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Comment by Mario9382 | Hacker News Reader

I created an account in X yesterday because I'm trying to get more involved into building in public and the social aspect of development and I was shocked to see nowadays you can pay for X premium where the more you pay, the more interactions you get to your tweets.

At the end I just deleted it and created an account into Bluesky instead.

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>X premium where the more you pay, the more interactions you get to your tweets.

You are confusing X ads for X premium or you are mistaken.

When X premium came out they said if I paid my tweets would be boosted more. I didn't pay, and my account with a few hundred followers went from 100ish views per average tweet to 10.

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.

It's probably not "the more you pay the more interactions you get", but there definitely is "if you pay, you get more interactions". Blue checks are boosted in top of replies etc., and is ironically often the exact people you don't want to see.

if you go to the premium section and look at the benefits it literally says (from memory) if you pay 3.5€/month you get a small boost on interactions for your tweets. If you pay 5€/month you get a bigger boost on interactions if you pay (I don't remember how much it is) 22€/month ~ you get the biggest boost for your tweets.

That to me sounds like if you don't pay, you're going to be in the bottom of the feed for everyone else.

I just looked and it doesn't say that. It only says that you have a higher chance to show up in front of other users in the reply section. It does not say that Premium Plus gets more of a boost than Premium. It is not a perk of Basic.

Doesn’t matter what it is called. You can buy interactions, that’s like buying fake followers.

With a double edged sword - they also removed the organic engagement you previously would have gotten

> You can buy interactions

You're describing advertisment in general. Same with FB. If I throw enough money at a posting ad, I will gain interactions.

You're missing the point. There's a difference between buying an ad, something that's clearly marked as an ad and inserted as an ad, vs having your normal posts appear organic but still getting put in front of more people.

Or, it's mainly the opposite. If you don't pay, you no longer get the organic, not even from your own followers.

On FB ads are not very clearly marked - the "sponsored" in grey lettering is not very noticeable.

They also promote anything that gets engagement which leads to showing people a lot of very nasty stuff.

Out of the anger inducing frying pan and into the group-think fire.

We're against chronological timelines composed of people you follow for being "group think" now?

How can you tell when they are two different hive minds, with temperament being the sole differentiator?

It’s funny how much people on X resent the freedom for alternatives to exist.

As always it’s because it’s never actually about free speech, just freedom of consequences from their own choices and behaviour.

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