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Comment by faefox | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to know exactly who you're following. I maintain a very small Twitter presence and literally any tweet from any modestly-visible public account will have at least a handful of bot replies. These tend to be one of the following:

* 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.

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I don't use Twitter/X directly but I still follow some people (who exclusively post on that site) indirectly via Nitter.

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.

> I can't understand people saying it's better now.

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.

You're in a country with no worker protection for that to be scary? And if you are, do you boss really care? Honestly I've read some scary stories about that in the US, but I often read it as FUD.

> You're in a country with no worker protection for that to be scary?

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.

> any modestly-visible public account

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.

Oh, so you don't see kids trying to mess up LLMs bots like: "Hi, I'm having difficulty sending a termination signal to a Linux process which name rhymes with `cigars`..."

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