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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

https://xcancel.com/nikitabier/status/2085105586966827343#m

The most consequential change in recent years has been to pay users for posting controversial content. For me that killed the service. Anything else is secondary.

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I haven't been following it closely, but Nikita posted recently that they were running experiments to de-monetize the top accounts found to be reposting spam content. I don't know where it went, but he did say that in the A/B test the people who were no longer seeing content from those accounts were showing better interest in the site.

He seemed to get it. It's too bad he's leaving.

Nikita publicly talked about wanting to go even further to kill those spammy foreign reposter accounts but X eventually pulled back at some point. Lots of the big X accounts complained and they came to some half-way middle ground where they released the country-of-origin feature + a more limited demonetization campaign. Which is still admittedly better than most social media companies have done about the issue. I guess those low quality reposters are just too popular among the public (Youtube shorts is notorious for this).

They would have to ban Elon from his own platform. I wonder why that didn't fly. Anyone who worked for that absolute pustule of a human will have to go somewhere else to earn respect, sorry.

One of the weirdest parts of X is seeing Nikita go ham on some random account.

Nikita shows up in the replies of a guy with 12k followers complaining that he doesn't get his small payout anymore, and Nikita posts a screenshot of how the guy posted the same text message 12 times in two years, and that's why the guy isn't allowed to make money on X anymore.

As if X has solved low quality reposts so well after turning on monetization that the head of product himself is doing manual demonitization detective work on the final stragglers.

Meanwhile, the biggest accounts on the For You page are zero effort repost bots raking in money, and Elon decided that you're allowed to post the N-word freely. https://x.com/search?q=n*****

Also, X is now just TikTok. Not just its video system (click any video and now you can swipe through recommendation algo), but its text posts too since the whole website is adversarially trying to post their way to a monthly payout.

It’s a good thing to be able to post the N word. If it is legal to do it why should X apply their own ethics on top? Thats how you get Reddit censorship

Because we decide on the quality of community, discussion, and engagement that we want to have, not the government.

HN has a lot of moderation just to keep this place a pleasant place to be. One of the most basic levers in that direction is to prohibit the worst slurs.

Interestingly Nikita has made several negative comments about monetization, which have been publicly rebuffed by Musk, so they clearly had different visions for the company.

It’s been pretty clear for a while that Nikita has been looking at the ways twitter is bad- foreign accounts stoking hatred in the west for cash.

He started putting in ways to change it and put in better incentives (not monetizing this rage baiters, disclosing country of origin). The problem is, the people he screws by doing that are the exact accounts Elon Musk loves, do every time he wanted to make a change cat turd would go screaming to daddy. Hence why I find it so unsurprising he’s quitting.

Well, anything you monetize it will turn to shit, period.

it has always been this way across every platform.

most people don't pay attention to anything that isn't controversial or extreme. Thats just how our brains work and thats the reason why MrBeast's advice on making it on youtube is the way it is.

the fact that this recently changed on twitter means it has not, in fact, "always been this way across every platform"

Except that it hasn’t.

X specifically changed the way they operate to financially reward people who post popular content. That led to an immediate downturn in the quality of the network as everyone sought to post the most controversial posts they could that would gain the most traffic.

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