Are these new users in the room with us? lmao
Meanwhile, everyone will bitch about the absurdity of this and how shitty Musk and his followers are, then continue to use the platform daily as though it’s an essential service. Anyone who hasn’t jumped ship my now is either complacent or wholly supportive.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.
Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.
“climate change and other left wing topics”… I know that’s basically how it works in some countries, but it’s insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn’t support such statements.
Lol I’m not paying shit, have fun everybody else. X is garbage
I work in bot protection and it’s a sound idea but doesn’t really work in practice. As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a “cat and mouse” sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
Oh my god I’m a fuckin idiot. Granted, I’ve had a couple drinks tonight but I thought you were protecting bots… not protecting against them lol
yeah sorry “protection against bots” just doesn’t roll of the tongue as easily lol
Protect the bots!!!
people who abuse the product and break TOS
You’re welcome.
Hey man it gets me employed and I even get to work on foss on work hours sometimes. Thanks! :)
I’ll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you’re likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you’re likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they’re working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
Perpetual growth/engagement statistics?
How true is the dead internet theory, in your view?
Er du måske en robot??
Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!
Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)
Go to r/worldnews and r/europe on reddit
The amount of bots is….
I’m not a fan of him, nor a twitter user, but as far as free speech is concerned, that should mean your opinion is not censored, but the platform doesn’t have to be free to use, but if it doesn’t discriminate opinions, and everyone is allowed to make an account, and everyone has to pay the same
That’s equal treatment, and isn’t going against free speech.
None of that was ever true for Twitter, anyway. It wasn’t true before Musk bought it and it’s only got worse.
Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.
True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.
Mastodon is picking up steam - it’s only a matter of time
International journalists should know better than to use a centralized platform to share information.
Please. I truly want to see my favorite people on Twitter get driven to a better platform.
Unfortunately, they’re going to Threads. Although I guess that’s technically better. But better in the sense that drinking piss is better than eating shit.
It’s sterile and I like the taste.
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
It has a “chicken or egg” problem. There are better alternatives, except many don’t use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don’t want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.
My sides
Please
It’s completely absurd that he’s saying this as an anti-bot measure. The bots exist because they generate revenue for the scumbags behind them, a small fee is just going to be part of doing business for them. He’s not trying to stop bots, he’s trying to monetize them and use them as an excuse to charge everyone. “The bot problem” will never be fixed and will be used as an excuse for every anti-user measure they put forward.
I never got the appeal of twitter/x, and I never will. I get other social networks, some more, some less, but Twitter’s just stupid IMO. I hope that shit’ll die sooner than later.
twitter is for food trucks to tell me where they’ll be today, and anything else is a misuse of the service
Twitter was great for watching Jan 6 unfold, there’s no replacement for the kind of unfiltered crowd sourced information gathering it enabled
No, stop, please, don’t kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.
This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.
Meanwhile, the neuralink patient zero gave a beautiful presentation of what has been happening with that project and it isn’t news because it goes against the Elon Bad narrative
If you’d stop attempting to play victim on Musk’s behalf long enough to google it, you’d see that that’s actually getting plenty of coverage.
Who the heck uses those obscure sites? U am thinking about YouTube and stuffs.
Bro did not just call Reuters, BBC, and WSJ ‘obscure’ 💀.
The First one sounds like some Ponzi scheme company, the second one, like porn stuff and the third onez like social justice warrior. Me no trust.
Who would have thought that Twitter would become the new Somethingawful forums, and that Musk would take the role of Lowtax.
aoh man. So apt and too soon.
Is SA still around?
Yes, and it still kicks ass. Come home, goon.
If you do your browsing on mobile, check out the Awful app.
Ngl I’m cautious about even looking. Has it devolved into a rw shithole or is it still funny?
The blowtax shock-site days are long gone. With occasional exceptions in containment areas like the pink forum and the debate forum, SA’s culture is acceptable-to-laudable these days. Effortposts on the leftist board are a life-changing force for personal betterment, and goons remain some of the most charitable nerds anywhere.
And despite all of that, it is still funny.
I do miss the culture and spirit of photoshop contests between SA and Fark.
God I’m old.
