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.
I saw Nikita mention that X will flag account locations in order to be transparent around a poster's origin [0] which is a step in the right direction, though abandoning the creator program altogether more so.
Nikita has had a rough couple of weeks. Targeted with the most vile antisemitism I've seen after attempting to get doxxing campaigns under control. That is hard to do when your boss is overriding every decision you make.
I'm not sure X is salvageable at this point. The internet's town square is starting to look at lot like a 1930s German beer hall.
"Social media" is an archaic term invented to describe a public bulletin board that didn't have ads and sort of functioned like a personal website.
It's been "media" ever since the first ad product launched, and cemented once the feeds were changed to infinite scroll "timelines" which ironically were not chronological ordered.
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.
The social media or anything really needs to be curated.
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.
I saw Nikita mention that X will flag account locations in order to be transparent around a poster's origin [0] which is a step in the right direction, though abandoning the creator program altogether more so.
Nikita has had a rough couple of weeks. Targeted with the most vile antisemitism I've seen after attempting to get doxxing campaigns under control. That is hard to do when your boss is overriding every decision you make.
I'm not sure X is salvageable at this point. The internet's town square is starting to look at lot like a 1930s German beer hall.
[0] - https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1978132382868988310
> The result has been a huge increase in bots and "legitimate" accounts farming engagement with rage bait and other content that makes X unbearable.
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-man-ai-bot-maga
I am glad they will turn it off, these grifters can starve and die for all I care.
They're probably having trouble getting the ad revenue that would pay for it.
And it's easier and cheaper than ever to post engagement slop with GenAI so why not cut out the middleman?
It makes complete sense and it would be for the best, therefore it will never happen
As soon as you start paying people to make content, you’re not social media - you’re just media.
"Social media" is an archaic term invented to describe a public bulletin board that didn't have ads and sort of functioned like a personal website.
It's been "media" ever since the first ad product launched, and cemented once the feeds were changed to infinite scroll "timelines" which ironically were not chronological ordered.
"More harm than good"?
Harm to profits/shareholders