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Comment by throwaway2990 | Hacker News Reader

Hahahhaha there’s less bots now than before Elon took over.

Now instead of reply bots tho I get like bots.

I paradoxically only really started heavily using Twitter when it seemed to decay under Musk (because I wanted be along for the fun ride). But I can hardly imagine that there could have been more bots before than there are now. Almost all my tweets are immediately liked by some catfishing bot and there are crypto spam bots under every slightly popular tweet.

Same here. And good engagement dropped down significantly. When I had 10K followers, I can easily get 200-400-500 likes and they were more or less real because I also get a lot of impressions and replies.

Nowadays with 35K followers I get, say, 20 likes and ~3 of them are bots.

As someone who reported tons of stupidly obvious spam/crypto bots pre takeover I'm genuinely puzzled as to people reporting _increased_ bots as I can spot maybe one every now and then. Maybe it's because I'm a passive user, but to me it's solved.

Interesting. It could be that I never noticed before because I wasn't as active (and have gained a couple followers in the meantime, thus becoming a slightly more attractive target). In any case it's now bad enough to make me reconsider using the platform at all (that and the promoted replies and tweets by blue checkmarks). Related to your remark about reports: my last few spam reports got the reply that the tweets didn't violate the "sensitive content policy", even though I reported them as spam, not sensitive content. So something seems to be broken about the report system now too.

Your profile must have a target painted on it because that is not my experience at all.

There are definitely more bots in the replies to the people I follow (a dwindling number as they are all switching focus to bluesky, threads and their own email).

And many have the $8 checks so ... $1 a year is going to very little to the bot population.

Do you have a source on that?

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