well as Ukraine war OSINT accounts and UA army helpers. I stay on X pretty much for these two topics.

Guess one has to, because there are just too many people on there. I don't like it but what can I do. What I hate the most is that states/countries, prime ministers and kings post on there. And that the emergency services of some countries have that as primary channel. I understand cross posting to the most popular social channels, but primary? That SHOULD be a local channel, not some dystopian shit hole you could be banned from randomly.

My feed is mostly people petting rabbits

A lot of interesting people who do interesting things post on X. You can follow them and have interesting feed. You don't get it on FB/Insta or Tiktok.

>>Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.

Yeah just a big tech CEOs posting (or an author of a big project, or an engineer working for a top lab), nothing to see here. On to another dancing teenager on TikTok. Let's watch some pranks or a "beauty influencer" on Insta where we are at it instead.

There's lots of US sports content. That's all I use it for.

> What is the main use case for X these days?

twitter/x remains the domain of intelligence agencies worldwide. It is a semi-open (the world first virtual leader, the ayatollah affirms he exists from there ..) psychological operations platform that permits the avatars of "world leaders" to speak to masses and also hosts a parasitical community of grifters ("opinion makers" and "influencers") that feed off of the festering fetid matter served up by the Spook International.

a secondary purpose of the twitter/x is a reverse doomsday clock, based on above. As long as the ghost of this unprofitable "business entity" is kept alive by funny money and funny deals, we can sleep soundly at night knowing there won't be ww3 or any other such extreme negotiating tactics by global elite, since they are all 'playing their role' on twitter currently known as x.

It's mostly a porn site these days

It's become just another doomscroll content mill like the rest. Public figures and well known names have been replaced with random content creators and repost bots.

I see many, many Twitter posts here. I flag every single one. Many of them are AI-related, and not something from a big tech CEO. It seems that many fans of AI don’t have any moral quandaries with using it. I will let you be the judge of whether that says anything about their moral compass in general.

I rarely use it (you need an account, so I need to add cancel to the url) but last time I had a "guest" account was two years ago and it was pretty much all bots. That being said, some (important) people or companies still use it for announcement but these are usually linked and xcancel works just fine.

I honestly have no idea if there are real people who actually use it daily. Who can read that stuff?

Linking to X is less useful than it used to be.

Incredibly unpopular opinion on Hacker News, but X remains the center of many circles, including tech. There is almost nothing posted on Hacker News that I haven't seen on X first, with better commentary.

What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be?

Yes, because influential, non-evil people who should know better just will not fucking leave. The vast majority of public-minded ML developers and researchers, including people who compete with xAI, being an obvious example.

And because skilled, knowledgeable people who could create a replacement service just will not do so. At least not without finding new and innovative forehead-slapping ways to fail at it.

Incredibly frustrating that Xitter is still as popular as it is.

All journalists and politicians are there, including left wing. If you want to know e.g. what the Prime Minister of Pakistan really said instead of some news spin, you have to read his tweets.

It is an elite club, and Musk wants you to pay for it.

I don't know why it is legal for EU politicians to use this walled garden for important messages.

Someone outside of the US jurisdiction (China?) has to keep xcancel.com running.

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Actually I retired from twitter before Musk, because twitter started to censor me. But of course once Musk took over, constantly raising his right arm, I knew twitter was dead. Here in Europe nobody wants to see selfish and ruthless right-wing nuts control ecosystems. Billionaires pulling the strings does not work; the USA need to learn this lesson first.

It's a social experiment about [variable] universal basic income

There's people from all walks of life and all corners of the internet on there still, good and bad. Twitter was always a darned mess, the only difference now is you can't just report people and bully them off the site.

Contrast to me trying to open BlueSky, and seeing death threats and other insane things. I've also heard (though never personally seen, nor do I want to) that BlueSky has a CSAM problem. Those two factors alone kept me from even trying it out.

What's really weird is there were a ton of claims that disappeared, about how X was full of bots, but X is the opposite of full of bots. Maybe there's one or another, but they're highly under the radar, X has improved their bot problem drastically.

Edit (tweaked some words, and wanted to add):

Then there was Threads, I am not in any way interested in "New Twitter" by Mark Zuckerberg, no thanks.