X Randomly Banning Users for "Inauthentic Behavior"
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
I used to follow only cycling/urban related accounts for the town I live in. Most of them left, so maybe that's making it hard for the algorithm, but my feed is now just far right immigration propaganda by blue checks, or lots of US issues (I'm not in the US). Not a nice place to be, but I can see how it can be addicting / trigger something in the brain.
Working as intended. It has been very clear for a very long time (in “Internet time”) that Mr “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk is only really interested in supporting far right propaganda.
> Not a nice place to be, but I can see how it can be addicting / trigger something in the brain.
Honest question, why would anyone willingly browse X? Why have an account there when it’s not even giving you anything nice? Delete the account. Stop visiting the site.
I don't know the psychology, but there absolutely is something akin to "outrage porn". Like, something in your brain wants you to go in and be outraged and annoyed about how stupid other's are, and how much better you are.
Tried to search around for why it happens, this has some thoughts, "The dangerous pleasures of outrage": https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/domestic-intelligenc...
> The pleasure of strong negative judgment becomes so enjoyable we seek opportunities to trigger it
That being said I don't browse X.
Social media has just gotten worse and worse since Facebook, to the point I can't even bother with Mastodon anymore (and I don't. I gave that up a few months back).
The main thing I like here - I get the info I was hoping to see in the first place, but without all the baggage. Even when that baggage seeps in, it is (very) short term. The ycombinator news mods are exceptional.
This site isn't all that "Social" per se, but the threads generally stay on topic, and aren't constantly trying to sell you something nobody ever asked for.
AI is not the fakest thing in social media.
I get these tweets randomly in my Timeline as well. What I don't understand is why does Twitter think I should know about someone asking Grok to put xxx in Bikini
> (for a while, every female posting would have someone in the replies doing "grok, put OP in a bikini")
This is now the purpose of the site: racism and sexism. There was once a time when it would have been the place to follow the Hungarian election, now I have to make to with a few people on bluesky.
I believe it strongly depends on what you interact with.
At some point I also had a lot of US news in my feed, but once I stopped opening those posts and instead used the 'Not interested in this post' button or muted the author, they disappeared.
Probably following other accounts or liking photography posts also helped.
Ragebait.
All I am saying is that if you Follow accounts you are interested in and like a few relevant posts, the platform likely becomes quite usable.
At the end I just deleted it and created an account into Bluesky instead.
You are confusing X ads for X premium or you are mistaken.
If you think you don't need to pay for engagement on there I can only assume you're paying for it and unaware of the difference.
That to me sounds like if you don't pay, you're going to be in the bottom of the feed for everyone else.
You're describing advertisment in general. Same with FB. If I throw enough money at a posting ad, I will gain interactions.
Or, it's mainly the opposite. If you don't pay, you no longer get the organic, not even from your own followers.
They also promote anything that gets engagement which leads to showing people a lot of very nasty stuff.
As always it’s because it’s never actually about free speech, just freedom of consequences from their own choices and behaviour.
An acquaintance of mine was also suspended due to “inauthentic behavior.” probably still suspended even now. [2]
Money. Lots of money. Pay the Advertising chuds. Back before reserved/paid usernames were even a thing I remember at least one recorded phone call kicking around one of my archives of a Twitter employee saying they'd release any handle I needed for a $10k ad commit over 3 months minimum pre-Musk.
They do read the appeals. I know this because I was falsely permanently suspended, without lawful reasons and without prior notice, with an account in good standing, a few years ago.
After writing several appeals over the years, in which I even mentioned article 19 of the UN UDHR (which pretty much mentions everyone has the right of freedom of expression and freedom of speech), and after receiving several rejections with the standard boilerplate text I got a very angry human written reply from somebody working at the Safety and Security team mentioning amongst other things I should never try to appeal again, and that they would automatically reject every appeal if I would. Or at least, that was basically the gist of it.
And I tried it once afterwards, and they didn't lie about that.
This was after the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, by the way.
So yes, they do read appeals (even before the Elon purchase likely). But they don't care.
What’s worse: no way to notify followers or export data after a ban.
Lesson here: Never outsource your identity or communication to a platform you don’t control, treat them as disposable channels, that might disappear any day.
I don't know how people do it. I can only figure it's my fault for running Linux or Firefox or not Signing in with Google™, upsetting the data harvesting overlords.
This was usually a few weeks/months after they were in the news for selling people's phone numbers.
It's so strange to put your interactions behind a walled garden that demands verification, especially for something like GOS. But even then, making people wait a day or so without telling them is such an antipattern
I've never seen a service so opposed to me using it. There's no option for dev accounts either.
I appealed the ban but AI declined my appeal. I couldn't circumvent the ban by using a VPN plus a different browser. I thought that would change my fingerprint enough to not be detectable, but perhaps I'm still detectable or perhaps my fingerprint through the VPN just looks suspicious.
Now I'm using something called "Gologin" that gives me a browser with a less unique footprint plus a residential IP in the USA. I have to pay for it. But at least I can use X still.
- Nostr is generally much lighter; it can even be served behind Tor without having a public IP, there's no need to maintain a web server etc. There are compact, self-contained relays like Haven, for example, which are a single go install-able app that includes everything needed on the server side, with practically zero setup.
- There are various clients, including mobile and web as well as desktop, which is enough to satisfy pretty much everyone's tastes.
- There's also an economic model that could be the future of journalism: everyone publishes what they want, and those who enjoy it can make micro-payments, if they wish, to support the publisher.
For now, it's a toy with many abandoned experiments, while Mastodon is a walking dead, having never really taken off. In other words, as they stand, neither of them is working. But Nostr has the potential to become the communication hub for many; for instance, there's already a Matrix-like service (0xchat and potentially whitenoise) that supports chat, audio, and live video, requiring only Coturn and a Nostr relay. There's also "long form" support, meaning personal blogs all on the same technology.
In other words, in a short space of time, on Nostr you can have:
- A personal blog-style site
- A personal Twitter/X
- Personal chat with audio and video
- Private notes if you need to jot something down on the go
- A search engine and address book that could allows with different access levels, a real address book usage for personal contacts.
Potentially all in a single, complete and lightweight deployment. There isn't the burden of federation, which makes many hesitate to activate it because, depending on who they federate with, they find a massive amount of resources consumed. It's essentially text, binary blobs, and near-real-time communications all in one. Haven is the first piece of the puzzle, MOAR is the successor in the making, but eventually, there will be one that integrates 0xchat and a web client, all-in-one.
The Fediverse hasn't achieved this and doesn't have the characteristics to do so.
Then again, if we're honest, the old Usenet did it better, but it's dead to most people, whereas Nostr is alive. People only dislike it because it comes from a crypto community, and many are biased against anyone from that world regardless.
Real discussions with friends happen in group chats, without all the crap and noise.
That being said, I assume that it flagged the amount/frequency of likes or whatever other activity and thought it was suspicious. Probably used Grok to do that and it obviously isn't good at that.