[patgenzler]

This is a result of what I call "audience economy". People want an audience and are willing to pay for it. Audience likes to see a prior audience. Bots enable prior audiences. Platforms like fiverr enable bots.

Get 5000 twitter followers for $5

Those 5000 fake followers make you look good to people that come across you, and they flow.

So it's all about an initial audience.

[pierrepoutine]

It feels very discouraging to start out in this space once a given platform reaches a certain level of maturity. For instance, Insta now seems littered with these local service/small-business accounts spamming the most optimised hashtags with inspirational quotes on stock photographs; most engagement seems to come from bots and scripts being used by these same accounts. (Maybe I'm playing the game wrong.)

Does buying 5k followers really help in any way? Won't the more sophisticated users (ideally those whom you'd be targeting as followers) see through this based on your engagement rates, or does having a certain number of followers hold some weight with the algos which leads to your stuff attracting more engagement, followers, etc. in some kind of virtuous cycle?

[mtdewcmu]

Twitter never sounded like a great idea to me. Years went by and I finally made an effort in the last few months to get on it so I could follow political tweets. I found that it sucked in all the ways I thought it would suck. When you find a good tweet, you get to enjoy reading it for a few seconds, but it leaves you empty and searching for another one.

I think there's a general feeling that Twitter has not much growth potential and it's slowly becoming obsolete.

If it's filling up with bots, that strikes me as a sign of decay.

[patgenzler]

Unfortunately no. When a social platform becomes "big" as in, reaches early majority, spam finds a way in. No algorithm can stop it. Quantity kills quality. The "sophisticated" early adopters lose it.

Look around. People will do whatever it takes to get to "front page", "top stories", and such.

Medium obsesses about quality, but their top stories, fueled by recommendations from "the common man", are full of junk. Same with LinkedIn. Twitter. Facebook.

HackerNews is saved simply because it's small.

[owenmarshall]

> HackerNews is saved simply because it's small.

lol

[jsemrau]

Look at Imgur, it has become a series of memes, reused content from (Twitter, FB, etc), or repetitive "dumps". original content is automatically downvoted