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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of people for whom everything Musk touches is the worst thing ever created, then a lot of people for whom everything he touches is gold, then some people who just like a pretty reasonably stable social media site that's not overrun by bots and pay-for-engagement morons.

IMO it seems objectively true that the bot problem is worse than it's ever been. It's definitely objectively true that boosting paid-for comments above organically high-engagement comments means your signal:noise ratio is way, way worse.

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It's not really clear at all to me, since, eg some people here are talking about getting several bot account follows daily, while for me it is the opposite, where I used to get a lot more bot follows than I have gotten over the past year or so (down from 4-5 per week to less than 1 per month).

On the other hand, I do see a lot more bots in replies (haven't had any reply to me yet though).

Overall my opinion has been slightly positive, my usage of the site is up and I'm hearing far less of people I follow (or those they follow) who have been unreasonably suspended or forced to delete tweets. It feels a lot "wilder" than before, but that's kind of what I enjoy anyway.

But I also don't really engage with political Twitter, I only use it to keep up on space related reporting and weeb stuff. The worst part has just been a lot more engagement farming through dumb statements from content creators who are circling the drain.

Yeah, I also engage little on Twitter, but so far I’ve seen no notable worsening of spam. When I clicked to see popular announcements (from HN or somewhere else) I also saw crypto spams and other stuff but from my perspective, it’s not much different from the situation on FB, for example. When I replied to some interesting GTP-chess posts, I still got replies clearly from humans (ask questions, do some follow up etc.). Thus, I don’t have a clear feeling whether it got better or worse.

The most striking change I have seen is the percentage of Musk’s tweets on my feed. It looks like he is everywhere now! That was definitely not the case before. But yeah, he is the owner and he likes to tweet :)

Please share some examples, I never see crypto scams anymore and pre-acquisition you could go in the replies of any popular account and it would be nothing but that. I'm guessing it's still there but I don't see it because I don't scroll for hours on end and verified posts being boosted at the top suppresses the visibility of any bots. Either way considering how bad the bot problem was before the change in ownership I feel like people have a very selective memory about this problem. I did get a handful of catfishing bot accounts following me a few months ago, but that's about the extent of what I've seen as far as spam goes recently and feeds are much cleaner than they were a couple years back. If you're comparing to how it used to be several years ago then it's a different story.

> It's definitely objectively true that boosting paid-for comments above organically high-engagement comments means your signal:noise ratio is way, way worse.

I'd like to see an objective proof for this alleged objective truth.

The bigger problem that I see constantly nowadays is cherry-picked information and people outright lying about a picture or video that they're sharing, but thankfully the community notes help a lot with that.

Go ahead and flag this comment for not being prefixed with "Grr I hate Elon Musk!"

I don't care about Musk one way or the other and I don't see any evidence to support your claim. The level of bot activity is no higher than before in terms of comments on tweets by accounts that I follow. But why bother reading comments anyway? That has always been mostly a waste of time.

my dude, you're in a comment section right now, replying to a comment, with a comment

To be fair his comment was a waste of time

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