I've said this in another thread here, but Twitter is borderline unusable because of this. I have 5,000+ blocked accounts by now (not exaggerating), and the first few screenfuls of replies are still bots upon bots upon bots. All well-behaved $8-paying netizens, of course.
That's fascinating to me, I've never blocked a single account on Twitter and see very few bots. The most annoying thing about twitter for me are the folks monetising the platform, that keep posting rage-bait to game the algorithm! But note I also generally only use the "for you" tab.
Dr. Egon Cholakian sends its regards. That is to say, the bots are getting good. LLMs made this technologically easy a few years ago, it would take a couple years to develop and deploy a sophisticated bot network like this (not for you or I, but for an org with real money behind it that timeline is correct) and now we are seeing them start to appear. The video I linked is proof that bots already deployed in the wild can take 40 minutes of dedicated effort from a capable suspicious person to identify with high conviction. Maybe it would have taken you 10, I'm not hear to argue that, but I am here to argue that it is starting to take real effort to identify the best bots and this is the worst they will ever be.
I don't care how smart, capable, or suspicious you are, within 3 years it will not be economical for you to curate your list of non-bot contacts on the basis of content (as opposed to identity).
Well on my "for you" page, I also follow a pretty niche audience of tech people, which helps :P They're a little easier to verify since they generally also have blogs, or websites, or github accounts, or youtube videos, etc that help verify they're not bots.
I also think people create bots for some purpose -- instability, political divisiveness, financial gain, etc. And I'm kind of inherently not using twitter for any of that. I don't think I could find an account on my twitter thread that mentions the word "liberal", "trump", "conservative", or any of that if I tried! I agree that's a muuuuch more likely place to find bots. What sort of bots do you notice the most in your twitter?
Yeah I suppose if you are already vetting based on identity from outside the network that probably does scale. Most people aren't as careful about this as you are, though, so it'll still be a problem and it will have to get much worse before it gets better.
I'm not on twitter. I left when the tidal wave of right-wing spam started to outweigh the entertainment value of seeing Yann LeCun dunk on Elon Musk.
Using the “for you” tab is the only way to use twitter these days. Their suggest algo is complete garbage. I spent a couple days trying various ways to train it and still I got was complete garbage, so I accepted reality that twitter doesn’t really have an algo for the feed, just a firehouse of crazy people and engagement trolls
> Using the “for you” tab is the only way to use twitter these days
The first 20 posts of my "for you" tab is Elon Musk, then it goes on to show me more useful content. I am wondering if following him or blocking him will make any difference.
I have an account I purely use to follow other accounts. I haven't posted anything aside from a "so, this is twitter then?" years ago.
I get multiple bots requesting to follow me every day, and maybe 10% of my "for you" timeline is right-wing political "discourse" engagement bots, despite never having followed or interacted with anything similar, aside from slowly increasing my block list when I see them.
If you only use the “following” tab twitter is fine, if you try to use the “for you” tab then you are expecting too much of someone who posts known nazis and says “hmmm…” or “interesting…”
Unfortunately it's still the main "shortform" social network here for local stuff. Not enough in my country moved to Mastodon or Bluesky. (Referenced HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41586643)
And no, it's definitely not worth it if you're joining/new enough. Anyone who asks me about Twitter I immediately tell them to not bother and that I'm just "stuck" there. My Following feed and most of the algorithmic feed is fine, it's just the replies & interaction that took a huge hit.
I'm curious what kind of engagement people who aren't prolific posters are seeing on Twitter these days. Before I left I noticed that engagement went off a cliff to near zero immediately following the aggressive algorithm changes with blue check spam being promoted, but remained normal on my other social channels. It didn't seem like there were any normal people talking with each other on Twitter.
It's down there, below the bluecheck promotion. Or in (non-English) circles where the LLM bots haven't proliferated yet, which are also (mostly) why I stuck around.
I tried using an extension that filters out blue checks and it’s still about 90% garbage from troll accounts who can’t afford $8. The only way is to just follow those who you enjoy, although you’ll likely have to find them outside of twitter, because their useful posts are drowning in a sea of trash
I haven't used Twitter in ages, but what happened to Musk's paywall idea? That might actually deter bots and real users, so it seems like a win-win for everyone to stop using it.
Otherwise, I doubt spammers/scammers are really paying $8/mo for a verified account. How are they getting them then?
Great, so instead of selling me overpriced intimate shaving accessories the bots will be trying to convince me that Europe will freeze without Russian natural gas.
I read this comment as a bit tongue in cheek, but to be clear, the aim of the bots isn't generally to advocate for as specific viewpoint but to flood the information landscape with bad information making it challenging for normal people to discern what is real and useful.
edit: What I meant by this is not the name thing but more fundamentally that what twitter was, is no longer so. It's now a different thing now, its has similarities to twitter, but its not twitter.
