Not surprising at all this is happening if the intent is to make X less awful. (Which is something Nikita Bier has been trying to do since he was hired.)
Incentivizing content creation does at least two things: it puts virality ahead of everything (quality, correctness, legitimacy) and also creates disproportionately greater value for users in poor or emerging economies. Earning a dollar or two from a post means a lot more to someone from say, India, than it does to someone from the US.
The result has been a huge increase in bots and "legitimate" accounts farming engagement with rage bait and other content that makes X unbearable. Hopefully this helps improve the content, but wow what a massive misplay this whole thing was. Just a terrible, terrible idea from the owner who understands nothing about what made Twitter great.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 22.6 ms ] threadIncentivizing content creation does at least two things: it puts virality ahead of everything (quality, correctness, legitimacy) and also creates disproportionately greater value for users in poor or emerging economies. Earning a dollar or two from a post means a lot more to someone from say, India, than it does to someone from the US.
The result has been a huge increase in bots and "legitimate" accounts farming engagement with rage bait and other content that makes X unbearable. Hopefully this helps improve the content, but wow what a massive misplay this whole thing was. Just a terrible, terrible idea from the owner who understands nothing about what made Twitter great.
Tiktok was blatantly un-embarrassed about manual curation where they favor good-looking people, and that made the content good at the beginning.
X needs to do the same.