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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who has been on Twitter lately could tell you that. Click any mildly popular thread, and you get about 25% crypto scams, 25% OF, 20% irrelevant clickbait, and maybe 25% at least somewhat relevant replies. The other 5% are also bots complaining that the replies aren't about the post, odd as that sounds.

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The blue checkmark is the main cause of this, or rather, the fact that it automatically boosts your comment over those who don't have one. This led to the current engagement farming meta, where none of the comments are about the OP itself (save for smaller accounts and even then.)

EDIT: Sometimes I find myself holding the spacebar, doom scrolling to reach the "peasant" comments, because at least they're actual comments.

I remember when a large portion of Hacker News commenters were praising the blue check changes. Comments such as:

> Fewer bots, less brigading, ideally no ads, less spam, etc.

> I am actually quite optimistic. Let the best ideas win. The blue check elitism is coming to an end.

> Given twitters known bot problem, the number of bluechecks will likely be muuuuch lower as real people start to pay for them, and the real people behind the identities have to pay for them instead of their PR staff running them, but this in turn will make them more valuable and meaningful.

It's interesting how often the prevailing sentiment of Hacker News commenters ends up being wrong (or misjudged).

There’s a general contrarian-for-contrarians-sake streak among us here, and prevailing sentiment outside HN was that the changes were terrible

Control Panel for Twitter [1] can automatically hide boosted blue replies for you

…although if an account is big enough, you're safer looking at the Quote Tweets instead for actual comments (it also restores the old direct link to those in the focused Tweet), e.g. you're lucky to get more than a handful of non-blue replies under an Elon Musk tweet among the engagement farmers before you hit the maximum number of replies Twitter will load

[1] https://jbscript.dev/control-panel-for-twitter

It's almost as if some lunatic came in and started shutting off systems that he didn't understand, assuming that they were unnecessary.

Why is this fence even here?

I think one limiting factor is the fact that most posts aren't particularly deep or insightful, so the intellectual space from which one can engage on the subject is pretty limited. So most people who engage with content of this sort are just clout chasers trying to get attention or scammers.

Is it really surprising that if Elon amplifies some post with a single exclamation mark all of the replies will be completely inane and full of spam?

Another factor is account size. You can still find interesting replies in accounts that are relatively small, especially when the author takes time to manually hide spam and scams. But once an account goes beyond a certain size they just become a magnet for nonsense. It's pure quantity over quality. Elon has the biggest number of followers but the quality is abysmal.

Ironically discussions tend to be better in circles where nobody wants to pay for the blue checkmark on principle, because the comments there are still sorted using the old ranking system. But as soon as bluechecks start posting they get shunted to the top regardless of quality, burying all the good replies from non-bluechecks.

Where do you find these circles all the comments are spam.

I mean, my Facebook, which I visited for the first time yesterday after months, was almost entirely "fan" pages showing AI generated images of famous actresses in skimpy underwear. Like 90%. I suppose the algorithm has decided that if I read the posts by sci-fi author David Brin, then I'm in a group that also wants dirty pictures of actresses. o_0

I went through a phase where it randomly showed me what I assumed were Thai prostitutes because a spammer created an insta account with my email. After I reset the password on the account it eventually subsided.

Same experience for me here.

And somehow, META stock is absolutely printing. I really don't understand this

BlueBlocker cuts right through all that junk.

Adding this to your host file works too:

127.0.0.1 twitter.com

Does it really? I use it and it has blocked around 25k Blue users for me, but that's nowhere near enough to make using Twitter enjoyable.

Threads, Bluesky or mastodon is your best choice

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