X becoming a 'ghost town' of bots as AI-generated spam content floods internet
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
* Artificial (LLM-generated) engagement
* Crypto scams (usually one bot asking for a link to the latest money-making trick and another bot replying)
* The now-infamous "M Y _ _ _ _ _ I N B I O")
Additionally I've noticed that almost without exception every ad Twitter has served me for the past few months has been for an AI-generated drop shipping site hawking the same handful of AliExpress products. I can't remember the last time I got an ad for anything resembling a major brand.
It's absolutely awful. I've seen spam replies that are actively pornography, presumably onlyfans spam. I quickly closed the tab. Maybe crypto spam is down as that bubble has burst but AI spam and OF spam seems to be up.
I can't understand people saying it's better now. Maybe it's some sort of stockholm syndrome. I keep hoping the holdouts I follow on Nitter will switch to any other platform, or at least crosspost before Nitter dies completely.
Those things are all bad, but they're fairly easy to ignore. I much prefer random sexbot spam to the hysterical culture that was ascendant on Twitter in, say, 2018. I think how much one misses that era probably just comes down to one's politics. For me, it was miserable.
I have a pretty thick skin and I enjoy the fray, so let's stipulate that there have always been assholes and jerks saying offensive and insulting things, but the word I'd use to characterize the progressive milieu of 2018 was menacing.
"Wow, interesting unconventional opinion on #metoo you've got there. Sure would be a shame if I found you on LinkedIn and sent it to your boss. Wonder what she'd think of it."
I couldn't be happier that those kinds of interactions have become less frequent.
Almost all employment in the United States is "at-will" and you can be fired for practically any reason and with no notice.
> And if you are, do you boss really care?
The answer to this is, "who knows?" I don't want to spend an afternoon defending my tweets to HR, either way. There's a chilling effect. If even moderate opinions are risky, then I'm probably just going to disengage.
I think the most visible account I follow would be Joueur du Grenier/@Frederic_Molas (a French Youtuber) with 1.3 M followers. But then I rarely check responses to his tweets. The rest have at most 150K followers and I mostly look at the answers to those with much smaller following (5k-10k).
I've seen all three types of reply you mention, but nearly never below tweets from the small account. I'd guess the bots focus on accounts with bigger follower numbers than the accounts where I spent my time.
I don't see any ads (only using on my browser), so I can't comment on that.
Also x traffic has risen over any other social media.. Not sure how abc made the judgement
Citation? Threads is trouncing it in mobile downloads, young people got to tiktok not x.
This tweet from English football Twitter summarises the core issue the best [2].
[0]: https://internettalk.substack.com/p/anyone-else-tired-a-brie... (disclaimer: I wrote this)
[1]: https://twitter.com/ultrarotom/status/1762433167003169046
[2]: https://twitter.com/liamb0117/status/1761391828836741333
I've saw this alot on Reddit before boycotting them.
This reminds me of the saying that 90% of statistics are completely made up.
you will see the most bots under the reply of tweet with at least +10k likes trying to latch into engagements.
I’m sure elevating replies with a “blue check” didn’t help either, since now bot replies can easily sail to the top of the list.
all bots posting viral clips that have nothing to do with the content you clicked the comments on
its very annoying
Twitter is mainly shoutouts into the empty night which LLMs should excel at. Almost no back and forth between users.
It wouldn't suprise me that bots and clickfarms are so common that automated systems have started to ban non-bots becouse normal use stands out now.
That's all mostly gone now and many of the most insufferable users (from my point of view) have moved elsewhere.
People who happen to have accepted the dominant Twitter culture of that period don't see any of this in the same way a fish doesn't know what water is.
Otherwise, what were YOU posting that prompted others to call your employer?
Edit: Also, nice dodge.
All I wanted to know is, what was it you were posting that prompted others to go to such extremes of contacting your employer?
- Spam post (AI generated?)
- Another spam post (AI generated?)
- And here is an ad for a revolutionary mop which lets you mop not just the floor, but the walls and the ceiling as well!
- Spam post (AI generated?)
- ...
... Bonus points for a Community Note that calls it out as a dropship and also links to the Aliexpress listing with their own custom affiliate tag bolted onto it.
I have a very old Twitter account.
I visit x a few times for ~10 minutes each on most days. Engage with a few tens of EE/Hardware/Software folks. Follow and followed by ~750 people.
The ads and engagement farming posts are both annoying, but on balance the conversations tend to be good and the info tends to be informative.
My feeling is that it's better now than it was a year ago.
I haven't noticed an increase in bot-like conversations.
Possibly major factor:
I actively unfollow and often block anyone who shouts about political subjects as I'm generally not interested in those conversations online.
B) if you have a single anecdote, sure you should be using the singular...?
I follow a small group of people and friends, none of whom are too popular. But instead of opening the app and seeing them, I get forced to some "For You" page full of spam, scams, and Elon tweets.
A bunch of commenters claim they don't see any of this and I wonder if they are on whatever the paid plan is called, in some favorable A/B category, or just flat-out lying. Everywhere I look is fulling of gambling ads, crypto scams, drop-shipping scams, community notes about those scams with their own scams in them, and of course, adolescent Elon tweets[1].
Whenever I tweet something high quality (interesting finding or howto), I almost never see any activity metrics for it. At best gets a view or two. Sometimes I'll ask a friend for feedback on a tweet I just made, but they are unable to find it.
So this has led me to check X maybe once a week or less. I used to read through my follow timeline once a week, but with the ads and the spam/scam replies in threads I've kind of drifted down to glancing at my follow list on occasion.
It's great. Between what's happened with Twitter and Reddit, I've freed up so much more time and brain space that I wasn't aware I was expending. And you don't get FOMO for low quality content, spam, and scams.
1. This isn't a politically-motivated jab, I'm politically-moderate. It's more "Elon is the same age as me, but he acts more like my adolescent kids than a man."
Edit: I like that I posted this comment and in the half second it took to post, it's been downvoted. I think HN might have a bot problem?
Your comment started with "I like what X has become", in reply to a submission complaining about what X has become. Some of these people don't read past the title of articles, so don't be surprised at losing internet points over technically somewhat agreeing with them.
* never add followers of very recent creation date
* ignore followers of lopsided ratio of followers
* mentally map and gauge responses before adding followers
* always block those likes on your tweets who have met above criterions.
Hardest part of maintaining your clean bot-free Twitter account is re-reviewing your 5K followers for bot-like profile.
Until most of above are fixed, the decline of natural and organic Twitter membership will continue.
There's really no way around it from what I can tell. How does one actually recognize and block not content online in an automated way? When the platform is digital and we now have digital means of generating content, the battle is lost IMO.
Maybe it could be delayed by some kind of platform or regulatory change requiring state issued ID for all internet users. I think that has come up before and it feels very similar to what a few Googlers proposed (before the community dog piled on it). That's not a version of the internet I'd want to use though, and if that's the only avenue for avoiding a web full of bots it sure seems like the days are numbered.
By gauging content popularity. People are good at consuming and obsoleting something abstract as an entire generative pipeline as content of its own. GenAIs and LLM had been doing great among its users but not reaching outside of it, and as required upkeep costs to fight its obsolescence grows non-linearly I'd predict it'll run out of investment sooner or later(before factoring in negative PR).
Hard ID systems don't work. If it worked Facebook wouldn't have acquired Instagram and wouldn't be in competition against Twitter in the first place.
Isn't that already roughly how Twitter's feed algorithm works? I don't use Twitter, but from both the article and comments here it sounds like many people feel their feed is already full of LLM content.
I have a hard time imagining this happening on HN.
Of course, if LLM content is so good that it survives on HN, then it may actually be welcome.
On HN, users downvote and flag junk content. dang shadowbans junk accounts. (I don't know how much of dang's bandwidth this takes up, but it could become a problem. dang does not scale.)
Personally I don't see down votes or flags as a not protection, they're meant to help patrol against low quality content or content that breaks moderation rules. Overloading it for bots may work for a while, but only for as long as not content is recognizable and/or bad quality.
How would we know to flag not content when it looks just like a real person may have written it? And how do we know quality content isn't already being written by bots?
\ . . , , , , . ' , . : @.However, for many viral posts, many of the responses have nothing to do with the original post. It looks like bots/users that are riding off of the success of the viral post in an attempt to get more views/likes/followers. It's a sad behaviour that lessens the experience of the platform.
Or install Windows.
You know what, Musk is a genius after all for monetizing Blue. He will then be taking money from bot accounts only for them to engage with other bot accounts, with none of them wiser
Why people listen to his words is a total mystery to me. He's a consummate liar. His actions re Twitter are clear as day.
Billionaires saw the way Twitter was empowering people and said 'Fuck this noise. Who can we get to destroy this from the inside...'
Can you give us an example of something you wanted to say and weren't allowed?
Also that Bud Light was pressured into a pro-trans campaign that did a lot of damage. I think it's well known there were many figure heads who knew their brand would suffer.
Are you suggesting that Trump was banned for saying that diversity reduces the talent pool? What are you saying? Make a point.
Your evasiveness suggests to me that your original claim was BS.
I suspect that getting banned on Twitter for saying something ambiguous that was misinterpreted is a tiny minority compared to those who are hellbent of hounding their pet hate minority and get banned for it.
He was banned from Twitter for not even saying anything, that’s what you’re telling me.
But, because this male identified himself as a woman, Murphy was banned from Twitter for "misgendering" him. This was, in general, a category of speech you weren't allowed to express on Twitter in the pre-Musk era. Even if you were talking about a male who was attempting to force women to touch his ballsack by court order.
The Mumsnet link is from when she returned to Twitter, in the later comments it has a bit more backstory of what happened. This article explains it better: https://afterellen.com/twitter-bans-meghan-murphy-founder-of...
How? Only Blue can post + comment? Looking in my X experience, a lot of spammers are not afraid of paying. I see way too many obviously generated spam posts/comments from Blue users. What other ways are there?
"If they disagree, they're bots. Also LLM, crypto, and ads."
My comments reliably get liked by some lonely Asian or East European lady with random quotes on their account (mostly bots).
But as far as actual tweets/content and interactions: it's all real people, super interesting, and very up to date news flying at the speed of light.