I used to follow only cycling/urban related accounts for the town I live in. Most of them left, so maybe that's making it hard for the algorithm, but my feed is now just far right immigration propaganda by blue checks, or lots of US issues (I'm not in the US). Not a nice place to be, but I can see how it can be addicting / trigger something in the brain.
Working as intended. It has been very clear for a very long time (in “Internet time”) that Mr “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk is only really interested in supporting far right propaganda.
> Not a nice place to be, but I can see how it can be addicting / trigger something in the brain.
Honest question, why would anyone willingly browse X? Why have an account there when it’s not even giving you anything nice? Delete the account. Stop visiting the site.
I don't know the psychology, but there absolutely is something akin to "outrage porn". Like, something in your brain wants you to go in and be outraged and annoyed about how stupid other's are, and how much better you are.
Tried to search around for why it happens, this has some thoughts, "The dangerous pleasures of outrage": https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/domestic-intelligenc...
> The pleasure of strong negative judgment becomes so enjoyable we seek opportunities to trigger it
I get these tweets randomly in my Timeline as well. What I don't understand is why does Twitter think I should know about someone asking Grok to put xxx in Bikini
Social media has just gotten worse and worse since Facebook, to the point I can't even bother with Mastodon anymore (and I don't. I gave that up a few months back).
The main thing I like here - I get the info I was hoping to see in the first place, but without all the baggage. Even when that baggage seeps in, it is (very) short term. The ycombinator news mods are exceptional.
This site isn't all that "Social" per se, but the threads generally stay on topic, and aren't constantly trying to sell you something nobody ever asked for.
AI is not the fakest thing in social media.
> (for a while, every female posting would have someone in the replies doing "grok, put OP in a bikini")
This is now the purpose of the site: racism and sexism. There was once a time when it would have been the place to follow the Hungarian election, now I have to make to with a few people on bluesky.
I believe it strongly depends on what you interact with.
At some point I also had a lot of US news in my feed, but once I stopped opening those posts and instead used the 'Not interested in this post' button or muted the author, they disappeared.
Probably following other accounts or liking photography posts also helped.
At the end I just deleted it and created an account into Bluesky instead.
As always it’s because it’s never actually about free speech, just freedom of consequences from their own choices and behaviour.
You are confusing X ads for X premium or you are mistaken.
If you think you don't need to pay for engagement on there I can only assume you're paying for it and unaware of the difference.
That to me sounds like if you don't pay, you're going to be in the bottom of the feed for everyone else.
You're describing advertisment in general. Same with FB. If I throw enough money at a posting ad, I will gain interactions.
Or, it's mainly the opposite. If you don't pay, you no longer get the organic, not even from your own followers.
Money. Lots of money. Pay the Advertising chuds. Back before reserved/paid usernames were even a thing I remember at least one recorded phone call kicking around one of my archives of a Twitter employee saying they'd release any handle I needed for a $10k ad commit over 3 months minimum pre-Musk.
I don't know how people do it. I can only figure it's my fault for running Linux or Firefox or not Signing in with Google™, upsetting the data harvesting overlords.
This was usually a few weeks/months after they were in the news for selling people's phone numbers.
It's so strange to put your interactions behind a walled garden that demands verification, especially for something like GOS. But even then, making people wait a day or so without telling them is such an antipattern
I've never seen a service so opposed to me using it. There's no option for dev accounts either.
What’s worse: no way to notify followers or export data after a ban.
Lesson here: Never outsource your identity or communication to a platform you don’t control, treat them as disposable channels, that might disappear any day.
Real discussions with friends happen in group chats, without all the crap and noise.
Perhaps for related reasons, I've also recently heard Elon Musk being described as a "literal Nazi" a lot, and I'm sure that kind of wild rhetoric has a similar backfire effect with anyone who has any familiarity with him.
That's because they are. Not all of them, of course, and not companies, but the general populace absolutely is.
And that's probably because they're both neurodivergent men who had abusive fathers, but that's not typically what people dislike Nazis for.
Ceasing to believe what your own eyes and ears are telling you, in as far as those things may challenge your political beliefs, is generally a road that leads nowhere good.
The chatbot run by his company has called itself 'MechaHitler' multiple times, and Musk himself did what is widely regarded as a Nazi salute during Trump's second inauguration.
X has the best AI news, the best virality for good content and sure - it has a lot of shit, but community notes and curated feeds keep the noise low.
Other places are like playgrounds, X is where the adults go to talk.
all platforms are tone policed, yes even real life. If you don't notice it, you're either not looking, or you agree with the tone.
Also: scale and context matters. Someone telling you to shut up on a movie theater is not out of place, but whoever was next to you in the theater does not get to decide what you say in a bar or a PTA meetiing.
I mean thats just the legal system, its also deciding what is taught in schools, or churches (other religions are available). Currently in the USA there is "tone policing" about trans people. Laws are being put in place to enforce a certain style of living for people who are trans. Regardless of you opinion of trans people, that is very much real life tone policing.
> but whoever was next to you in the theatre does not get to decide what you say in a bar or a PTA meeting.
but the people in the bar/PTA meeting do. In the same way that newspaper decide who to publish, TV which programmes to air, student organisations what cause to adopt, charities what people to fight for.
I think you are saying that one organisation doesn't get to control the patterns and types of speech for an entire country, which is mostly true apart from a authoritarian places.
But, each platform has its own tone, be that X, bluesky, the local darts club, PTA, or church. that tone is enforced by the people who support/take part in that platform. Those rules vary by factions that live on those platforms. The issue with X/bluesky etc is that they make money by deliberately forcing separate factions to engage. If you fall out with your local pub, you find a different pub, and hopefully never see those people again. But that pub is selling you pints, not advertising. so it needs to keep you happy to keep you buying pints.