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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
techblueberry•3mo ago
estimator7292•3mo ago