alt Hacker NewsI've now completely stopped engaging with anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person. If any non-real-name account says anything that remotely feels bad-faith in replies, I block them. Having been on the Internet since the mid 90's when it was the frontier, and everyone helped/trusted everyone else, the policy feels very wrong. But unfortunately Twitter has given no tools or alternatives to deal with the situation.
Replies
This is the only way to realistically deal with it but it’s not scalable. A platform is only as useful as its non-bot users. On Twitter even the positive replies are likely bots. Real engagement is limited for most users.
On a site like HN, blocklists are very effective at keeping people off your feed.
Same. (I would love to say, but they still get me way too often)
I can also highly encourage people to keep notes and do some basic OSINT. The effective internet is smaller than one might think, so that proves useful time and time again.
>>anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person
Not sure why that makes any difference - I've had plenty of arguments on Facebook with people who are perfectly happy to spew racist and/or conspiratorial bullshit while having their full names, their holiday photos and photos of their children and/or grandchildren attached to their identity. The weird thing is that these people are 99/100 times incapable of actually having an argument, they either start insulting you straight away or say some variation of "if you don't like what I'm saying then leave" or actually majority of time "what does a foreigner like you know about this topic".
The real names policy has yielded zero of the promised effects imho.
I have found that the only way to deal with this these days is basically to only use my time to discuss things with people in private, invitation only forums. HN is a rare exception for "I am pretty sure you all are not bots (yet)" and yet anonymous.
Everything else that I care about is in private Signal groups or an equivalent of same with anywhere from 15 to 200 people, and adding any new member means they need to be vouched for by an existing one. And at least 55-75% of the people know each other face to face through industry vertical specific events, trade shows, conferences and similar.
I can't even imagine trying to engage with people on something like x/twitter or other social media. Not knowing whether the 'person' you're replying to is somebody's LLM authoried bot farm.