[lucidone]

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]

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

Fake: 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]

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.

[bentley]

> 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.

[NetOpWibby]

Twitter Support doesn't care about legit scams and bots but will absolutely enforce a mistaken ban.

[metaphor]

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]

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

[unshavedyak]

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".

[ethanbond]

There are a lot of people for whom everything Musk touches is the worst thing ever created, then a lot of people for whom everything he touches is gold, then some people who just like a pretty reasonably stable social media site that's not overrun by bots and pay-for-engagement morons.

IMO it seems objectively true that the bot problem is worse than it's ever been. It's definitely objectively true that boosting paid-for comments above organically high-engagement comments means your signal:noise ratio is way, way worse.

[candiddevmike]

> someone chimes in about how much better the conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over

I always assume these types of comments are some kind of dog whistle

[bodge5000]

I ended up in a really unfortunate position, pre-elon I never really "got" twitter and so barely used it. When he took over I'd log in every now and then to see how much it was plummeting, and in the process of doing so found the (ever shrinking) value of the platform, so I only started enjoying it when it started going downhill (for me at least).

I guess though that's less the platform or the people running it and more the users. There's nothing particularly unique about twitter that I like other than the other people who use it

[omoikane]

For me the Twitter experience is roughly the same as before, except ad density increased.

It might be that the majority of Twitter changes mostly affect only English content, which I mostly do not follow.

[mewpmewp2]

Is this based on the kind of politics you are into? E.g. if you are from US you either have one side or the other where one side likes it and the other dislikes it?

[Georgelemental]

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.

[rsynnott]

Look, some people _like_ talking to sex-robots, alright? Nothing to be ashamed of.

[ineedaj0b]

yeah, i'm having a great time

[lofaszvanitt]

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.

[FireBeyond]

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.

[arcanemachiner]

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

[stephenitis]

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