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I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like. It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive advantage you are talking about.
I keep hearing this about Twitter and Facebook but my experience is completely different. I believe the default experience is as you describe, but after I started following dozens of retrogaming groups, old games are all I see in both places. Even the ads became relevant and, believe it or not, interesting. I've clicked on a couple, which took me to small creators in the retrogaming and RPG areas.
The same is true with Reddit. The default feed is absolutely awful, but the bar required to curate something individually interesting and useful is too high for most new users, given the toxicity + banality of the default.
I finally quit my barren Twitter when the Musk takeover resulted in my feed being flooded with porn (including illegal content) and arabic carpet cleaning ads. I seriously doubt anyone's default Reddit front page has ever looked like that.
I keep seeing people say they've experienced this, but I've been on twitter for years (pre Musk and stayed post Musk) and I've never once seen porn on there. How does this happen by accident?
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I don't see any porn in my feed. Some of it is salacious, but not porn.
YouTube is nuts when not logged in as well. Those crazy clickbait thumbnails eg. Mr. Beast or whatever.
My logged-in YouTube shows me almost entirely 3blue1brown, Applied Science, and the like. Logged out it is 100% chum and garbage.
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On reddit the defaults are shit and the rest of the site bans you by default until you've karmawhored yourself past an arbitrary threshold on those defaults. Trash website.

I used to use it years back. Some subreddits were really great but they all inevitability devolved so I lost any interest in maintaining active accounts there. r/skookum had really interesting content for a while but devolved into idiots reposting the same skookum brand wrenches over and over again.

I'm sorry but reddit is trash. Every subreddit, no matter how niche, is basically cringy phrases being repeated or photos of some "home set up" or said niche product someone bought who is looking for validation of their decision. It's so bad I blocked reddit from my search engine results.
Clearly we're using different subs. ymmv.
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Agreed. The X ads were terrible and annoying until I flipped on that "Let X ad track you" and at least I get tolerable ads on mobile. (uBlock Origin blocks them on desktop)

The For You feed varies week by week but is generally okay. I make heavy use of lists, mute words, etc to clean things up.

X is a train wreck, but an interesting and useful one, depending on who/what you follow.

I bought a premium account on X and the ads went away.

I bought a premium Prime account on Amazon, and yet some of their shows still have embedded commercials. grrrr.

I have Premium and I still get half the ads as free.

Plus, I get constant ads to upgrade to Premium+ for ads-free.

Premium+ is probably what you have.

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Use Firefox and you can block them on mobile as well.
Safari, with an ad blocker, does block them on mobile, as well. I should have noted I was talking about the X mobile app.
I run a number of business X accounts which are post-only.

The very second the US election got underway all of our accounts started to heavily promote right-wing political content. Even though we specifically said when we signed up that we aren't interested in anything like that.

This happened to me on imgur, i explicitly filtered out politics but once the election got underway I started seeing it everywhere (except in imgur's case it was left-wing content). I turned off the politics filter and then turned it back on and they vanished for a time but then slowly leaked back in. If i reset the filter every week then i could keep political related content hidden for the most part.
same, people keep complaining that their twitter feeds are full of violence, porn & political bullshit but I get 0 of that

I haven't gone out of my way to restrict my timeline either, I follow ~1000 accounts I just don't follow or interact with accounts that post any of that crap.

Don't worry it will come, it takes a while but then you start getting sent outrage bait, stuff you will disagree with just to get you involved.
I don't understand why you were being flagged, it was actually my experience then deleted my account, of course it was some months ago, but still think that is the current one. (September of 2024)
They all suck. But the user experience is practically irrelevant to the business of selling ads and operating sentiment manipulation channels, which is the business that all of the large social media companies are in.

And whether their ideas and strategies are well-grounded or seem optimal or ethical to the rest of us, the top leadership at most of those companies lean strongly towards corporatist, libertarian political ideals and see most regulation (and preemptive self-regulation) as both philosophically immoral and an existential threat to their businesses.

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You have to follow people you’re interested in, and continually curate that list. X is garbage in the same way /r/all is - you have to find the subreddits you like and aren’t too large
are you suggesting the company's staffing policy influences what users post? I don't agree the arrow points in that direction. or that there's an arrow between those topics at all
As someone that uses Twitter quite a lot for consumption, I actually think it's great. I've learned so much on Twitter (and yes, I'm aware there is plenty of disinformation), and it's also extremely entertaining. Maybe I've just used it long enough so I my feed is quite curated.
The fact that you're being downvoted for accurate reporting that can be easily verified by anyone who makes a Twitter account.. lol

Before I deleted my Twitter account, I tried really hard to just block every account that posted content I felt was pol-tier.. it just doesn't work. That platform is FUBAR, and the prime example is the owner of the platform who has been completely brainrotted from staring into the orb for 12 hours a day.

It seems like public sentiment is trending towards rolling over and letting channers run society. We'll see how that goes.

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> It's completely unusable

I will rail on FB just as hard as the next guy, but realistically, from a business perspective, if facebook's wild popularity and 3 billion active monthly users still says "unusable" to you... well, do you really think most people would agree with you? And more importantly to the company... whose opinion matters the most?

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