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Comment by npalli | Hacker News Reader

True, X is becoming unbearable. Used to be - 90% of replies were from normal people. Nowadays, it is just 90% bots in all replies. Maybe the result of firing 70% of the employees shows up after some delay.

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Used to be - 90% of replies were from normal people. Nowadays, it is just 90% bots in all replies.

This reminds me of the saying that 90% of statistics are completely made up.

It's not a statistics, but an illustration of an anecdata

imo it wasn't caused by firing the employees, it's making it possible to earn money with engagements that made X plagued with bots,

you will see the most bots under the reply of tweet with at least +10k likes trying to latch into engagements.

It’s as if a city laid off the entire fire department and then announced they would pay people for starting fires. You can argue all day about which decision was dumber, but it doesn’t matter. The whole city’s burning.

I understand you don't like what Elon did to twitter but that doesn't give you license for outright fabrications.

So fireing everyone working with spam issues and shutting down automated spam detection tools to save a few bucks has nothing to do with this?

It’s likely both that and all of the horrible product decisions are having an impact.

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.

…for money.

Yes it is bot(h) actually

No. They're just trying to automate content creation and consumption so to take the social part out and industrialize the media part of social media.

I mean, it's probably a combination, plus the pay-for-attention model.

I too am annoyed at that part of our fellow humans, which slapps its' fleshy bony extremities on our non-brethren computers, to disagree with our opinions. I wish humans would stay out of our circuits and networks, and express their disagreements by smacking and undulating their fleshy flaps, while forcing air through their wet fleshy bags. So icky. Stay off our networks, and poke each other with deceased rods of cellulose, you imbecilic primitive life forms! Leave computers be!

> Nowadays, it is just 90% bots in all replies.

all bots posting viral clips that have nothing to do with the content you clicked the comments on

its very annoying

Definitely not my experience before. Before Elon's acquisition, anytime I looked at a tweet it was filled with crypto scams. Send BTC to get 2x BACK!

Self-hosted quite good LLMs surely has to be the biggest factor?

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.

Maybe X management actually find value the illusion of activity that bots provide. It's probably not fooling anyone, but...

I've never been on twitter but that's never been my understanding of it from people's descriptions.

I find X to be far more enjoyable than at any time in the past, but I suspect that's because we have different politics. Peak unusability on Twitter for me was, say, 2016-2021, a period during which people who disagreed with me on there literally emailed my boss to try to cause trouble for me, a period in which I was routinely piled-on and called the most offensive and ridiculous names by massive accounts for relatively banal and benign moderate opinions.

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.

I would love to know what you were disagreeing about.

David Shor was fired for pointing out (with data) that riots are electorally counterproductive, for example.

Are you David Shor?

Otherwise, what were YOU posting that prompted others to call your employer?

Why don’t you just say explicitly what you’re trying to imply and save everybody the bother of guessing.

I could ask you the exact same question.

Edit: Also, nice dodge.

It’s not 2015 anymore and I’m not going to have a conversation with you about whether cancel culture is real or if maybe actually everybody complaining about it just simply deserved it. If you want to have that debate, then you’re going to need either a time machine or another interlocutor.

I never mentioned anything about whether cancel culture is real or not.

All I wanted to know is, what was it you were posting that prompted others to go to such extremes of contacting your employer?

Many of those insufferable users that left are still in here, hence your downvotes.

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