alt Hacker NewsThat's fascinating to me, I've never blocked a single account on Twitter and see very few bots. The most annoying thing about twitter for me are the folks monetising the platform, that keep posting rage-bait to game the algorithm! But note I also generally only use the "for you" tab.
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Using the “for you” tab is the only way to use twitter these days. Their suggest algo is complete garbage. I spent a couple days trying various ways to train it and still I got was complete garbage, so I accepted reality that twitter doesn’t really have an algo for the feed, just a firehouse of crazy people and engagement trolls
I have an account I purely use to follow other accounts. I haven't posted anything aside from a "so, this is twitter then?" years ago.
I get multiple bots requesting to follow me every day, and maybe 10% of my "for you" timeline is right-wing political "discourse" engagement bots, despite never having followed or interacted with anything similar, aside from slowly increasing my block list when I see them.
You sure about that?
https://youtu.be/WEc5WjufSps?t=193
Dr. Egon Cholakian sends its regards. That is to say, the bots are getting good. LLMs made this technologically easy a few years ago, it would take a couple years to develop and deploy a sophisticated bot network like this (not for you or I, but for an org with real money behind it that timeline is correct) and now we are seeing them start to appear. The video I linked is proof that bots already deployed in the wild can take 40 minutes of dedicated effort from a capable suspicious person to identify with high conviction. Maybe it would have taken you 10, I'm not hear to argue that, but I am here to argue that it is starting to take real effort to identify the best bots and this is the worst they will ever be.
I don't care how smart, capable, or suspicious you are, within 3 years it will not be economical for you to curate your list of non-bot contacts on the basis of content (as opposed to identity).