Meta Conversation: The fact that X has a "Show Probable Spam" and both of the responses were pretty valid, with one even getting a reply from the creator.
I just don't understand how they still have users.
Relatedly, it's crazy to me how many people still get their news from X. I mean serious people, not just Joe Schmoe.
The probable spam thing was nuts to me too. My guess was it's maybe trying to detect users with lower engagement. Like people who aren't moving the investigation forward but are trying to follow it and be in the discussion.
One of the things to keep in mind is that Twitter had most of these misfeatures before Musk bought it.
The basic problem is, no moderation results in a deluge of spam and algorithmic moderation is hot garbage that can only filter out the bulk of the spam by also filtering out like half of the legitimate comments. Human moderation is prohibitively expensive unless you want to hire Mechanical Turk-level moderators and not give them enough time to do a good job, in which case you're back to hot garbage.
Nobody really knows how to solve it outside of the knob everybody knows about that can improve the false negative rate at the expense of the false positive rate or vice versa. Do you want less ham or more spam?
I agree the problem is hard from a technical level.
The problem is also getting significantly worse because it's trivial to generate entire pages of inorganic content with LLMs.
The backstories of inorganic accounts are also much more convincing now that they can be generated by LLMs. Before LLMs, backstories all focused on a small handful of topics (e.g. sports, games) because humans had to generate them from playbooks of best pracitces. Now they can be into almost anything.
I use X solely for the AI discussions and I actively curate who I follow, but where is there a better platform to join in conversations with the top 500 people in a particular field?
I always assumed that the reason legit answers often fall under "Show probable spam" is because of the inevitable reports coming in on controversial topics. It seems like the community notes feature works well most of the time.
If bad spam detection was such a big issue for a social platform, YouTube wouldn't be used by anyone ;). In fact it's even worse on YouTube, it's the same pattern of accounts with weird profile pictures copy pasting an existing comment as is and posting it, for thousands of videos, and it's been going on for a year now. It's actually so basic that I really wonder if there's some other secret sauce to those bots to make them undetectable.
Well if it's just the comments, I think a lot of people just don't read those. In fact, it's a fair bit of effort just to read the descriptions with the YouTube app on some devices (e.g. smart TVs), and it's really not worth the effort to read the comments when users can just move on to the next video.
I don't necessarily think that's true anymore. YouTube comments are important to the algorithm so creators are more and more active in the comment section, and the comments in general have been a lot more alive and often add a lot of context or info for some type of videos. YouTube has also started giving the comments a lot more visibility in the layout (more than say, the video description). But you're probably right w.r.t platforms like TVs.
Before this wave of insane bot spam, the comments had started to be so much better than what they used to be (low effort, boomer spam). In fact I think they were much better than the absolute cringy mess that comments on dedicated forums like Reddit turned into
I'd go so far to say that almost all responses that I see under "probable spam" are legitimate. Meanwhile real spam is everywhere in replies, and most ads are dropshipped crap and crypto scams with community notes. It's far worse than it's ever been before.
I believe that is dependent on your account settings. I block all comments on accounts that do not have a verified phone number as an example and they get dropped into that.
There’s literally not a better alternative and nobody seems to be earnestly trying to fill that gap. Threads is boomer chat with an instagram requirement. Every Mastodon instance is slow beyond reason and it’s still confusing to regular users in terms of how it works. And is Bluesky still invite only? Honestly haven’t heard about it in a long time.
Mastodon is a PERFECT replacement. But it'll never win because there isn't a business propping it up and there is inherent complexity, mixed with the biggest problem, cost.
No one wants to pay for anything, and that's the true root of every issue around this. People complain YouTube has ads, but wont buy premium. People hate Elon and Twitter but won't take even an ounce of temporary inconvenience to try and solve it.
Threads exists, I'm happy they integrate with Activity Pub, which should give us the best of both worlds. Why don't people use Threads? I'd a little more popular outside the US but personally, I think the "algorithm" pushes a lot of engagement bait nonsense.
>No one wants to pay for anything, and that's the true root of every issue around this. People complain YouTube has ads, but wont buy premium.
Perhaps if buying into a service guaranteed that they would not be sold out then there would be more engagement. When someone signs up it is pretty much a rock-hard guarantee that their personal information will be marketed and sold to any entity with the money and interest to buy it - paying customers, free-loaders, etc.
When someone chooses to buy your app or SaaS then they should be excluded from the list of users that you sell or trade between "business partners".
When paying for a service guarantees that you're selling all details of your engagement with that service to unrelated business entities you have a disincentive to pay.
People are wising up to all this PII harvesting and those clowns who sold everyone out need to find a different model or quit bitching when real people choose to avoid their "services" since most of these things are not necessary for people to enjoy life anyway. They are distractions.
EDIT: This is not intended as a personal attack on you but is instead a general observation from the perspective of someone who does not use or pay for any apps or SaaS services and who actively avoids handing out accurate personal information when the opportunity arises.
In my experience, Mastodon is nice until you want to partake in discussions. To do so, you need an account.
With an account you can engage in civilized discussions. Some people don't agree with you, and you don't agree with some people. That's fine, maybe you'll learn something new. It's a discussion.
And then, suddenly, a secret court convenes and kills your account just like that; no reason will be given, no recourse will be available, admins won't reply, and you can do two things: go away for good, or try again on a different server.
I'm happy with a read-only Mastodon via a web interface.
But read-write? Never again, I probably don't have the correct ideology for it.
All the people I know that are still active on Twitter because they need to be "informed" are constantly sending me alarmist "news" that breaks on Twitter that, far more often than not, turns out to be wrong.
> Every Mastodon instance is slow beyond reason and it’s still confusing to regular users in terms of how it works.
I'll concede the confusing part but all the major Mastodon servers I interact with regularly are pretty quick so I'm not sure where that part comes from.
It is not so bad with Mastodon but much fedi software gets slower the longer it's been running. "Akkoma Rot" is the one that's typically most talked about but the universe of misskey forks experiences the same problems, and Mastodon can sometimes absolutely crunch to a halt on 4GB of ram even for a single user instance.
Maybe the experience varies depending on where the user is located. Users near Mastodon servers (possibly on the US East or West Coast) may not feel the slowness as much as users in other parts of the world. I notice noticeably slower response times when I use Mastodon in my location (Korea).
I think a lot of people use Hetzner. I notice slowness, especially with media, in Hong Kong. A workaround I've found is to use VPNs which seem to utilise networks with better peering with local ISPs
It is the best internet social feed to me as well. I use pro a lot for following different communities and there is nothing that can comes close today to being on the edge of change online.
Some people don't jump on every fad out there. Most of the people who miss out on fads quickly realize that they aren't losing out on much simply because fads are so ephemeral. As far as I can tell, this is normal (though different people will come to that realization at different stages of their life).
While a fad (in this context) depends upon a company maintaining a product, the act of maintaining a product is not a measure of how long the fad lasts. Take Facebook, the product. I'm fairly certain that it is long past its peak as a communications tool between family, friends, and colleagues. Facebook, the company, remains relevant for other reasons.
As for ChatGPT, I'm sure time will prove it is a fad. That doesn't mean that LLMs are a fad (though it is too early to tell).
Sadly enough the "average" instagram user doesn't use threads. It's just a weird subset of them that use it, and imo it's not the subset that makes Instagram great lol. (It's a lot of pre 2021 twitter refugees, and that's an incredibly obnoxious and self centered crowd in my experience)
I just don't understand how they still have users.