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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

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.

pyinstallwoes 2y ago
Relatedly, it’s crazy to me how many people still get news from the Sunday times!
- jen729w 2y ago
  Relatedly, it's crazy to me how many people still read the news!
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
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?
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  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.
  - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
    If you can’t tell, is it spam?
ungreased0675 2y ago
When something big happens, Twitter is probably the best place to get real time information from people on location. Most everything else goes through a filter and pasteurization before public consumption.

pyinstallwoes 2y ago

Relatedly, it’s crazy to me how many people still get news from the Sunday times!

jen729w 2y ago
Relatedly, it's crazy to me how many people still read the news!

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

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?

ants_everywhere 2y ago
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.
- pyinstallwoes 2y ago
  If you can’t tell, is it spam?

ungreased0675 2y ago

When something big happens, Twitter is probably the best place to get real time information from people on location. Most everything else goes through a filter and pasteurization before public consumption.