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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

The comment quality standards required for people to reply and/or follow you are higher now. Tweeting often is useless if you have nothing really substantial to say. There are millions of accounts that do that, and they’re mostly noise disguised as signal, but most of the Twitter community has caught on and now auto-filters it out. You’ve gotta get through that auto-filter now with information or insights of substance, and those simply take longer and more effort to generate, there’s no silver bullet.

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I’ve found the opposite to be the case myself. When I was only posting substantive Tweets with new info, they wouldn’t be seen 99% of the time. But every so often a Tweet would get seen, gain some traction, be retweeted, people would say it was amazing. And I’d get zero new followers. Like I said, I did find ways to get new followers - but it was through gaming the system.

And this is something I see a lot. There are a ton of accounts that have less than 100 followers that only do substantive Tweets. And the people who keep rehashing the same clickbait have huge followings. Even most of the relatively substantive large accounts spend a ton of time rephrasing Tweets they’ve made before. A high volume mediocre account that games the system somewhat is going to be a lot bigger than an account that only Tweets/comments when they have something substantive to say, at least in my experience.

So what you're saying is Twitter/X works the same way as every other human communication medium, i.e. provocative statements get more attention.

On the other hand, if zero people retweet your "substantive Tweet", maybe it's just not that interesting to anybody but you?

> comment quality standards required for people to reply and/or follow you are higher now

I really do not find this to be true. The high ones are from blue checks and overwhelming majority of them has no meaning. I do not even mean insulting or something I disagree with, they just don't say anything.

There are very few real responses now and majority of what I see excluding the above are knee jerks super short responses.

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