Meta Conversation: The fact that X has a "Show Probable Spam" and both of the responses were pretty valid, with one even getting a reply from the creator.
I just don't understand how they still have users.
I just don't understand how they still have users.
Because this post is here and not somewhere else. Strong network effects.
The probable spam thing was nuts to me too. My guess was it's maybe trying to detect users with lower engagement. Like people who aren't moving the investigation forward but are trying to follow it and be in the discussion.
The basic problem is, no moderation results in a deluge of spam and algorithmic moderation is hot garbage that can only filter out the bulk of the spam by also filtering out like half of the legitimate comments. Human moderation is prohibitively expensive unless you want to hire Mechanical Turk-level moderators and not give them enough time to do a good job, in which case you're back to hot garbage.
Nobody really knows how to solve it outside of the knob everybody knows about that can improve the false negative rate at the expense of the false positive rate or vice versa. Do you want less ham or more spam?
The problem is also getting significantly worse because it's trivial to generate entire pages of inorganic content with LLMs.
The backstories of inorganic accounts are also much more convincing now that they can be generated by LLMs. Before LLMs, backstories all focused on a small handful of topics (e.g. sports, games) because humans had to generate them from playbooks of best pracitces. Now they can be into almost anything.
Most everything else goes through a filter and pasteurization before public consumption.
I always assumed that the reason legit answers often fall under "Show probable spam" is because of the inevitable reports coming in on controversial topics. It seems like the community notes feature works well most of the time.
Before this wave of insane bot spam, the comments had started to be so much better than what they used to be (low effort, boomer spam). In fact I think they were much better than the absolute cringy mess that comments on dedicated forums like Reddit turned into
I'll concede the confusing part but all the major Mastodon servers I interact with regularly are pretty quick so I'm not sure where that part comes from.
Not since February. But it's for the best that the Eternal September has remained quarantined on Twitter.
No one wants to pay for anything, and that's the true root of every issue around this. People complain YouTube has ads, but wont buy premium. People hate Elon and Twitter but won't take even an ounce of temporary inconvenience to try and solve it.
Threads exists, I'm happy they integrate with Activity Pub, which should give us the best of both worlds. Why don't people use Threads? I'd a little more popular outside the US but personally, I think the "algorithm" pushes a lot of engagement bait nonsense.
Perhaps if buying into a service guaranteed that they would not be sold out then there would be more engagement. When someone signs up it is pretty much a rock-hard guarantee that their personal information will be marketed and sold to any entity with the money and interest to buy it - paying customers, free-loaders, etc.
When someone chooses to buy your app or SaaS then they should be excluded from the list of users that you sell or trade between "business partners".
When paying for a service guarantees that you're selling all details of your engagement with that service to unrelated business entities you have a disincentive to pay.
People are wising up to all this PII harvesting and those clowns who sold everyone out need to find a different model or quit bitching when real people choose to avoid their "services" since most of these things are not necessary for people to enjoy life anyway. They are distractions.
EDIT: This is not intended as a personal attack on you but is instead a general observation from the perspective of someone who does not use or pay for any apps or SaaS services and who actively avoids handing out accurate personal information when the opportunity arises.
In my experience, Mastodon is nice until you want to partake in discussions. To do so, you need an account.
With an account you can engage in civilized discussions. Some people don't agree with you, and you don't agree with some people. That's fine, maybe you'll learn something new. It's a discussion.
And then, suddenly, a secret court convenes and kills your account just like that; no reason will be given, no recourse will be available, admins won't reply, and you can do two things: go away for good, or try again on a different server.
I'm happy with a read-only Mastodon via a web interface.
But read-write? Never again, I probably don't have the correct ideology for it.
You're being too dismissive of Threads. It's fine, there are adults there.
What weirdo doesn't have an insta?
Some people don't jump on every fad out there. Most of the people who miss out on fads quickly realize that they aren't losing out on much simply because fads are so ephemeral. As far as I can tell, this is normal (though different people will come to that realization at different stages of their life).
As for ChatGPT, I'm sure time will prove it is a fad. That doesn't mean that LLMs are a fad (though it is too early to tell).
My wife only uses Facebook, and even then pretty sparingly.
The quality vs crap ratio is stellar on mastodon. Not so much on anywhere else.