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Every day I get new followers on twitter that are sex bots and onlyfans catfishes. Nothing else. Seems like the platform is a wasteland.

latchkey 3y ago
I recently had a fake account follow me where they replaced the letter L with an I in the user name. Whatever font Twitter website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the difference. The fake account looks 100% the same as the real, even has thousands of 'followers'. I reported it, and it is still up. Original: https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader Fake: https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader It is unreal to me that the platform hasn't developed a way to automatically deal with fake accounts like this. Just check to see if the profile image is the same!?
- labrador 3y ago
  I had a fake Yann LeCun (Meta's AI chief) follow me. It looked and read like the real thing. I was happy about it for a couple of days until I realized it was fake. It fooled a lot of people. I didn't report it because obviously Musk doesn't care.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    I can't imagine working for Twitter, in a position to fix things like this, and having to listen to Musk tell me to 'stay the course'. I know that everyone has a price, so their salary must be insanely good.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      I suspect that only the true believers are left. There were _so_ many actions and warning signs over the last year I can’t imagine anyone thinking it was a good/stable place to work unless they really liked Musk.
      - greesil 3y ago
        I think there's still a bunch of people who have an audience and don't really care about the drama. They're there not to engage, or sell anything, but just to use it as a broadcast medium. But yes why would I ever talk to anyone there? I can just use nitter to read my neets and call it good. Edit: oh fuck nitter is gone, arrrgh
        refulgentis 3y ago
        They meant twitter employees, not users
        MBCook 3y ago
        Right, that was what I meant. For creators, I’ve heard other services offer much more useful interaction per follower, which would mean either Twitter followers often aren’t shown posts of a large cube of followers don’t care (likely bots). I don’t think Musks behavior and obvious preferences should be ignored. But even without that it sounds like it’s dead at the core and more people figure it out every day.
        hackerlight 3y ago
        There's many nitter mirrors still up
    - ews 3y ago
      From what I know, lots of people with visas (L1/H1B) are stuck in twitter hell.
      - latchkey 3y ago
        That makes more sense than the Musk true believers theory. I mean, I get it, if you work at spacex, then that's one thing... you're building rockets and all.
        lostlogin 3y ago
        I laughed, this is a new one. How many dollars would it take you to work for Musk? How many dollars would it take if it involved space rockets?
        techdragon 3y ago
        Dunno how “new” it is… I’ve definitely got a big price difference and I’m pretty sure others will to… Twitter, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring… all the non space Musk corps…. Quarter million if I don’t have to move from Australia, half million to a million depending on where I was going if it requires moving to the USA… I’d do it… but I’d basically have the resignation letter already drafted from day one… For the rockets… I’d probably be happy with their normal pay offer… not being a US citizen basically makes it impossible for me to apply for a job with SpaceX so I’d take what I could get lol… and since Elon is clearly just glued to his phone tweeting… it’s not going to be the Elon show… Gwynne Shotwell is running the company like a level headed and competent management executive, the place is full of competent engineers who seem like pretty well adjusted people when they talk about their experiences after leaving, and they all seem to leave for normal reasons…
      - labrador 3y ago
        I can't imagine the hell it must be to be stuck this way at X. Can you imagine being the engineer that gets the email "Elon wants Séamas O’Reilly suspended because he said some rude things about X" and you happen to be Irish? Journalist says he finds it ‘surreal’ to have account on X suspended after writing critique of platform https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2024/02/12/journalist-says-he-finds-it-surreal-to-have-account-on-x-suspended-after-writing-critique-of-platform/ https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2024/02/12/journali...
  - canadiantim 3y ago
    I can't be certain but I'm pretty sure Musk isn't personally going through each report to vet them
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Do you think that's what's being proposed? Was the fact this was not as significant an issue due to Dorsey and then Agrawal being really good moderators as individuals? Or do you think maybe business leaders are accountable for the behavior of the system beneath them, especially when they personally overhauled exactly the system in question?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - hackerlight 3y ago
      Well, he fired the entire moderation team, and he made it no longer against ToS to post overt racism. Then he made it against the rules to say "cis". All of this was super important for the square speech town freedom thing, you wouldn't understand.
- NetOpWibby 3y ago
  Twitter Support doesn't care about legit scams and bots but will absolutely enforce a mistaken ban.
- bentley 3y ago
  > Whatever font Twitter website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the difference. Doesn’t it? When I view the profiles you listed (before that horrible login wall pops up), the ‘I’ is of the crossbar variety, and the ‘l’ has a finial, making the characters visibly different. In fact, I recall that Twitter started using that font (which also visually distinguishes 0 and O) after the Musk takeover as an anti‐spoofing measure. Spoofed usernames were completely impossible to detect before the font was changed.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    Depends on your system/browser font?
    - bentley 3y ago
      Wouldn’t think so, given the intent. Shows up for me on both desktop and mobile. Do you have any local font overrides? Looks like the change happened just over a year ago: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23572746/twitter-changed-font-impersonators https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23572746/twitter-changed-... https://mashable.com/article/twitter-new-font-fights-impersonators https://mashable.com/article/twitter-new-font-fights-imperso...
arcanemachiner 3y ago
I'm struggling to remember a time when Twitter was not a wasteland.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
metaphor 3y ago
Sure enough, 17 new bot followers today after blocking 14 only a few days ago. There's precisely zero reason any legit person should be following my entirely passive, unengaged account. Twitter truly is a cesspool.
- nothercastle 3y ago
  Ditto but I’ve amassed almost 100 from I think 5 pre musk. It’s interesting to see it fluctuating with ban waves
unshavedyak 3y ago
It's interesting to me how hot and cold descriptions are of Twitter. You get posts like these, but then someone chimes in about how much better the conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over. I'm not on Twitter so i can't really make sense of it. I feel like i see more negative than positive.. but still.. it's bizarre to me that there's people in both camps. More than likely some of them are biased.. but still, i find it "interesting".
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  For people with interests or opinions that were heavily censored by pre-Musk Twitter, the end of this censorship alone compensates for the countless new annoyances.
  - deeth_starr_v 3y ago
    This seems vibes based. Twitter censored in the past and continues to censor. If you were in the out group and now are in the in group you’re happy even tho you were unlikely to have been censored
    - MiddleEndian 3y ago
      I've always found Twitter to be kind of dumb, most of my interaction with it is when twitter bullshit gets plastered over UFC PPVs or "news" articles report on what people say on twitter. I used my account to (mildly) troll some guy who shared my same name until I got banned a few years ago. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605212 But despite what some people claim, they did not unban everyone, I checked and I am still banned. outgroup to outgroup lol Still hoping the site collapses so the two cases mentioned above stop happening. Also an extra lol @ people learning why user-content sites need moderation, even 4chan is moderated.
  - 3y ago
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Instagram is the same. They have bots to give you the feeling that you jumped right into a group of people, while it's actually a desert like environment.
- newaccount7g 3y ago
  [dead]
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  And the stupid optimization tricks even legitimate users do to increase their clout: post several pictures - "Which one is your favorite? Comment below" so they get engagement points by the number of comments when it's just a stream of numbers that no-one (probably not even the creator) cares about.
stephenitis 3y ago
Create a new account and follow tech people, I get none of that.

latchkey 3y ago

I recently had a fake account follow me where they replaced the letter L with an I in the user name. Whatever font Twitter website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the difference. The fake account looks 100% the same as the real, even has thousands of 'followers'. I reported it, and it is still up. Original: https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader https://twitter.com/WildcatTrader Fake: https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader https://twitter.com/WiidcatTrader It is unreal to me that the platform hasn't developed a way to automatically deal with fake accounts like this. Just check to see if the profile image is the same!?

labrador 3y ago
I had a fake Yann LeCun (Meta's AI chief) follow me. It looked and read like the real thing. I was happy about it for a couple of days until I realized it was fake. It fooled a lot of people. I didn't report it because obviously Musk doesn't care.
- latchkey 3y ago
  I can't imagine working for Twitter, in a position to fix things like this, and having to listen to Musk tell me to 'stay the course'. I know that everyone has a price, so their salary must be insanely good.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    I suspect that only the true believers are left. There were _so_ many actions and warning signs over the last year I can’t imagine anyone thinking it was a good/stable place to work unless they really liked Musk.
    - greesil 3y ago
      I think there's still a bunch of people who have an audience and don't really care about the drama. They're there not to engage, or sell anything, but just to use it as a broadcast medium. But yes why would I ever talk to anyone there? I can just use nitter to read my neets and call it good. Edit: oh fuck nitter is gone, arrrgh
      - refulgentis 3y ago
        They meant twitter employees, not users
        MBCook 3y ago
        Right, that was what I meant. For creators, I’ve heard other services offer much more useful interaction per follower, which would mean either Twitter followers often aren’t shown posts of a large cube of followers don’t care (likely bots). I don’t think Musks behavior and obvious preferences should be ignored. But even without that it sounds like it’s dead at the core and more people figure it out every day.
      - hackerlight 3y ago
        There's many nitter mirrors still up
  - ews 3y ago
    From what I know, lots of people with visas (L1/H1B) are stuck in twitter hell.
    - latchkey 3y ago
      That makes more sense than the Musk true believers theory. I mean, I get it, if you work at spacex, then that's one thing... you're building rockets and all.
      - lostlogin 3y ago
        I laughed, this is a new one. How many dollars would it take you to work for Musk? How many dollars would it take if it involved space rockets?
        techdragon 3y ago
        Dunno how “new” it is… I’ve definitely got a big price difference and I’m pretty sure others will to… Twitter, Tesla, Neuralink, Boring… all the non space Musk corps…. Quarter million if I don’t have to move from Australia, half million to a million depending on where I was going if it requires moving to the USA… I’d do it… but I’d basically have the resignation letter already drafted from day one… For the rockets… I’d probably be happy with their normal pay offer… not being a US citizen basically makes it impossible for me to apply for a job with SpaceX so I’d take what I could get lol… and since Elon is clearly just glued to his phone tweeting… it’s not going to be the Elon show… Gwynne Shotwell is running the company like a level headed and competent management executive, the place is full of competent engineers who seem like pretty well adjusted people when they talk about their experiences after leaving, and they all seem to leave for normal reasons…
    - labrador 3y ago
      I can't imagine the hell it must be to be stuck this way at X. Can you imagine being the engineer that gets the email "Elon wants Séamas O’Reilly suspended because he said some rude things about X" and you happen to be Irish? Journalist says he finds it ‘surreal’ to have account on X suspended after writing critique of platform https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2024/02/12/journalist-says-he-finds-it-surreal-to-have-account-on-x-suspended-after-writing-critique-of-platform/ https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2024/02/12/journali...
- canadiantim 3y ago
  I can't be certain but I'm pretty sure Musk isn't personally going through each report to vet them
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Do you think that's what's being proposed? Was the fact this was not as significant an issue due to Dorsey and then Agrawal being really good moderators as individuals? Or do you think maybe business leaders are accountable for the behavior of the system beneath them, especially when they personally overhauled exactly the system in question?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - hackerlight 3y ago
    Well, he fired the entire moderation team, and he made it no longer against ToS to post overt racism. Then he made it against the rules to say "cis". All of this was super important for the square speech town freedom thing, you wouldn't understand.
NetOpWibby 3y ago
Twitter Support doesn't care about legit scams and bots but will absolutely enforce a mistaken ban.
bentley 3y ago
> Whatever font Twitter website uses, makes it impossible to visually see the difference. Doesn’t it? When I view the profiles you listed (before that horrible login wall pops up), the ‘I’ is of the crossbar variety, and the ‘l’ has a finial, making the characters visibly different. In fact, I recall that Twitter started using that font (which also visually distinguishes 0 and O) after the Musk takeover as an anti‐spoofing measure. Spoofed usernames were completely impossible to detect before the font was changed.
- latchkey 3y ago
  Depends on your system/browser font?
  - bentley 3y ago
    Wouldn’t think so, given the intent. Shows up for me on both desktop and mobile. Do you have any local font overrides? Looks like the change happened just over a year ago: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23572746/twitter-changed-font-impersonators https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23572746/twitter-changed-... https://mashable.com/article/twitter-new-font-fights-impersonators https://mashable.com/article/twitter-new-font-fights-imperso...

arcanemachiner 3y ago

I'm struggling to remember a time when Twitter was not a wasteland.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

metaphor 3y ago

Sure enough, 17 new bot followers today after blocking 14 only a few days ago. There's precisely zero reason any legit person should be following my entirely passive, unengaged account. Twitter truly is a cesspool.

nothercastle 3y ago
Ditto but I’ve amassed almost 100 from I think 5 pre musk. It’s interesting to see it fluctuating with ban waves

unshavedyak 3y ago

It's interesting to me how hot and cold descriptions are of Twitter. You get posts like these, but then someone chimes in about how much better the conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over. I'm not on Twitter so i can't really make sense of it. I feel like i see more negative than positive.. but still.. it's bizarre to me that there's people in both camps. More than likely some of them are biased.. but still, i find it "interesting".

DonHopkins 3y ago
[flagged]
Georgelemental 3y ago
For people with interests or opinions that were heavily censored by pre-Musk Twitter, the end of this censorship alone compensates for the countless new annoyances.
- deeth_starr_v 3y ago
  This seems vibes based. Twitter censored in the past and continues to censor. If you were in the out group and now are in the in group you’re happy even tho you were unlikely to have been censored
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
    I've always found Twitter to be kind of dumb, most of my interaction with it is when twitter bullshit gets plastered over UFC PPVs or "news" articles report on what people say on twitter. I used my account to (mildly) troll some guy who shared my same name until I got banned a few years ago. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605212 But despite what some people claim, they did not unban everyone, I checked and I am still banned. outgroup to outgroup lol Still hoping the site collapses so the two cases mentioned above stop happening. Also an extra lol @ people learning why user-content sites need moderation, even 4chan is moderated.
- 3y ago

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

Instagram is the same. They have bots to give you the feeling that you jumped right into a group of people, while it's actually a desert like environment.

newaccount7g 3y ago
[dead]
FireBeyond 3y ago
And the stupid optimization tricks even legitimate users do to increase their clout: post several pictures - "Which one is your favorite? Comment below" so they get engagement points by the number of comments when it's just a stream of numbers that no-one (probably not even the creator) cares about.

stephenitis 3y ago

Create a new account and follow tech people, I get none of that.