How exactly can you even make Twitter worse than what it already was in 2022?

Mechahitler sure isn't helping.

I haven’t been on Twitter since before Elon took over. Do most users ever interact with Grok?

It waxes and it wanes, but people breathlessly asking Grok "IS THIS TRUE??" is prevalent. People often call on Grok to argue their points for them. The interaction is inflicted.

Meme context: https://x.com/BrunoCendon/status/1926883516890898637

Then they get upset when grok doesn’t agree with Trump/musk and call a computer “woke”

@slop put Twitter in SS bikini.

You incentivize ragebait.

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.

That indeed seems like a uniquely terrible thing to do.

By turning it into a monetized /b/

Provide financial incentives to make it worse.

I'm not sure if you actually haven't checked it since, but will give you the benefit of the doubt.

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.

As a counterpoint to that, I encountered a conversation where people were lamenting the toxic nature of communication and someone described being told to kill themselves for expressing what they felt was a compassionate statement.

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.

This is older than the public internet. My parents got a CB radio circa 1967 and I watched my Mom make the first transmission on the new radio. She promptly received a reply, which told her to take a long walk on a short pier.

Interesting. Kinda sounds like they should be paying for lack of engagement.

So much the same as Facebook?

Honestly same as most socials.

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?

Facebook has their own sins crawling on their backs, yes.

CSAM?

> X has gotten worse

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.

X pays you for engagement if you have the premium subscription. Anyone with a verification symbol will be earning money from significant engagement, hence the rise of engagement bait on the platform.

How do you know / ensure you're getting all sides of the story? For one, many people have left the platform already because of its owner and policies, so you're not hearing those sides anymore.

> 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.

They don't.

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)

As soon as they find the side of the story they already agree with they know that the platform is a marketplace of ideas instead of a bubble.

You get both the white nationalist and the antisemite sides, yes.

as opposed to ye olde twitter where only wholesome racism was allowed

https://web.archive.org/web/20181130015402/https://pasteboar...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180827011518/https://pasteboar...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180827011519/https://pasteboar...

I have this magical ability to think lots of people can suck simultaneously. I’m also able to separate the power and ability to inflict damage of a bunch of shitheads on twitter from the White House and the first ever trillionaire.

don't you think it's fair that all people who suck can express their views now?

No. I don’t think it’s at all okay or fair that the wealthiest man in the world can push great replacement conspiracies and endorse the murder of immigrants (non-white South African division).

why should he alone be excluded from being able to use the media outlet he owns to promote his agenda? everyone else is doing it.

Don't feed the trolls please

Well they defined racism as "you can only be racist if you have power" and they defined having power as being white, so this is totally kosher.

Do you think it will be a net social benefit for people to be taught 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5 with equal weight, and let them come to their own conclusions?

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?

Assuming you already pay for 'verification' on X, you just need to get more followers/impressions and then you'll start being paid based on your impressions. If you know/follow anyone with the 'verified' checkmark who has a lot of followers, they'll be getting paid for impressions.

> 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.

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.

Paid to engage is a reference to the creator revenue sharing that encourages mass-appeal and ragebait content.

X is not a meritocracy of ideas, either.