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by siavosh 138 days ago
After not logging into Twitter for years I logged back in because I wanted to follow some posts regarding some breaking news. Omg the amount of garbage and fake videos and pictures was overwhelming. My guess is bot content is now so realistic and engagement manipulation is so sophisticated from even a few years ago that people will disengage even more.
2 comments
bsaul 138 days ago
I think that's the number 1 reason. Bot simply drive away useful content.

I think musk don't fight against bot because it makes the ads sells more (just like in the first days of SEM, where fake traffic and fake clicks was a source of revenue for second tier ad networks). But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.

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numpad0 137 days ago
That and GP are both plain untrue. The system literally hides useful and/or organic contents. There's also no signs of ads doing better than before.

The current Twitter algorithm funnel users into divided bubbles of couple hundreds users each, and cap numbers and quality metrics of contents that are allowed to be accessed beyond the bubbles, except for spams, which are artificially kept in the global context. Or something like that. To maintain the facade of a unified timeline, the system picks contents that would have been plausibly popular in the absence of it and push it into global contexts, but those are so out of contexts and out of regular system behaviors that it only brews hostility among the users against the system.

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CamperBob2 138 days ago
But ultimately he's going to have to do something against it.

Musk: "Why, at this rate, I'll have to shut this place down in... let's see... 684,000 years."

He can afford to treat Twitter as a playground for bots, a grooming ground for right-wing radicals, and a cesspool of cut-rate advertising.

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reverius42 137 days ago
Not only can he afford to, investors have been chomping at the bit!

x.com (Twitter) was acquired by xAI. xAI is to be acquired by SpaceX. And rumor has it, SpaceX will IPO for big money soon.

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CamperBob2 137 days ago
On to Mars! Er, ... To the Moon!

He is just another Lucy, holding just another football.

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kristo 137 days ago
I was similarly shocked when I logged back in a couple months ago for the first time to read some news stuff. Then I kept going back once a day for a month or two and the posts have started to look more normal.

I can see how this would change me unwillingly over time. Good wake up call to delete my throwaway account again.

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