I Wasted an Hour on X
Recently John Gruber, whom I’ve followed for decades, published X Once Again Marks the Spot. It’s short and I’m not going to try to summarize it so go read it if you haven’t already. But here are two key quotes: “I see more interesting posts on X than I do on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined. I wish that weren’t so but it is.” and “The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place.” Reaction on Bluesky and the Fediverse has been pretty fierce.
I think the following things can all be true.
It’s less toxic than it used to be · Well yeah, Elon isn’t in everyone’s feed, clearly a major quality-of-life improvement.
It’s still his shop, and he’s a slimy fascist · Go read X is bad, though by Lex Freidman. I mean, Musk delivers sieg-heil Nazi salutes in public and boasted about how he, the world’s richest man, cut off food rations to the world’s poorest children. Lex has a longer list of reasons but those two are all I need.
Then there’s the unforgiveable doctrine of tuning the algorithm to bury posts that have links in them.
The CEOs are there · This was Gruber’s starting point. But, uh… CEOs are boring. They have to be ruthlessly on-message and never stray a millimeter from their core mission, which is promoting their company to the investment class. If I want to learn about Apple I’ll go read actual humans like Gruber or Friedman and ignore the vacuous arm-waving from the executives.
It’s not just CEOs, I saw Macron and Burnham and Zelenskyy and Modi. In fact, today’s reality on X is that the people posting are mostly public figures, already established as writers or politicians or executives or whatever. Most of them are there with a business or party or product to promote and that’s what they do.
There are very few who are just interesting voices you haven’t heard before; and that’s part of what I go online looking for.
It’s not “cheerful” for everyone · I dunno, I just spent an hour there and I find myself totally gloomed out. Putinist propaganda. Zionist settler hasbara. Rod Dreher ranting incomprehensibly, and I quote: “…young Jews became Bolsheviks in part to "murder" their fathers - that is, to destroy Judaism.” LLM cheerleading, that get-on-board-or-you’re-history flavor we all remember from the heydey of crypto. Joni Mitchell gleeful at her US-Citizenship ceremony. Slanted political propaganda, against the incumbents in the current BC election, until I switched to Explore and it switched to pro-incumbent puffery.
This is fun?
Anyhow, here’s a list · People, I mean, who are there but should really know better and of whom I now think less: Joni. Nicholas Kristoff. Josh Marshall. Jeet Heer. Nate Silver. Aaron Rupar. Corey Quinn. Stephen King. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation. Miguel de Icaza. Fortunately none of them care what I think of them. I could go on but I’m already blue enough. And I’m not going to even start listing the many featured voices belonging to people whom I already thought of as unsalvageable scumfucks.
The future · Twitter is part of the SpaceX LLMs+rockets conglomerate. If you believe, as I do, that the bubble is going to pop soon and loudly, it’s going to be desperate times when SpaceX’s valuation collapses and it can’t borrow billions to keep the doors open. Twitter has never made really significant profits (and I saw exactly zero ads in the hour I spent poking around).
So what happens then? Feels to me like the choices are extinction or enshittification. We’ll see.
Where I stand · I’m still a happy Fediversian, here’s why. Yeah, there aren’t as many people and it’s kinda geeky and leftist and queer; also unattractive to billionaires and CEOs. I can see why that’s less appealing for some folk out there and, well, OK. But I’m having fun on Fedi. And it’ll be a loooong time before I waste another hour on X.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Seth Finkelstein (Oct 13 2026, at 18:04)
It's fine to have The Progressive Clubhouse. Nobody should be ashamed to want to hang out in their local club, where they're part of the group and it's only their group, others are not welcome. I think it's a mistake to be too strict that such spaces shouldn't exist in any form, though of course it gets complicated in detail. HOWEVER, when it comes to trying to impose some sort of norm that Progressives May Only Go To The Progressive Clubhouse, that runs into the problem that it's quite a small slice of the world.
Further, TPC tends to have a very annoying faction of purity enforcers, who will give great grief to anyone who is ideologically impure by their lights. Maybe you don't trigger them, but it's quite easy to do.
I'm not active on Twitter/X for my reasons of disliking its attack dynamics. But Mastodon is no general solution. Anything which doesn't work for "normies" is never going to be more than a niche.
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From: Patrick Gibson (Oct 13 2026, at 19:31)
I almost did a spit-take seeing something by Lex Friedman that was critical of X. And then I realized there is both a Lex Friedman and a Lex Fridman, both of whom are in this tech world of ours, and one of whom is very much Team Elon and Team X.
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From: Simon (Oct 13 2026, at 23:39)
I get that gloomy feeling from X when I browse the "For You" tab. When I switch to "Following", it's a good list.
But it's the same whether I go to Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads. The algorithmic feeds are depressing.
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From: Hanan Cohen (Oct 14 2026, at 00:25)
I still have friends that are on Twitter that I want to interact with.
I created a private list that has a bit more than 40 accounts. The list URL is my entry point to Twitter.
I also have the LeechBlock browser extension and I have set up a rule that if I go to the Twitter homepage it blocks the URL and shouts at me "NO!".
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From: Luci P. (Oct 14 2026, at 04:32)
Hi,
I went on to read the post you're linking to. Color me not impressed. Well, impressed, alright, but the wrong kind of impression. I am vaguely familiar with Mr. Gruber, but I would expect someone with such a long history in tech to have a nose for these kind of things. I'll quote from his piece:
"Without any fanfare — perhaps to avoid his ire — X has de-Musked its algorithm. I stopped visiting at all when the algorithm there was putting Musk’s own tweets into my timeline, every time I checked, despite the fact that I never followed him. But they don’t do that anymore."
Could it possibly because they are now able to create as many bubbles as they want? X being aware of the chances that Mr. Gruber can influence a number of people that have his trust, they may want to pay special attention to the bubble they allow him to exist in, on X... If such people can't be bothered to avoid such traps, indeed there's gloom.
I don't recall where I heard this first, but rather than trying to settle a minor dispute with someone a planet away on X, maybe people should be focusing on actual people closer to home. If they have time for it in the digital space also, I think Fediverse is the better place for it.
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From: Tristan Louis (Oct 14 2026, at 07:13)
I suspect the Fediverse feels right to us older crowd because it feels more like the old internet: One where humans (mostly artists, nerds, and other curious people) are sharing the geekery they are interested in with other people who may be interested in joining. They're not in it because it's a side hustle, or to make money (if they do, that's a nice aside but it's not the primary goal); they're in it for the sheer joy of discovery, of advance as a byproduct of exploration.
The other platforms, X/Threads/Bsky (heck even LinkedIn), have a form of profit motive and therefore attract individuals who are into this kind of concept. That tends to attract a lot more self-promotions and agenda-promotion. All this, feeding an algorithm that then barfs back the stuff to people most likely to eat it. Oftentimes, the posts on those networks are not human-created but machine-generated (via generative AI) because the distributors of that stuff are not as interested in the creative process as they are in pushing up their views or their popularity.
I have a preference for the creative crowd (in the words of a bygone era ""Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.") The people who still read RSS feeds, believe in open vs. closed, and see the world (and technology) not just as a model to extract from but a place to contribute in.
Both worlds can co-exist (and always have) but the one that always ends up generating new ideas and creating what we know as progress is always the one where the weirdos are experimenting. That was the world of the 1990s internet, and it is the world of the future, even though it doesn't look like it from the current billionaire seats.
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From: Paul G (Oct 14 2026, at 08:40)
I find it disturbing that X is still considered to be the most effective way to reach journalists as it clearly has had an impact on their reporting. I hate to sound like an old fogy but I miss the days they would talk to sources, go to events and press conferences, instead of relying on tweets for news.
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