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?