"Smaller accounts" my arse. All that will do is give even more of a platform for the utterly fringe far right and most importantly the porn/scam bots.
It's funny, Elon Musk took over with the promise to get rid of said bots - but guess what, that didn't happen. Literally every thing I tweet these days, no matter if it's original posts or replies, gets insta-liked by at least one or two bots, with always the same homepage domains. I wonder what is going on at Twitter's anti-abuse department. A human would be able to instantly grasp the context of these domains and block them all...
Not to mention the obscene amounts of crypto scam bots and the bots under a lot of movie news accounts tweets advertising procedural t-shirts made from phrases popular from the movie in question. You always had bots but contrary to any of what he's said, Musk has absolutely made the problem infinitely worse
Scrolling through the replies to tweets of big accounts, Musk himself is the best example, feels like we are already in a SciFi dystopia. Nearly everything is scam or other weird GPT created nonsense.
Considering the parent comment based itself on identity politics and vapid Musk hating, there wasn't much debate to be had in the first place. Even invited the subsequent sneering comments, arguably.
> Considering the parent comment based itself on identity politics and vapid Musk hating
It is objectively measurable that Musk himself has been responsible for a lot of high-profile alt-right accounts (most notably Kanye West [1]) getting unbanned or that he acted as some sort of "personal helpdesk" for the far right [2], and that the spam bot problem has exploded during his reign, in political [3], fake porn [4], crypto scams [5] and dropshipping scams [6].
Instead of just claiming that I were inviting sneer replies, you could have done the research in well under a minute.
You keep using the terms "alt-right" and "far right" and all that tells me is that you're far left and more interested in playing identity politics than having a worthwhile conversation. It's akin to vapidly calling someone a nazi and killing off even the potential for a conversation.
As for the bots and scams, those have been a problem since long before Musk took the reins. I hope you have just as much hate against Dorsey and whoever the last Twitter CEO was as you do against Musk, to at least be fair.
> You keep using the terms "alt-right" and "far right" and all that tells me is that you're far left and more interested in playing identity politics than having a worthwhile conversation.
Simple: only the far-right has so far staged a coup attempt in the US, one that by many credible estimates only due to courage [1] and sheer luck didn't end in a hostage crisis or even more deaths than it did.
While you are correct that I do identify on the far-left side of politics (which a simple look on my profile would have shown you), my primary interest is not turning Germany or the US into a Communist utopia - it is, at this point, purely to sound the foghorn about the insane danger the far right poses. The worst that the far-left is doing these days, in contrast, is holding (admittely vile) pro-Hamas marches - and while I do detest these, they are not comparable at all to the sizable list of domestic terrorism acts by the far right.
> As for the bots and scams, those have been a problem since long before Musk took the reins. I hope you have just as much hate against Dorsey and whoever the last Twitter CEO was as you do against Musk, to at least be fair.
I can agree on the bots and scams being a problem before Musk - the problem is that the frequency of this crap measurably increased as legitimate advertisers left Twitter in droves and the value of ads tanked so hard that it had gotten a no-brainer for any willing scammer to buy them. Additionally, and here is where Musk personally comes into play, is ruining the "blue checkmark" by turning it not just from "someone at Twitter HQ actually verified this person is legitimate" to "the person had a credit card with 8$ on it" but prioritizing these accounts in replies.
I beg any journalist reading this to test creating new Twitter accounts. With each account, do not post or follow or like any content. With these "naked" fresh accounts, I have seen most (and virtually all) new account Twitter notifications pushing far right messaging like great replacement theories. These promoted tweets often do not even have more than a few dozen likes (so they shouldn't be notable).
I get followed by a new fake account (~0 posts, thousands of follows, a dozen followers) every day. I haven't figured out what they are doing, but one guess is that someone is trying to hide their fake followers by making them fake followers of thousands of accounts.
Kinda. Something got dumped with very few updates since the first month. The last few commits specifically mention open source which would indicate there's a private version somewhere with more changes.
If you think about it, the secret sauce tends to be in the data they're able to capture and input into the recommendation algorithms rather than the recommendation algorithm itself.
I mean, even Tiktok has papers detailing their recommendation algorithm [1]. So does Youtube and plenty of others.
Most "creators" I see on insta/tiktok are just people with pretty faces or some random people trying to sell cheap stuff at a slightly higher price and constantly pushing videos(or reels for the cultural folks) promoting products, and of course the reel after their's is also an sponsored advert, so everything is now advert.
Only useful creators I see are some talented artists in Instagram, but sadly they are now flooded out by all new-age AI art generator /creators/ producing anime/manga/van-gogh arts of the same thing in slightly different context.
> Creator is anyone who makes money by producing content. It's irrelevant whether you consider that content "worthy".
Thanks for clarifying, this makes sense to me. Previously, I considered creators as someone making original content(could be informative, documentary, educational, news, art, music etc.), but I see that the term is now considered a much broader scope. May be am just stuck in stone-age.
The proliferation of corporate/business language is a hint - no one actually wants to "create content". They want to create art, music, writing etc. Advertising however usually needs something to ship it with, to draw attention, and so we have broad, hollow terms like "content" and "creator".
AI art and social media appear to me to be the same thing. Automated propagation of styles or interests or products that lead to a homogenous landscape of essentially nothing.
Creators are people paid to shit in your head and maintain your attention that are acceptable because the platform considers their attention to be profitable.
The contract breaks if any conditions are not fulfilled or stop growing.
They want to move Twitter from 4chan/LiveLeak/9gag style culture to TikTok/Insta like environment because pretty faces selling cheap stuff is more preferable(?), and doing so without a shutdown/relaunch. That was the direction even before the acquisition that never worked.
Last month they were trying to move it few inches towards direction of Reddit, but the culture didn't budge so they're recalculating plans. I bet it's going to help Bluesky a bit and that will be it.
I really hope this brings doesn't turn out to be another "elon musk will be flooding your timeline even if you don't follow him or have ever interacted with his tweets" scenario. I wouldn't really want to start seeing people whom I have no interest in following in my timeline.
But also, I do value good recommendation algorithms, and they can definitely be helpful in improving the site. So it remains to be seen if this will be a good change or not.
> I wouldn't really want to start seeing people whom I have no interest in following in my timeline.
My city authority(police, mayor, emergency services etc.) posts latest affairs and developments live on Twitter, so I use Twitter solely for these news(I don't follow any friends in Twitter because I am not interested in their political views or silly retweets). What helps me most is that, when I see an account trending too much on my timeline, I simply mute that account and somehow it also seems to reduce the similar other accounts showing up in my timeline eventually.
I mean no harm to anyone of course, but I want to see the news of my city(because keeping track of 10 different news portal is tough compared to live tweets from the source) but when these important things get flooded by random people posting why Taylor Swift should adapt keto diet or whatever, I have to mute the accounts.
This is good. Was insane that it used to literally penalize your account if you interacted with sub 1000 accounts before.
Seeing how TikTok treats its creators really shows old Twitter management squandered something bigger by chasing only the desires of journalists and celebs on their platform.
Never seeing the bigger picture of what was possible.
Twitter was the first platform to get celebs posting on the daily so they had something new and exciting on their hands.
TikTok then said, what if we turn normal people into celebrities?
TikTok would not exist without Twitter and I think Twitter could not have been TikTok. The two cater to different audiences. The elitism of Twitter is what kept the celebs posting there.
I was never a really active twitter user. However - at least the people that I follow - mostly went to bluesky (and some switched to mastodon) and are a lot less active on twitter. My twitter feed is mostly full of people that I don't know and never followed. I am aware there is a "following"-tab. But that is mostly some political institutions and companies that I follow that still seem to post their press releases on twitter.
Maybe I'm jaded, but I just don't believe them. I think 'smaller creators' are probably just trying smaller scale tweets. I think they are going to disincentivize going offsite to my website or youtube.
I guess I'll try it, wouldn't hurt. But I'm def not holding my breath.
Whenever I see "X" I think of X11, so I misread the headline as "X[11] is changing its algorithm to highlight smaller accents", and thought it was about font rendering.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 14.8 ms ] threadIt's funny, Elon Musk took over with the promise to get rid of said bots - but guess what, that didn't happen. Literally every thing I tweet these days, no matter if it's original posts or replies, gets insta-liked by at least one or two bots, with always the same homepage domains. I wonder what is going on at Twitter's anti-abuse department. A human would be able to instantly grasp the context of these domains and block them all...
Sneering, sarcastic dismissals of this type don't advance debate even if you disagree with the person.
It is objectively measurable that Musk himself has been responsible for a lot of high-profile alt-right accounts (most notably Kanye West [1]) getting unbanned or that he acted as some sort of "personal helpdesk" for the far right [2], and that the spam bot problem has exploded during his reign, in political [3], fake porn [4], crypto scams [5] and dropshipping scams [6].
Instead of just claiming that I were inviting sneer replies, you could have done the research in well under a minute.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/30/elon-musk-rein...
[2] https://nypost.com/2022/11/26/who-elon-musk-likes-to-talk-to...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/09/x-twitter...
[4] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/twitters-bot-...
[5] https://gizmodo.com/twitter-bot-problem-metamask-support-cry...
[6] https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ak9/twitters-verified-sca...
As for the bots and scams, those have been a problem since long before Musk took the reins. I hope you have just as much hate against Dorsey and whoever the last Twitter CEO was as you do against Musk, to at least be fair.
Simple: only the far-right has so far staged a coup attempt in the US, one that by many credible estimates only due to courage [1] and sheer luck didn't end in a hostage crisis or even more deaths than it did.
While you are correct that I do identify on the far-left side of politics (which a simple look on my profile would have shown you), my primary interest is not turning Germany or the US into a Communist utopia - it is, at this point, purely to sound the foghorn about the insane danger the far right poses. The worst that the far-left is doing these days, in contrast, is holding (admittely vile) pro-Hamas marches - and while I do detest these, they are not comparable at all to the sizable list of domestic terrorism acts by the far right.
> As for the bots and scams, those have been a problem since long before Musk took the reins. I hope you have just as much hate against Dorsey and whoever the last Twitter CEO was as you do against Musk, to at least be fair.
I can agree on the bots and scams being a problem before Musk - the problem is that the frequency of this crap measurably increased as legitimate advertisers left Twitter in droves and the value of ads tanked so hard that it had gotten a no-brainer for any willing scammer to buy them. Additionally, and here is where Musk personally comes into play, is ruining the "blue checkmark" by turning it not just from "someone at Twitter HQ actually verified this person is legitimate" to "the person had a credit card with 8$ on it" but prioritizing these accounts in replies.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/capitol-...
Twitter laid off a large proportion of their workforce, so there might not be much of an anti-abuse department left.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38263468
Wait - the recommender algorithms will be made open source? I find that hard to believe.
I mean, even Tiktok has papers detailing their recommendation algorithm [1]. So does Youtube and plenty of others.
It's all in the data now a days.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07663.pdf
1) Not all accounts get enough views to receive payments.
2) Not all accounts are subscribed to Twitter Blue. They can't receive payments.
Any other type of model would be unpredictable at best and more than likely an extreme business risk.
- What is a "creator"?
- Who are considered "creators"?
Most "creators" I see on insta/tiktok are just people with pretty faces or some random people trying to sell cheap stuff at a slightly higher price and constantly pushing videos(or reels for the cultural folks) promoting products, and of course the reel after their's is also an sponsored advert, so everything is now advert.
Only useful creators I see are some talented artists in Instagram, but sadly they are now flooded out by all new-age AI art generator /creators/ producing anime/manga/van-gogh arts of the same thing in slightly different context.
Thanks for clarifying, this makes sense to me. Previously, I considered creators as someone making original content(could be informative, documentary, educational, news, art, music etc.), but I see that the term is now considered a much broader scope. May be am just stuck in stone-age.
Plenty of entertainers want to create "content" instead of what you label "art".
A creator is anyone who creates content. Differentiated from a consumer, who is someone who (mostly) consumes content.
The contract breaks if any conditions are not fulfilled or stop growing.
If I can serve ads on your stuff, you are a content creator.
Last month they were trying to move it few inches towards direction of Reddit, but the culture didn't budge so they're recalculating plans. I bet it's going to help Bluesky a bit and that will be it.
But also, I do value good recommendation algorithms, and they can definitely be helpful in improving the site. So it remains to be seen if this will be a good change or not.
Use the following pane. It’s linear non algorithmic
My city authority(police, mayor, emergency services etc.) posts latest affairs and developments live on Twitter, so I use Twitter solely for these news(I don't follow any friends in Twitter because I am not interested in their political views or silly retweets). What helps me most is that, when I see an account trending too much on my timeline, I simply mute that account and somehow it also seems to reduce the similar other accounts showing up in my timeline eventually.
I mean no harm to anyone of course, but I want to see the news of my city(because keeping track of 10 different news portal is tough compared to live tweets from the source) but when these important things get flooded by random people posting why Taylor Swift should adapt keto diet or whatever, I have to mute the accounts.
Seeing how TikTok treats its creators really shows old Twitter management squandered something bigger by chasing only the desires of journalists and celebs on their platform.
Never seeing the bigger picture of what was possible.
I always assumed that fake followers were pointless since they wouldn’t ever actually see anything.
TikTok would not exist without Twitter and I think Twitter could not have been TikTok. The two cater to different audiences. The elitism of Twitter is what kept the celebs posting there.
I understand why it happened https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Looking forward to see where X takes it. Recently it has been an echo chamber of big news events.
Just before Elon took over, I was able to see more teachers posting STEM projects.
I hope it gets back to that.
I am probably a creator account, never could get critical mass on Twitter.
I can on pretty much every other website, just not twitter.
I know I should take responsibility for this, but given every other social media site worked great for me... I just never gained traction on twitter.
Maybe I'm jaded, but I just don't believe them. I think 'smaller creators' are probably just trying smaller scale tweets. I think they are going to disincentivize going offsite to my website or youtube.
I guess I'll try it, wouldn't hurt. But I'm def not holding my breath.