"X" is in a weird place now. The monetization of engagement absolutely wrecked the feeds from my cursory glance. Just ragebaiting, vague posting, abuse (for a while, every female posting would have someone in the replies doing "grok, put OP in a bikini" and it would post sexualized images of them). Someone vent viral by posting a picture of Steve Jobs' daughter (?), and people try to replicate that as that now generates money. Replies to posts are just bluechecks being insane, or farm accounts spamming unrelated stuff hoping to get impressions and generate some dollars.
I used to follow only cycling/urban related accounts for the town I live in. Most of them left, so maybe that's making it hard for the algorithm, but my feed is now just far right immigration propaganda by blue checks, or lots of US issues (I'm not in the US). Not a nice place to be, but I can see how it can be addicting / trigger something in the brain.
> Most of them left, so maybe that's making it hard for the algorithm, but my feed is now just far right immigration propaganda by blue checks
Working as intended. It has been very clear for a very long time (in “Internet time”) that Mr “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk is only really interested in supporting far right propaganda.
> Not a nice place to be, but I can see how it can be addicting / trigger something in the brain.
Honest question, why would anyone willingly browse X? Why have an account there when it’s not even giving you anything nice? Delete the account. Stop visiting the site.
> Honest question, why would anyone willingly browse X?
I don't know the psychology, but there absolutely is something akin to "outrage porn". Like, something in your brain wants you to go in and be outraged and annoyed about how stupid other's are, and how much better you are.
Maybe it’s related to the tendency of a group to think the way other groups do things is weird/wrong to justify the existence/stance of the group. like “those people all look stupid, they don’t dress properly like we do” type middle school stuff.
I generally look at the political & social viewpoints of others to try and understand their viewpoint to some degree. Not for outrage. Even if I consider those viewpoints extreme or counter to my own.
I stopped using all of that style of social media, mainly for this reason. First it was Facebook a couple decades ago. I figured I can deal with only hearing from my family once in a while, in real life and emails, and blissfully missing all those photos of the food they're about to eat.
Social media has just gotten worse and worse since Facebook, to the point I can't even bother with Mastodon anymore (and I don't. I gave that up a few months back).
The main thing I like here - I get the info I was hoping to see in the first place, but without all the baggage. Even when that baggage seeps in, it is (very) short term. The ycombinator news mods are exceptional.
This site isn't all that "Social" per se, but the threads generally stay on topic, and aren't constantly trying to sell you something nobody ever asked for.
> every female posting would have someone in the replies doing "grok, put OP in a bikini"
I get these tweets randomly in my Timeline as well. What I don't understand is why does Twitter think I should know about someone asking Grok to put xxx in Bikini
My guess would be that they amplify tweets involving Grok as a form of advertising. I think they disabled tagging Grok for non paying users, so I guess they do it to advertise its capabilities. And because their user base is so toxic that mostly means amplifying things like that.
This is a command to the Grok bot and used to generate an image based on the post and that specific prompt. After significant outrage they disabled it for non-paying users at least, not sure if they changed more about this later.
If the "algorithm" thinks that I want to see <command to the Grok bot> from random accounts so jams lots of them into my feed then it is a pretty dumb algorithm
Maybe X thinks X users might be unaware of the ability to pay money to see other random X users naked, so it's basically an advert for non-consensual sexual image generation.
I've been saying that about a lot of algorithms for a while now, but I think the issue is more that they're smart algorithms optimized for the wrong thing
> my feed is now just far right immigration propaganda by blue checks, or lots of US issues (I'm not in the US)
> (for a while, every female posting would have someone in the replies doing "grok, put OP in a bikini")
This is now the purpose of the site: racism and sexism. There was once a time when it would have been the place to follow the Hungarian election, now I have to make to with a few people on bluesky.
My 'For you' feed is almost exclusively Photography, science and tech news.
I believe it strongly depends on what you interact with.
At some point I also had a lot of US news in my feed, but once I stopped opening those posts and instead used the 'Not interested in this post' button or muted the author, they disappeared.
Probably following other accounts or liking photography posts also helped.
They're not on my For You feed, but anytime I watch a video on Twitter and it automatically jumps to a next video, it's always something that would never be on my feed. These days, it's usually bodycam footage from the United States (which I don't live in).
Meh, this borders on victim blaming. You can't deny they've done something to turn it the last few years. And there is no one of my interest left to follow, they've all jumped ship. I checked the "following" tab now, and there is nothing of interest there, they've all left.
I created an account in X yesterday because I'm trying to get more involved into building in public and the social aspect of development and I was shocked to see nowadays you can pay for X premium where the more you pay, the more interactions you get to your tweets.
At the end I just deleted it and created an account into Bluesky instead.
When X premium came out they said if I paid my tweets would be boosted more. I didn't pay, and my account with a few hundred followers went from 100ish views per average tweet to 10.
If you think you don't need to pay for engagement on there I can only assume you're paying for it and unaware of the difference.
It's probably not "the more you pay the more interactions you get", but there definitely is "if you pay, you get more interactions". Blue checks are boosted in top of replies etc., and is ironically often the exact people you don't want to see.
if you go to the premium section and look at the benefits it literally says (from memory) if you pay 3.5€/month you get a small boost on interactions for your tweets. If you pay 5€/month you get a bigger boost on interactions if you pay (I don't remember how much it is) 22€/month ~ you get the biggest boost for your tweets.
That to me sounds like if you don't pay, you're going to be in the bottom of the feed for everyone else.
I just looked and it doesn't say that. It only says that you have a higher chance to show up in front of other users in the reply section. It does not say that Premium Plus gets more of a boost than Premium. It is not a perk of Basic.
You're missing the point. There's a difference between buying an ad, something that's clearly marked as an ad and inserted as an ad, vs having your normal posts appear organic but still getting put in front of more people.
Or, it's mainly the opposite. If you don't pay, you no longer get the organic, not even from your own followers.
Posting here since I am curious if any friends on HN have faced the same AI based banning. I have had a Twitter account since like 2008 and they just did this- like folks on reddit are reporting appeals just get robo-rejected. Is there any way to reach a human at X? I have some SWEs and SREs in my linkedin account as second and third person contacts but reaching out there just feels wrong. Putting AI in charge of Auto banning 10+ year old paying accounts is insane. There is another thread on this same issue here https://www.reddit.com/r/twitterhelp/comments/1sfn3l4/has_an...
Money. Lots of money. Pay the Advertising chuds. Back before reserved/paid usernames were even a thing I remember at least one recorded phone call kicking around one of my archives of a Twitter employee saying they'd release any handle I needed for a $10k ad commit over 3 months minimum pre-Musk.
They do read the appeals. I know this because I was falsely permanently suspended, without lawful reasons and without prior notice, with an account in good standing, a few years ago.
After writing several appeals over the years, in which I even mentioned article 19 of the UN UDHR (which pretty much mentions everyone has the right of freedom of expression and freedom of speech), and after receiving several rejections with the standard boilerplate text I got a very angry human written reply from somebody working at the Safety and Security team mentioning amongst other things I should never try to appeal again, and that they would automatically reject every appeal if I would. Or at least, that was basically the gist of it.
And I tried it once afterwards, and they didn't lie about that.
This was after the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, by the way.
So yes, they do read appeals (even before the Elon purchase likely). But they don't care.
Automated decision making processing, such as banning, must be avoided under the GDPR. Those facing this issue should throw a complaint at their DPA. I'm sure Musk would love another series of fines in the EU.
Yeah I know- I have accounts on bluesky and mastodon as well- but I try not to isolate myself to one network, there are plenty of non-usa accounts that were only on X who I followed for technology and art/photography stuff. shikata ga nai I guess.
Same here. Premium account, years old, barely post, banned with no explanation.
What’s worse: no way to notify followers or export data after a ban.
Lesson here: Never outsource your identity or communication to a platform you don’t control, treat them as disposable channels, that might disappear any day.
Most social media has been has been utterly untenable forever, but Twitter and Discord are the most troublesome in my experience. It's so hard to create and use a new account on those sites without the rigmarole of captcha (due to suspicious activity) -> banned (due to suspicious activity) -> captcha (due to suspicious activity) -> verify email (due to suspicious activity) -> banned (due to suspicious activity) -> verify phone number (due to suspicious activity). Then, want to follow someone, or join a guild? Hmm.. your account reputation is too low. Try again in a week?
I don't know how people do it. I can only figure it's my fault for running Linux or Firefox or not Signing in with Google™, upsetting the data harvesting overlords.
Back when they still had staffed support, and were called twitter, I'd have to spend a week or more back and forth with them when I inevitably hit the demand for a phone number. Most of the time the account got unlocked.
This was usually a few weeks/months after they were in the news for selling people's phone numbers.
Discord annoys me with this. I tried to ask a question about GrapheneOS on reddit and they auto deleted it and said we use discord now. I don't have discord so I signed up and can't post until I verify my email. So I verified a burner and don't have permission to post in that channel. A couple of days later I did, but the motivation had passed.
It's so strange to put your interactions behind a walled garden that demands verification, especially for something like GOS. But even then, making people wait a day or so without telling them is such an antipattern
I needed to create a Facebook account to verify some Facebook posting functionality worked as we wanted it to. Ok, easy. Tried using my work email. No, not allowed. Hmm, try creating a new email. Nope. Tried to create an account on my personal device with a personal email. Nuh-uh.
I've never seen a service so opposed to me using it. There's no option for dev accounts either.
My X account was banned about a week ago. I use X in an unusual way: I open up fifty tabs a day of people I want to read and see what they've posted in the past day. But I don't use the default feed at all. I often 'like' posts, but I very rarely post anything myself. I don't think I violated any X rules. But I can see why an algorithm think I look a little bit bot-ish.
I appealed the ban but AI declined my appeal. I couldn't circumvent the ban by using a VPN plus a different browser. I thought that would change my fingerprint enough to not be detectable, but perhaps I'm still detectable or perhaps my fingerprint through the VPN just looks suspicious.
Now I'm using something called "Gologin" that gives me a browser with a less unique footprint plus a residential IP in the USA. I have to pay for it. But at least I can use X still.
You'll be banned again - using a "residential IP" to appear domestic is a primary method used for accessing compromised accounts. We dissuade use of "privacy VPN" services for all users, as some of those services use the host as an exit node for unknown VPN traffic.
As far as I know reddit does the same thing. If you don’t follow normal human patterns you will quickly get banned. I read some guy’s report where he got banned 8 times detailing each behaviour and indeed it was nothing crazy.
I've also been suspended for breaking their terms and services, even though I haven't done anything wrong. It was probably my VPN. Luckily, my account got unsuspended, but I ain't using that platform anymore
We simply need open, decentralized or distributed platforms. Nostr is not that excellent, but it works, and have a potential to became "unified personal web platform", take a look at it.
- Nostr is generally much lighter; it can even be served behind Tor without having a public IP, there's no need to maintain a web server etc. There are compact, self-contained relays like Haven, for example, which are a single go install-able app that includes everything needed on the server side, with practically zero setup.
- There are various clients, including mobile and web as well as desktop, which is enough to satisfy pretty much everyone's tastes.
- There's also an economic model that could be the future of journalism: everyone publishes what they want, and those who enjoy it can make micro-payments, if they wish, to support the publisher.
For now, it's a toy with many abandoned experiments, while Mastodon is a walking dead, having never really taken off. In other words, as they stand, neither of them is working. But Nostr has the potential to become the communication hub for many; for instance, there's already a Matrix-like service (0xchat and potentially whitenoise) that supports chat, audio, and live video, requiring only Coturn and a Nostr relay. There's also "long form" support, meaning personal blogs all on the same technology.
In other words, in a short space of time, on Nostr you can have:
- A personal blog-style site
- A personal Twitter/X
- Personal chat with audio and video
- Private notes if you need to jot something down on the go
- A search engine and address book that could allows with different access levels, a real address book usage for personal contacts.
Potentially all in a single, complete and lightweight deployment. There isn't the burden of federation, which makes many hesitate to activate it because, depending on who they federate with, they find a massive amount of resources consumed. It's essentially text, binary blobs, and near-real-time communications all in one. Haven is the first piece of the puzzle, MOAR is the successor in the making, but eventually, there will be one that integrates 0xchat and a web client, all-in-one.
The Fediverse hasn't achieved this and doesn't have the characteristics to do so.
Then again, if we're honest, the old Usenet did it better, but it's dead to most people, whereas Nostr is alive. People only dislike it because it comes from a crypto community, and many are biased against anyone from that world regardless.
I'm not touching seedy X any more - if there's someone linking to it the 'toXcancel' extension shows me the content while shielding me from Musk's actual sht pit.
X has been dead to me for years now. It's all Nazi propaganda, rage bait and CSAM. I honestly think it should be banned. Under Musk it became as bad as the ugly side of 4chan.
Sorry, but Twitter is only for bots now. Real humans need not log on. /s
That being said, I assume that it flagged the amount/frequency of likes or whatever other activity and thought it was suspicious. Probably used Grok to do that and it obviously isn't good at that.
This hyperbole does more to turn people away from Bluesky and other sites more than X to be honest. There are clearly lots of politically moderate, wholesome "politically inert," and international X users. The people who are vocal about having left seem more extreme and less tolerant to me.
Perhaps for related reasons, I've also recently heard Elon Musk being described as a "literal Nazi" a lot, and I'm sure that kind of wild rhetoric has a similar backfire effect with anyone who has any familiarity with him.
Well said. This is how I feel about Bluesky. I've read so many exaggregations from bsky users that I would definitely not want to join that sort of echo chamber. Better leave the extremists alone.
> I've also recently heard Elon Musk being described as a "literal Nazi" a lot
The chatbot run by his company has called itself 'MechaHitler' multiple times, and Musk himself did what is widely regarded as a Nazi salute during Trump's second inauguration.
I guess to expand on my earlier post, it's generally a good thing that these kinds of absurd allegations are counterproductive and generally not convincing, because if they were more readily believable they would be quite irresponsible. Real violence has occurred because of beliefs (and posts) like this.
Yes, let's get the protractors out to find out if the man who's turned Twitter into a far right cesspool, and has served in a far right government, and constantly tweets far right things, may just have far right sympathies. /s
Ceasing to believe what your own eyes and ears are telling you, in as far as those things may challenge your political beliefs, is generally a road that leads nowhere good.
Are you proud of this comment? Is this the person you wanted to be when you were a kid? Disputing whether a Nazi salute was actually a Nazi salute because the executor of the Nazi salute doesn’t have the skill to execute it correctly?
Maybe describing him as a "literal Nazi" is a bit exaggerated (although there was that thing with the Nazi salute last year), but you only have to remember what he did at DOGE (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world/lancet-usaid-global...) and maybe take a look at what he posts (and reposts) on X to realize that it's not too far from the truth...
The classic "if it disagrees with me, it's a far-right neo-Nazi" rhetoric. Sadly thiss is becoming depressingly common in certain corners of tech discourse.
X has the best AI news, the best virality for good content and sure - it has a lot of shit, but community notes and curated feeds keep the noise low.
This. No other platforms has a system akin to CN's. For me personally, I could never stand using any platform that is aggressively tone policed towards whatever official truth. Not Truth Social, not BlueSky.
Other places are like playgrounds, X is where the adults go to talk.
Not all platforms are agressive about the tone-policing and "real life" is not a platform. AFAIK, we still don't live in a world where the moneyed class get to set the rules about who is allowed to exist in "real life".
Also: scale and context matters. Someone telling you to shut up on a movie theater is not out of place, but whoever was next to you in the theater does not get to decide what you say in a bar or a PTA meetiing.
> AFAIK, we still don't live in a world where the moneyed class get to set the rules about who is allowed to exist in "real life".
I mean thats just the legal system, its also deciding what is taught in schools, or churches (other religions are available). Currently in the USA there is "tone policing" about trans people. Laws are being put in place to enforce a certain style of living for people who are trans. Regardless of you opinion of trans people, that is very much real life tone policing.
> but whoever was next to you in the theatre does not get to decide what you say in a bar or a PTA meeting.
but the people in the bar/PTA meeting do. In the same way that newspaper decide who to publish, TV which programmes to air, student organisations what cause to adopt, charities what people to fight for.
I think you are saying that one organisation doesn't get to control the patterns and types of speech for an entire country, which is mostly true apart from a authoritarian places.
But, each platform has its own tone, be that X, bluesky, the local darts club, PTA, or church. that tone is enforced by the people who support/take part in that platform. Those rules vary by factions that live on those platforms. The issue with X/bluesky etc is that they make money by deliberately forcing separate factions to engage. If you fall out with your local pub, you find a different pub, and hopefully never see those people again. But that pub is selling you pints, not advertising. so it needs to keep you happy to keep you buying pints.
> each platform has its own tone, be that X, bluesky, the local darts club, PTA, or church. that tone is enforced by the people who support/take part in that platform.
You are abusing the meaning of the word "platform" to try to create a false equivalence that can be used to justify the absurdity that present-day Twitter is.
> justify the absurdity that present-day Twitter is.
Present day twitter is one man's increasingly sad slide into authoritarian/contrarianism. It is a mess of idiocy and malignant individualism.
My point is, that twitter is nothing different, it has it's own tone. If you notice it, then twitter is not the place for you anymore. If you don't then twitter is the right place for you.
It still has the best AI news because users are not quitting it. Even the most fervent left leaning folks I know cannot quit it. Too bad it fell into the wrong hands and became a shell of its former self
Its not just in tech circles. It really started around 2020 with C. "Everyone needs to agree this time" extremely backfired and ruined our ability to discuss things.
Not really. George Orwell has noted this phenomenon in his 1946 book "Politics and the English Language". He attributes it to a knock-on effect of wartime propaganda.
"X" is in a weird place now. The monetization of engagement absolutely wrecked the feeds from my cursory glance. Just ragebaiting, vague posting, abuse (for a while, every female posting would have someone in the replies doing "grok, put OP in a bikini" and it would post sexualized images of them). Someone vent viral by posting a picture of Steve Jobs' daughter (?), and people try to replicate that as that now generates money. Replies to posts are just bluechecks being insane, or farm accounts spamming unrelated stuff hoping to get impressions and generate some dollars.
I used to follow only cycling/urban related accounts for the town I live in. Most of them left, so maybe that's making it hard for the algorithm, but my feed is now just far right immigration propaganda by blue checks, or lots of US issues (I'm not in the US). Not a nice place to be, but I can see how it can be addicting / trigger something in the brain.
> Most of them left, so maybe that's making it hard for the algorithm, but my feed is now just far right immigration propaganda by blue checks
Working as intended. It has been very clear for a very long time (in “Internet time”) that Mr “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk is only really interested in supporting far right propaganda.
> Not a nice place to be, but I can see how it can be addicting / trigger something in the brain.
Honest question, why would anyone willingly browse X? Why have an account there when it’s not even giving you anything nice? Delete the account. Stop visiting the site.
> Honest question, why would anyone willingly browse X?
I don't know the psychology, but there absolutely is something akin to "outrage porn". Like, something in your brain wants you to go in and be outraged and annoyed about how stupid other's are, and how much better you are.
Tried to search around for why it happens, this has some thoughts, "The dangerous pleasures of outrage": https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/domestic-intelligenc...
> The pleasure of strong negative judgment becomes so enjoyable we seek opportunities to trigger it
Maybe it’s related to the tendency of a group to think the way other groups do things is weird/wrong to justify the existence/stance of the group. like “those people all look stupid, they don’t dress properly like we do” type middle school stuff.
My guess is that outrageous things were important to pay attention to when we were in tribes?
I generally look at the political & social viewpoints of others to try and understand their viewpoint to some degree. Not for outrage. Even if I consider those viewpoints extreme or counter to my own.
That being said I don't browse X.
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I stopped using all of that style of social media, mainly for this reason. First it was Facebook a couple decades ago. I figured I can deal with only hearing from my family once in a while, in real life and emails, and blissfully missing all those photos of the food they're about to eat.
Social media has just gotten worse and worse since Facebook, to the point I can't even bother with Mastodon anymore (and I don't. I gave that up a few months back).
The main thing I like here - I get the info I was hoping to see in the first place, but without all the baggage. Even when that baggage seeps in, it is (very) short term. The ycombinator news mods are exceptional.
This site isn't all that "Social" per se, but the threads generally stay on topic, and aren't constantly trying to sell you something nobody ever asked for.
AI is not the fakest thing in social media.
> every female posting would have someone in the replies doing "grok, put OP in a bikini"
I get these tweets randomly in my Timeline as well. What I don't understand is why does Twitter think I should know about someone asking Grok to put xxx in Bikini
My guess would be that they amplify tweets involving Grok as a form of advertising. I think they disabled tagging Grok for non paying users, so I guess they do it to advertise its capabilities. And because their user base is so toxic that mostly means amplifying things like that.
This is a command to the Grok bot and used to generate an image based on the post and that specific prompt. After significant outrage they disabled it for non-paying users at least, not sure if they changed more about this later.
If the "algorithm" thinks that I want to see <command to the Grok bot> from random accounts so jams lots of them into my feed then it is a pretty dumb algorithm
Maybe X thinks X users might be unaware of the ability to pay money to see other random X users naked, so it's basically an advert for non-consensual sexual image generation.
I've been saying that about a lot of algorithms for a while now, but I think the issue is more that they're smart algorithms optimized for the wrong thing
> my feed is now just far right immigration propaganda by blue checks, or lots of US issues (I'm not in the US)
> (for a while, every female posting would have someone in the replies doing "grok, put OP in a bikini")
This is now the purpose of the site: racism and sexism. There was once a time when it would have been the place to follow the Hungarian election, now I have to make to with a few people on bluesky.
My 'For you' feed is almost exclusively Photography, science and tech news.
I believe it strongly depends on what you interact with.
At some point I also had a lot of US news in my feed, but once I stopped opening those posts and instead used the 'Not interested in this post' button or muted the author, they disappeared.
Probably following other accounts or liking photography posts also helped.
They're not on my For You feed, but anytime I watch a video on Twitter and it automatically jumps to a next video, it's always something that would never be on my feed. These days, it's usually bodycam footage from the United States (which I don't live in).
> it's usually bodycam footage from the United States (which I don't live in).
Ragebait.
Meh, this borders on victim blaming. You can't deny they've done something to turn it the last few years. And there is no one of my interest left to follow, they've all jumped ship. I checked the "following" tab now, and there is nothing of interest there, they've all left.
I signed up a year ago, so I would not know how Twitter behaved back in the days.
All I am saying is that if you Follow accounts you are interested in and like a few relevant posts, the platform likely becomes quite usable.
vague posting is the current meta
I created an account in X yesterday because I'm trying to get more involved into building in public and the social aspect of development and I was shocked to see nowadays you can pay for X premium where the more you pay, the more interactions you get to your tweets.
At the end I just deleted it and created an account into Bluesky instead.
>X premium where the more you pay, the more interactions you get to your tweets.
You are confusing X ads for X premium or you are mistaken.
When X premium came out they said if I paid my tweets would be boosted more. I didn't pay, and my account with a few hundred followers went from 100ish views per average tweet to 10.
If you think you don't need to pay for engagement on there I can only assume you're paying for it and unaware of the difference.
It's probably not "the more you pay the more interactions you get", but there definitely is "if you pay, you get more interactions". Blue checks are boosted in top of replies etc., and is ironically often the exact people you don't want to see.
if you go to the premium section and look at the benefits it literally says (from memory) if you pay 3.5€/month you get a small boost on interactions for your tweets. If you pay 5€/month you get a bigger boost on interactions if you pay (I don't remember how much it is) 22€/month ~ you get the biggest boost for your tweets.
That to me sounds like if you don't pay, you're going to be in the bottom of the feed for everyone else.
I just looked and it doesn't say that. It only says that you have a higher chance to show up in front of other users in the reply section. It does not say that Premium Plus gets more of a boost than Premium. It is not a perk of Basic.
Doesn’t matter what it is called. You can buy interactions, that’s like buying fake followers.
With a double edged sword - they also removed the organic engagement you previously would have gotten
> You can buy interactions
You're describing advertisment in general. Same with FB. If I throw enough money at a posting ad, I will gain interactions.
You're missing the point. There's a difference between buying an ad, something that's clearly marked as an ad and inserted as an ad, vs having your normal posts appear organic but still getting put in front of more people.
Or, it's mainly the opposite. If you don't pay, you no longer get the organic, not even from your own followers.
On FB ads are not very clearly marked - the "sponsored" in grey lettering is not very noticeable.
They also promote anything that gets engagement which leads to showing people a lot of very nasty stuff.
Out of the anger inducing frying pan and into the group-think fire.
We're against chronological timelines composed of people you follow for being "group think" now?
How can you tell when they are two different hive minds, with temperament being the sole differentiator?
It’s funny how much people on X resent the freedom for alternatives to exist.
As always it’s because it’s never actually about free speech, just freedom of consequences from their own choices and behaviour.
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Posting here since I am curious if any friends on HN have faced the same AI based banning. I have had a Twitter account since like 2008 and they just did this- like folks on reddit are reporting appeals just get robo-rejected. Is there any way to reach a human at X? I have some SWEs and SREs in my linkedin account as second and third person contacts but reaching out there just feels wrong. Putting AI in charge of Auto banning 10+ year old paying accounts is insane. There is another thread on this same issue here https://www.reddit.com/r/twitterhelp/comments/1sfn3l4/has_an...
My account was also randomly suspended recently, but I regained access after submitting an appeal to X support. [1]
An acquaintance of mine was also suspended due to “inauthentic behavior.” probably still suspended even now. [2]
[1] https://rtnf.substack.com/p/altilunium-chronoo
[2] https://x.com/i/status/2043104069259268335
> Is there any way to reach a human at X?
Money. Lots of money. Pay the Advertising chuds. Back before reserved/paid usernames were even a thing I remember at least one recorded phone call kicking around one of my archives of a Twitter employee saying they'd release any handle I needed for a $10k ad commit over 3 months minimum pre-Musk.
> Is there any way to reach a human at X?
They do read the appeals. I know this because I was falsely permanently suspended, without lawful reasons and without prior notice, with an account in good standing, a few years ago.
After writing several appeals over the years, in which I even mentioned article 19 of the UN UDHR (which pretty much mentions everyone has the right of freedom of expression and freedom of speech), and after receiving several rejections with the standard boilerplate text I got a very angry human written reply from somebody working at the Safety and Security team mentioning amongst other things I should never try to appeal again, and that they would automatically reject every appeal if I would. Or at least, that was basically the gist of it.
And I tried it once afterwards, and they didn't lie about that.
This was after the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, by the way.
So yes, they do read appeals (even before the Elon purchase likely). But they don't care.
Just to be clear, they are 10+ year old accounts, they haven't been paying for 10+ years, premium has only been available for maybe 3 years
Nothing is wrong during AI revolution.
Automated decision making processing, such as banning, must be avoided under the GDPR. Those facing this issue should throw a complaint at their DPA. I'm sure Musk would love another series of fines in the EU.
Good time to heed the signal and leave. It's an anti-pattern for humanity.
Yeah I know- I have accounts on bluesky and mastodon as well- but I try not to isolate myself to one network, there are plenty of non-usa accounts that were only on X who I followed for technology and art/photography stuff. shikata ga nai I guess.
lol yep. Was miffed for about 5 minutes, as I hadn't done anything wrong. Then realized it was probably a good thing. See ya....
Same here. Premium account, years old, barely post, banned with no explanation.
What’s worse: no way to notify followers or export data after a ban.
Lesson here: Never outsource your identity or communication to a platform you don’t control, treat them as disposable channels, that might disappear any day.
Most social media has been has been utterly untenable forever, but Twitter and Discord are the most troublesome in my experience. It's so hard to create and use a new account on those sites without the rigmarole of captcha (due to suspicious activity) -> banned (due to suspicious activity) -> captcha (due to suspicious activity) -> verify email (due to suspicious activity) -> banned (due to suspicious activity) -> verify phone number (due to suspicious activity). Then, want to follow someone, or join a guild? Hmm.. your account reputation is too low. Try again in a week?
I don't know how people do it. I can only figure it's my fault for running Linux or Firefox or not Signing in with Google™, upsetting the data harvesting overlords.
Back when they still had staffed support, and were called twitter, I'd have to spend a week or more back and forth with them when I inevitably hit the demand for a phone number. Most of the time the account got unlocked.
This was usually a few weeks/months after they were in the news for selling people's phone numbers.
Discord annoys me with this. I tried to ask a question about GrapheneOS on reddit and they auto deleted it and said we use discord now. I don't have discord so I signed up and can't post until I verify my email. So I verified a burner and don't have permission to post in that channel. A couple of days later I did, but the motivation had passed.
It's so strange to put your interactions behind a walled garden that demands verification, especially for something like GOS. But even then, making people wait a day or so without telling them is such an antipattern
I needed to create a Facebook account to verify some Facebook posting functionality worked as we wanted it to. Ok, easy. Tried using my work email. No, not allowed. Hmm, try creating a new email. Nope. Tried to create an account on my personal device with a personal email. Nuh-uh.
I've never seen a service so opposed to me using it. There's no option for dev accounts either.
My X account was banned about a week ago. I use X in an unusual way: I open up fifty tabs a day of people I want to read and see what they've posted in the past day. But I don't use the default feed at all. I often 'like' posts, but I very rarely post anything myself. I don't think I violated any X rules. But I can see why an algorithm think I look a little bit bot-ish.
I appealed the ban but AI declined my appeal. I couldn't circumvent the ban by using a VPN plus a different browser. I thought that would change my fingerprint enough to not be detectable, but perhaps I'm still detectable or perhaps my fingerprint through the VPN just looks suspicious.
Now I'm using something called "Gologin" that gives me a browser with a less unique footprint plus a residential IP in the USA. I have to pay for it. But at least I can use X still.
Ngl, this sounds like addiction. You don't have to use the site, man.
You'll be banned again - using a "residential IP" to appear domestic is a primary method used for accessing compromised accounts. We dissuade use of "privacy VPN" services for all users, as some of those services use the host as an exit node for unknown VPN traffic.
Do you work for them?
Free speech absolutism ladies and gentlemen.
As far as I know reddit does the same thing. If you don’t follow normal human patterns you will quickly get banned. I read some guy’s report where he got banned 8 times detailing each behaviour and indeed it was nothing crazy.
I've also been suspended for breaking their terms and services, even though I haven't done anything wrong. It was probably my VPN. Luckily, my account got unsuspended, but I ain't using that platform anymore
"Inauthentic behaviour"? Did Simone de Bouvoir take over X?
We simply need open, decentralized or distributed platforms. Nostr is not that excellent, but it works, and have a potential to became "unified personal web platform", take a look at it.
Isn't that just Mastodon? Why would I use Nostr instead?
For several reasons:
- Nostr is generally much lighter; it can even be served behind Tor without having a public IP, there's no need to maintain a web server etc. There are compact, self-contained relays like Haven, for example, which are a single go install-able app that includes everything needed on the server side, with practically zero setup.
- There are various clients, including mobile and web as well as desktop, which is enough to satisfy pretty much everyone's tastes.
- There's also an economic model that could be the future of journalism: everyone publishes what they want, and those who enjoy it can make micro-payments, if they wish, to support the publisher.
For now, it's a toy with many abandoned experiments, while Mastodon is a walking dead, having never really taken off. In other words, as they stand, neither of them is working. But Nostr has the potential to become the communication hub for many; for instance, there's already a Matrix-like service (0xchat and potentially whitenoise) that supports chat, audio, and live video, requiring only Coturn and a Nostr relay. There's also "long form" support, meaning personal blogs all on the same technology.
In other words, in a short space of time, on Nostr you can have:
- A personal blog-style site
- A personal Twitter/X
- Personal chat with audio and video
- Private notes if you need to jot something down on the go
- A search engine and address book that could allows with different access levels, a real address book usage for personal contacts.
Potentially all in a single, complete and lightweight deployment. There isn't the burden of federation, which makes many hesitate to activate it because, depending on who they federate with, they find a massive amount of resources consumed. It's essentially text, binary blobs, and near-real-time communications all in one. Haven is the first piece of the puzzle, MOAR is the successor in the making, but eventually, there will be one that integrates 0xchat and a web client, all-in-one.
The Fediverse hasn't achieved this and doesn't have the characteristics to do so.
Then again, if we're honest, the old Usenet did it better, but it's dead to most people, whereas Nostr is alive. People only dislike it because it comes from a crypto community, and many are biased against anyone from that world regardless.
No heavy-handed moderation - as well as no algorithms of course; for some, it’s a pro, for others it’s not.
I'm not touching seedy X any more - if there's someone linking to it the 'toXcancel' extension shows me the content while shielding me from Musk's actual sht pit.
I use my account only to mock @realDonaldTrump.
Real discussions with friends happen in group chats, without all the crap and noise.
looks like the incident happened a month ago ?
my business account got banned as well 7 days ago. I created an appeal but didn't receive any response. crickets.
X has been dead to me for years now. It's all Nazi propaganda, rage bait and CSAM. I honestly think it should be banned. Under Musk it became as bad as the ugly side of 4chan.
Sorry, but Twitter is only for bots now. Real humans need not log on. /s
That being said, I assume that it flagged the amount/frequency of likes or whatever other activity and thought it was suspicious. Probably used Grok to do that and it obviously isn't good at that.
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This hyperbole does more to turn people away from Bluesky and other sites more than X to be honest. There are clearly lots of politically moderate, wholesome "politically inert," and international X users. The people who are vocal about having left seem more extreme and less tolerant to me.
Perhaps for related reasons, I've also recently heard Elon Musk being described as a "literal Nazi" a lot, and I'm sure that kind of wild rhetoric has a similar backfire effect with anyone who has any familiarity with him.
> The people who are vocal about having left seem more extreme and less tolerant to me.
That's because they are. Not all of them, of course, and not companies, but the general populace absolutely is.
Well said. This is how I feel about Bluesky. I've read so many exaggregations from bsky users that I would definitely not want to join that sort of echo chamber. Better leave the extremists alone.
> I've also recently heard Elon Musk being described as a "literal Nazi" a lot
The chatbot run by his company has called itself 'MechaHitler' multiple times, and Musk himself did what is widely regarded as a Nazi salute during Trump's second inauguration.
I guess to expand on my earlier post, it's generally a good thing that these kinds of absurd allegations are counterproductive and generally not convincing, because if they were more readily believable they would be quite irresponsible. Real violence has occurred because of beliefs (and posts) like this.
The dude did a literal Nazi salute on stage. Twice. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call him a Nazi.
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Yes, let's get the protractors out to find out if the man who's turned Twitter into a far right cesspool, and has served in a far right government, and constantly tweets far right things, may just have far right sympathies. /s
Ceasing to believe what your own eyes and ears are telling you, in as far as those things may challenge your political beliefs, is generally a road that leads nowhere good.
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Are you proud of this comment? Is this the person you wanted to be when you were a kid? Disputing whether a Nazi salute was actually a Nazi salute because the executor of the Nazi salute doesn’t have the skill to execute it correctly?
Maybe describing him as a "literal Nazi" is a bit exaggerated (although there was that thing with the Nazi salute last year), but you only have to remember what he did at DOGE (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world/lancet-usaid-global...) and maybe take a look at what he posts (and reposts) on X to realize that it's not too far from the truth...
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The classic "if it disagrees with me, it's a far-right neo-Nazi" rhetoric. Sadly thiss is becoming depressingly common in certain corners of tech discourse.
X has the best AI news, the best virality for good content and sure - it has a lot of shit, but community notes and curated feeds keep the noise low.
This. No other platforms has a system akin to CN's. For me personally, I could never stand using any platform that is aggressively tone policed towards whatever official truth. Not Truth Social, not BlueSky.
Other places are like playgrounds, X is where the adults go to talk.
> any platform that is aggressively tone policed
all platforms are tone policed, yes even real life. If you don't notice it, you're either not looking, or you agree with the tone.
Not all platforms are agressive about the tone-policing and "real life" is not a platform. AFAIK, we still don't live in a world where the moneyed class get to set the rules about who is allowed to exist in "real life".
Also: scale and context matters. Someone telling you to shut up on a movie theater is not out of place, but whoever was next to you in the theater does not get to decide what you say in a bar or a PTA meetiing.
> AFAIK, we still don't live in a world where the moneyed class get to set the rules about who is allowed to exist in "real life".
I mean thats just the legal system, its also deciding what is taught in schools, or churches (other religions are available). Currently in the USA there is "tone policing" about trans people. Laws are being put in place to enforce a certain style of living for people who are trans. Regardless of you opinion of trans people, that is very much real life tone policing.
> but whoever was next to you in the theatre does not get to decide what you say in a bar or a PTA meeting.
but the people in the bar/PTA meeting do. In the same way that newspaper decide who to publish, TV which programmes to air, student organisations what cause to adopt, charities what people to fight for.
I think you are saying that one organisation doesn't get to control the patterns and types of speech for an entire country, which is mostly true apart from a authoritarian places.
But, each platform has its own tone, be that X, bluesky, the local darts club, PTA, or church. that tone is enforced by the people who support/take part in that platform. Those rules vary by factions that live on those platforms. The issue with X/bluesky etc is that they make money by deliberately forcing separate factions to engage. If you fall out with your local pub, you find a different pub, and hopefully never see those people again. But that pub is selling you pints, not advertising. so it needs to keep you happy to keep you buying pints.
> each platform has its own tone, be that X, bluesky, the local darts club, PTA, or church. that tone is enforced by the people who support/take part in that platform.
You are abusing the meaning of the word "platform" to try to create a false equivalence that can be used to justify the absurdity that present-day Twitter is.
> justify the absurdity that present-day Twitter is.
Present day twitter is one man's increasingly sad slide into authoritarian/contrarianism. It is a mess of idiocy and malignant individualism.
My point is, that twitter is nothing different, it has it's own tone. If you notice it, then twitter is not the place for you anymore. If you don't then twitter is the right place for you.
> My point is, that twitter is nothing different
And my point is that Twitter is different because it has become a direct instrument from one single man to proselytize and shape the conversation.
> If you notice it, then twitter is not the place for you anymore. If you don't then twitter is the right place for you
By your logic, I don't belong anywhere because I notice the tone everywhere.
It still has the best AI news because users are not quitting it. Even the most fervent left leaning folks I know cannot quit it. Too bad it fell into the wrong hands and became a shell of its former self
Its not just in tech circles. It really started around 2020 with C. "Everyone needs to agree this time" extremely backfired and ruined our ability to discuss things.
Not really. George Orwell has noted this phenomenon in his 1946 book "Politics and the English Language". He attributes it to a knock-on effect of wartime propaganda.