Twitter pay you for how much "engagement" your tweets get now. If you post something that angers people you will get a ton of replies, quote-tweets etc.
There are a whole lot of grifters on that platform making thousands of dollars a month winding people up.
Accounts pushing white supremacy, the reversion of women's rights, hatred towards other on the basis of their race or religion, climate change denial, denial of science and promotion of pseudoscience, etc etc. are heavily promoted across the platform and get millions of engagements.
If you create a new account, the majority of the accounts you are shown and suggested to follow will be those pushing the above.
They've switched to a model of paying their users for engagement, which naturally encourages users to post the most engagement bait they can, which tends to be inflammatory and utterly lacking in depth or nuance.
Someone asked where that happened and they said "On X" and the response was "Holy shit, That's the kind of thing you expect to see on Bluesky, not X"
The thing is, The comments were terrible, and the average user of either platform would probably wholeheartedly agree that they were terrible.
If you exist in your own little community on these platforms then you don't see those bits. Those hideous extreme elements are there though. I don't know how representative they are of their respective populations, or even how much of it is automated stirring. I'm not sure anyone does. it seems quite difficult to find an analysis that is not pushing an agenda. The nature of agenda driven research over truth driven research makes it much easier to find the agenda driven stuff, because it's only reason to exist is to be found. The hard working people who try and find the nuance are too busy doing that to run a PR operation for their work.
There's a dark irony that with the decline of platforms like Twitter and Reddit descending into places of astroturf and brigading, there are fewer places to find conversations where informed people are discussing things publicly. A person searching for what an informed individual would say on the matter cannot find it. There's not really even any bots pretending to be those informed individuals. The bot game is more basic. Throw so much obviously fake crap around that nobody trusts anything.
Unless people control their own algorithm, forget about it.
Imagine buying a cooking magazine and it was full of political ads. Who wants that shit?
It's actually gotten better for those of us that value all sides of a given story so we can come to our own conclusions, instead of parroting stuff we hear in bubbles. I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
Anecdotal; people get paid / pay to post and promote certain content. But that's nothing new on social media.
That said, escaping or avoiding bubbles is good, just be sure you're actually out.
What they actually mean by "all sides" is "my side" (that is not typically allowed/supported on other platforms, for reasons they don't want to go into)
https://web.archive.org/web/20181130015402/https://pasteboar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180827011518/https://pasteboar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180827011519/https://pasteboar...
How about if the person who owns the educational institution puts their thumb on the 2 + 2 = 5 side of the balance for their own ends?
1. A different bubble is still a bubble.
2. Regardless of political leanings, paying for engagement is a really bad sign.
> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
So? You don't have to know anyone being paid for it to be happening. The people who are really motivated by that are often poor by western standards and living on the other side of the world from you.
Facebook also pays for engagement, and what that's lead to is stuff like AI-generated shrimp Jesus and fake "I made this" memes, created by guys in India that don't even know English and don't own a computer. They throw crap at the wall from their cell phones to see what sticks, then do more of that.
IIRC the same thing happens for politics. Just the other day I read that a lot of popular "Alberta separatist" accounts are run by people who don't even live in Canada. They just use AI and shamelessly copy posts made by other accounts.
X is not a meritocracy of ideas, either.
Similar feelings about Nebula vs YouTube, although Nebula straight up doesn’t have entire genres, or videos in languages other than English, so it doesn’t really work as a general recommendation.
> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle
because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.
Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.
Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.
I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).
In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.
I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.
I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.
It's big business and is really not that deep. For someone who isn't part of that world(which is big business) to judge what is good or not is hard.
And now it's cheap to produce that "pulp romance" novels en masse. So people who have little clue about this genre can produce something that seems good, but doesn't appeal to the reader.
My favorite implementation of this is talking to the clerks at my neighborhood bookstore. But the New York Review of Books is an alternative that’s easier to enjoy from home. For romance novels I like the blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Also this is kind of cheating but I have a family member who reviews books for a library journal so a lot of the time I just let her tell me what to read.
I've found myself applying this rule, sometimes unintentionally, to almost all media I consume. It's now a very rare occasion that there's something new that I want to read, watch, or listen to. It just isn't that good, tbh. My music library is full of music from ~2018 and older, most books I enjoy are even older than that, and I can't remember the last time a movie came out that I was dying to see since about 2016-ish.
It's not like I'm intentionally filtering out for old stuff, my own tastes just seem to prefer it. Not sure if its due to my own age (I'm not that old, mid thirties), or if we've just so over optimized media for revenue extraction that its become too formulaic and boring.
However, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, in my opinion there is some new good stuff (books, music, movies, etc.) still being created, even if it's harder to find in the sea of mediocrity.
Claiming otherwise is to treat each book as a packet of Pokémon trading cards, where you know you’re getting some cards, but you don’t get to choose which ones.
I don't understand this. Who goes to an online store to decide what to read? Rather than just buy what you wanted to buy.
I would expect that people were going to.. places where people talk about books. Like goodreads, or even some interesting thread on /r/books, or whatever. And then, well, after you decide what to read, you think about how you will obtain it. I think people have their priorities inverted.
And I think like that because the storefront doesn't have your best interest at heart. For them you're just a number on a bottom line.
Its the same process online and offline: See an interesting cover/title, read the dust cover, skim a page to get the writing style, buy or dont buy.
Sure, you will get "more bad than good" but not everything needs to be efficient, and in the old days, the bookstore played the role of curator so you could have a great experience spending a few hours in the store. You would come away having discovered a book that isnt the hotest thing on some review site or message board. That's probably the experience she has been replicating, but now the overall quality has gone down.
I don't know exactly how the incentives work for uploading shitloads of different slop readings of old novels on there, but it seemed to show no sign of slowing down.
IMO they need to focus on the scam side more than the AI side.
But AI does seem to make it easier.
Also not that it takes skill to come up with a remix/cover/homage of a song that is close enough to the original that people can enjoy it like the original, but not so close that you are just plagiarizing it. So this problem before AI is limited to talented musicians who for some reason would rather copy somebody else then to make their own music.
People who like to write lyrics, but can't afford to pay a vocalist still deserve to get their art materialized and distributed.
and they can pay someone who can play an instrument to make it happen, or do it themselves.
They can just come up with a few thousand dollars per hour for a few hours per song. Everyone has a few thousand dollars just lying around
So begins the Clone Wars...
Is this their responsibility? Just restrict payment to the registered copyright holder or their delegate, require registration of copyright for music to be payment-eligible, and escalate the problem to a federal crime with (presumedly) federal enforcement, no? Sure, some people will commit federal crimes to get a payout, but it's gotta reduce the problem massively.
Let them do, if they like to listen, whom are you to say their tastes are bad ?
> 97% of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human made music
https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-ai-m...
Other people seem to be fine with it. Why wouldn't they?
They're fine with it now, but at what does the bread taste more like sawdust than flour to these same customers? 20%? 40%? Half? 70%?
You can only deteriorate your core product so much before people start going somewhere else.
I may be in the minority but I like AI generated music. Do you ever really like a song in the current moment and want one almost exactly like that? Mostly for background music. I like to listen to synthwave while working and since I may listen for 10-20h a week, I hear the same songs over and over. Maybe I should be more selective or curate my playlist, but it's just work. I would love a stream of AI generated music in a particular style I can work to.
Some people are listening to music as an experience, internalizing lyrics, empathizing with the feeling and vibes of the artist. Others are just wanting something pop-y as background noise while they do work. They come together and since they're arguing for different needs, the whole thing turns into a mess.
There's a reason why a few artists persist through the decades, while others just fade into obscurity.(think of how long Madonna, Cher have been around)
AI generated music is also not at all original. Which scares all of the "artists" who lack originality.
This is a musicaly illterate position. You only find the instruments passable because you're not familiar enough with music. You hear vocals and because you have a decent understanding of what a human should sound like you can tell how bad it sounds. Anyone with a musical ear hears the same thing of the horrible AI generated instrumentals.
I would easily recognize AI generated orchestra, while I can bet a lot of money that AI generated EDM is hard to distinguish from something created in a DAW
As a lifelong songwriter, using AI to produce my own melodies and lyrics lets me listen to the diary of my own life, which allows me to reminsce and realize my songs are the best songs ever for JUST me :). I dont subject others to them ... much.