IsMyXFeedFucked – Analyze How Your X Feed's Impacting You
107 comments
·January 19, 2025msravi
threeseed
It really is unique to everyone and who they follow.
But when the US election came around all of our business For You feeds switched to political, far-right content even though we are not in the US nor political. And the fact that the EU is investigating X for its algorithm changes means at least some other people have had the same experience.
sureIy
My X feed is FUBAR.
My feed was tech-only. Real people publishing real stuff.
Last year X started occasionally showing some random content like Reddit, I'd mark them as "not interesting" and move on.
Since last month there's no tech content by tech people, there's exclusively junk worse than on Reddit's homepage. No amount of "not interesting" will fix it. Oh, there's porn now too.
I stopped opening X altogether.
Havoc
That plus even the classic SV tech crowd is now so entangled in US partisan politics that you're more likely to hear about whatever outrage is happening in culture wars than a new technology. Complete write-off and I don't just mean X
nobrains
I have noticed searching for topics that interest me, ends up showing more content related to that search term in my feed. At least for some time. Just putting it out there incase someone wants to manually tweak their timeline using the search workaround.
matthewdgreen
Yup. I had a beautiful infosec feed that was incredibly useful. Sometime over the summer my "for you" devolved into wild political opinions, and many of the smartest people left the platform which turned by "Following" feed into a ghost town. Every time I used the app I came away feeling angry, and I realized I was happier not using the app than using it.
Fortunately about 1/2 of the smart people have shown up on Bluesky, and we can have technical conversations now. I'm hoping all the energy eventually comes back.
sunaookami
Why not use the "Following" feed? You won't get any recommended content (besides ads without an adblocker) and only see stuff from people you follow.
Side note: It's annoying how many tech people started posting their political hot takes since ~2016. I unfollowed everyone who tweeted about politics.
matthewdgreen
Because a lot of the smartest and most interesting people just stopped posting. And frankly I don't blame them. A good chunk of the reason is that the replies are recently much more angry and toxic, which makes the entire platform stressful to use.
calmworm
“It's annoying how many people started posting their political hot takes…” ftfy
cosmic_cheese
Discover feeds, if they try to be actually relevant to the user, can be a great tool for finding new people to follow and help keep the following feed fresh. I primarily follow artists on Twit-alikes and it’s how I once upon a time used it on Twitter and now use it on Bluesky.
A discover feed that’s not adversarial isn’t strictly necessary but it’s a significant selling point.
sunaookami
>I primarily follow artists on Twit-alikes and it’s how I once upon a time used it on Twitter and now use it on Bluesky.
I still do this on Twitter and the "For You" feed works great.
vanrohan
Also make sure to remove bots from your followers. Having them in your social graph impacts your feed for sure. I made the "x bot remover" Chrome extension that automates removal based on simple rules. It's free.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/x-bot-remover/aohkh...
miki123211
Use "latest", not "for you."
"Latest" is still exclusively people you follow, in chronological order (and content explicitly marked as sponsored if you don't have premium.)
X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this. You don't like the algorithm? Don't use it, and use X just like everybody else for the first 10 years of its life.
SketchySeaBeast
> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this.
Why would you emphasize that point when it's clearly wrong? Is it ignorance? Is it to push a particular narrative? I'm confused.
louthy
> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this
Facebook has this: menu -> feeds -> friends
tanaros
> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this. You don't like the algorithm? Don't use it, and use X just like everybody else for the first 10 years of its life.
Speaking as a non-X user, doesn’t YouTube offer essentially the same thing with the “subscriptions” tab?
sitharus
Yep, it absolutely does. YouTube would be unusable without it for me
gammarator
… Bluesky offers a clean, strictly chronological following feed as well as your choice of algorithmic feeds.
null
drdeca
Tumblr also has this?
(Not counting the ads and specifically-paid-to-be-promoted posts, but those are clearly marked, and I’m pretty sure twitter has as many in-line ads)
threeseed
> X is the only corporate social media platform that offers this
Threads and BlueSky both offer this.
And so there is no literally zero reason now why anyone should stay on X.
romaniitedomum
> And so there is no literally zero reason now why anyone should stay on X.
Unless the people you're interested in hearing from are mostly or exclusively there.
greatgib
What is infuriating is the fucked algorithm that is now showing in priority the tweets of Elon, even if you don't subscribe, follow or care about him.
That is the real problem nowadays, he destroyed the system to make it a self promotion tool first. I'm quite sure that always on feed tweets of him can easily brain wash hundreds of millions of people.
tbihl
At the risk coming off as pedantic, it ceases to be a self-promotion tool if the system is destroyed.
PartiallyTyped
I had him blocked and last I used xitter I still saw his stuff.
dustingetz
i turned off the images, it’s under bandwidth saving settings but makes x much better and helps keep the alg away from memes also
Kye
Most of the tech people I recognize are on Bluesky now. If you follow enough of the same people, even the "Following" timeline won't help because they're just not there.
arnvald
To me the worst part is not even the feed (I can use “following” tab) but the replies. I often used to look at single threads to see replies there. Since they started prioritizing replies from premium users it turned into cesspool and I eventually stopped using X altogether
bjackman
I did the same, very quickly. I'm now on BlueSky and it's exactly like pre-Musk Twitter.
egeozcan
Bluesky doesn't have contact import yet (or I didn't see it). Are there any good lists for techie/nerd content? I really miss my old Twitter feed but most people I followed switched to Bluesky and it's a lot of manual work to find people again.
Kye
Here you go: https://goodfeeds.co/search?q=tech
extraduder_ire
You can change how replies are sorted for you via a button on the top right, but you have to change it every time you open some replies.
The problem comes from the default sort order shown to everyone though, not just you as you're reading it.
threeseed
> started prioritizing replies from premium users
And often non-premium users are simply flagged as spam and hidden.
Which actually means that if Elon removes your blue checkmark (as happened recently with Asmongold) then it is akin to a shadowban.
add-sub-mul-div
It's a de facto entry level advertising tier for the worst products and the worst takes. Everything on the platform is an ad impression.
matsemann
Yup, so short-sighted. Probably boosted numbers when lots of trolls bought premium to be noticed (where their obnoxious replies normally would land in the bottom with no views), but in the end I got so tired of the hostile environment that I just stopped using it.
jp57
If I were to use this credulously, I'd be committing the same error as believing everything in my X feed.
I have no idea who made this tool or what their biases are, why would I believe their analysis any more than I'd believe a stranger on X? I can't find any information on who is behind this.
The different axes that they uses for analysis (health, political balance, "vibe', etc) are all inherently subjective. How are they measured?
natdude
Hi - I made this baby:
Each post is scored based on a bunch of metrics - yes, is gemini setting attribute values for each post.
These attributes are then all summed and some stats used to create your 'scores' - these are just based on percentile, e.g. top 90% violence = a high violence score.
The health is a weighted sum of the other metrics.
Fair point about 'subjective nature of things'. I've found combining the more subjective scoring with statistics and comparison has made the scoring more grounded
Thanks for the feedback!
refulgentis
I very much doubt it even works or tries to, even though a lot of barriers have been lifted recently (I'm handwaving at https://xkcd.com/1425/ x the input being just a video x output sold as rigorous deep analysis)
I have a stroooong feeling this is just a wrapper around Gemini, as it has video input.
peanut-walrus
Screen recording and processing because it's easier than just scraping now is wild.
chikere232
X, such a curious game, the only way to win is not to play
sschueller
Everyone's x feed is FD. I don't not follow Elon yet his crap posts are littering the app when I open it. It's turned into his personal bullhorn of miss information and rage bating.
tbihl
FWIW, I can't recall seeing Elon except as retweets. The downsides are the bots, the exodus, and the stupid renaming, but it's been almost entirely improvement to me.
I was pretty tired of Mastodon and thus happy to return when Elon bought it.
ETA: I use a preferred subset of my follows for my main feed, a few subject-delineated lists for particular research, and occasionally my "following" feed to branch out.
egeozcan
It's crazy how blatant it is. If you block him and his promoted bunch, you still get occasional fascist/racist bait on the feed. Following feed is also mostly dead because many people I followed left.
electrondood
He's either been radicalized by his own platform, or he's intentionally being provocative to drive engagement, to drive ad revenue. It's disgusting.
The hypocrisy is absurd. Like telling everyone to go fuck themselves, and then hours later, pleading for users to post more positive content... or making a big show of being worried about using AI untruthfully, and then repeatedly posting AI-generating images smearing people he doesn't like. Pretending like no one had "free speech" until he bought the platform, and then selectively banning vocal dissent he doesn't like.
He's a child. Such a waste.
wsintra2022
He may also have just had an in house AI running his socials for the last few years. Surprising not much discussion around that as a possibility.
haunter
I just don’t get why don’t people use the “following” tab. You only see people you follow, if they post things you don’t like unfollow them that’s all.
that_guy_iain
Because Twitter switches you a lot and even then you also have all the random notifications from people you don't follow.
Oarch
Old twitter switched you all the time. I even used a plugin to switch me back.
I've never knew been switched since the acquisition.
agos
during the old twitter times you could use a third party client, that was the trick
haunter
>Because Twitter switches you a lot
What does that mean? Twiter doesn’t switch my tabs on its own, neither on desktop or mobile.
>and even then you also have all the random notifications from people you don't follow.
I only get notifications from people I don’t follow if someone likes my tweets or they reply
that_guy_iain
I feel like you don't use Twitter that much then. Because they added the whole notifications about new posts feature a while back and it's not based on who you follow and I believe famously it's like that so Musk gets more views. And I feel like my tabs get changed on a somewhat frequent basis but I've stopped using it to really keep track.
yomismoaqui
I made was tired of reading political crap from some accounts I follow and created a Chrome extension to filter them out.
Just define topics you don't want to read about and the AI filter will hide them from your feed.
Technically is just passing the text to Gemini Flash 1.5 with a simple prompt to detect if the tweet is from a forbidden topic.
You can try it here: https://twitter.cercaapp.com
sebmellen
You saved me from having to make this. Thank you!
Is the source available? Can this be ported to FireFox?
KTibow
There's a surprising number of extensions like this (see https://github.com/thomasj02/AiFilter, https://unbaited.danielpetho.com/) although it seems most are Chrome-exclusive
natdude
Oh cool - its like anti-virus for your brain. AI firewall! haha
ksec
Again I use Twitter like RSS feeds where I put those people into my list, Hardware, Ruby, Software, Database, Economics etc. If you curate your own list and avoid politics it is mostly fine.
I rarely or ever see any promotional tweets.
PixelForg
It says that my feed is pretty fucked, but I only follow pixel and anime artists :) I unfollow anyone that posts anything other than art repeatedly, I guess it is an echo chamber of some sorts.
natdude
Oh interesting - thanks for the upload. Ahh - its the N/A political diversity being seen as 'low' when a null should just have no impact on score.
Thanks! Will work on a fix
__rito__
Happened for my feed as well. It had ZERO political content but showed me a fully red bar for lacking political diversity. It showed N/A%.
natdude
Oh interesting - thanks for the upload
natdude
UPDATE:: The uploading function was not working for a large number of users - this has now been fixed! (it was an issue with the callback URL not being set in the .env which meant file upload progress wasn't returned to the client).
If you have attempted to use this previously without success, please retry - it should work fine now :)
null
I use X to mostly follow politics and some math/physics, and the political feed in the "For you" tab is remarkably balanced. I actually maintain two separate lists called "Left" and "Right" that I slot accounts into, and I just go to each list's feed to see what each side is saying about something. The "For you" tab has a mix, and overall has been pretty well balanced.