[bowsamic]

Community Notes seems to be increasing in usage as X becomes more toxic and full of conspiracy theorists. I personally think there is a causation here. The frequency at which damaging content appeared on my timeline (just a few days ago I de-activated my account) has ballooned within the last few months. It got to the point where it was constantly serving me videos of fights or even quite often animal torture. There is also an uptick in hate, e.g. overt racism, accounts that have a lot of followers and openly ask for ethnic cleansing against non-whites, etc. Elon has turned X into "anything" (though, I know more left wing people who are still getting suspended, esp. if they criticise Musk), and Community Notes has become a "release valve" allowing the old liberal twitter to regulate posts on X and prevent the entire platform from becoming the next 8chan.

If Community Notes are maintained at their current pace, there is the potential for X to continue on a kind of life support for the majority of "normal" people. If Elon starts to limit Community Notes, e.g. if they start being used on his posts too much, then I think that X will surely die. X already smelled bad before Elon bought it, and its stench is intensifying. What was once a nice information platform with subcultures of toxicity and hate, is now perceived as a place where one cannot escape the worst parts of modern internet culture. Community Notes is the only thing stopping it from collapsing into fanatic esotericism.

[tomcam]

Animal torture? I get tons of hilarious animal shorts on Twitter but never animal torture. I train the algo by liking these vids. I do get fight, real estate, web design, shuffle dance, and guitar vids for the same reason. Could you perhaps be feeding the algorithm? Why would you get more than one or two after downvoting? And are the torture videos downvoted or removed by staff? Mind posting an example?

[bowsamic]

> Could you perhaps be feeding the algorithm?

I don't know but it shouldn't even be a possibility to train the algorithm to give animal torture videos

> Why would you get more than one or two after downvoting?

How do you downvote on X?

> And are the torture videos downvoted or removed by staff?

Again I don't know what "downvoted" means in the context of X. I can't see any kind of score or anything. In my experience they are not removed by staff unless the animal is mammalian.

> Mind posting an example?

I've deleted my account, but I wouldn't post them here anyway

[tomcam]

> How do you downvote on X?

Click ellipsis, then block or mute

[bowsamic]

Okay then yes I was doing that and even so the content was still appearing more and more rapidly. I know many others who've had the same problem specifically with animal torture videos. Frankly, the platform is not fun when there is always a good chance of seeing animals being tortured. I think I'm being downvoted because people think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not. Here's an article about it https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...

[rideontime]

Do you have any actual evidence that muting or blocking an account "trains" the "algorithm" to show you fewer accounts like that, or is this just based on your own observations? If the latter, can you share your data?

[tomcam]

Purely anecdata and common sense. A large commercial enterprise can’t survive that kind of thing for very long. My Twitter feed has been aggressively G-rated from day 1

[mschuster91]

> There is also an uptick in hate, e.g. overt racism, accounts that have a lot of followers and openly ask for ethnic cleansing against non-whites, etc.

Not to mention the constant bot spam. Musk promised to "get rid" of it, and yet I have to block about 10-20 bots shilling porn via follows and likes on completely random tweets and replies a day... and they're all following the same 3-4 templates for their activities and bios. Had Twitter any moderation staff left, it would take a couple minutes to write a regex to catch these porn bot bios and to take all of their accounts down at once.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Post-Elon takeover the amount of bot spam I encounter has definitely decreased. I'm not sure the claim of Twitter moderation is accurate, since before the takeover the problem was still present.

The problem got so bad in YouTube Comments that eventually third-party tools [0] were developed to help purge spam.

I agree that if you had a team monitoring spam they could write rules to drastically reduce spam. It's always going to be a cat and mouse game, but if the cat side was more proactive it would definitely lead to a better experience.

[0] https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge

[mschuster91]

Urgh, yes. YouTuber HeavyDSparks has had a long running scammer campaign against him with people naming themselves with unicode characters of numbers in circles and posting "Whatsapp me" replies to legit comments. That even someone like him with > 3M subscribers can't seem to get ahold of a YouTube CSR who can raise an issue with backend/anti-fraud developers to check for accounts using this pattern is mind-boggling and only speaks for the dysfunctionality of Google today.

[bowsamic]

Yep, sometimes I would be having a conversation with someone and suddenly the bots come and start liking all of our tweets for a good 10 minutes, then suddenly they go again after they realise that they aren't getting a bite. Never had that on old twitter.

[pjc50]

Certain people I follow always have a bot spam comment on every post. They put it in the hidden replies, and next post they make gets a very similar comment from a different bot.

Always crypto scams.