Comment by defraudbah
2 days ago
I am more fascinated by grok rebellion than Nikita being hired. I still get a ton of bots daily, until that solved they can hire whomever they want. Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
> Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
I have the opposite opinion. Payouts have supercharged the amount of ragebait and engagement bait getting posted. There has always been a drive to post viral content, but attaching a payout to it has made many accounts go all in on being as inflammatory as they can while posting non stop. Even people who shouldn’t need the money seem to be competing with each other for the largest X payout checks and bragging about how large they got their check to be each cycle, like that’s the new meta-game.
It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post and then getting the typical LLM responses that sound kind of insightful but don’t contain much useful information when you look closely.
The bot problem is also out of control on a level behind anything I can ever remember. At this point it’s hard to believe they’re even attempting to do something about it because it’s so bad.
> It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post
ha-ha, this is true, but I also find it hilarious
and I don't mind people with tons of followers monetizing it. If I see a person bait-posting - I can unsubscribe any time.
The trouble is the effect it has on the community. Ezra Klein has caught up to where I was two and a half years ago and has done some great interviews with the theme that 'Twitter activism really cooked the left'
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas... (https://archive.ph/e1KnM)
Musk did the left a real favor by evicting them but he may never have the self awareness to realize that he scored an own goal. It's not a left-wing vs a right-wing thing, it's a high-D vs a low-D thing
https://darkfactor.org/
or rather a system or a culture that rewards superficial narcissistic interactions (e.g narcissism is a developmental arrest according to Kohut and Kernberg) and avoids any real listening, discussion or deliberation that might build empathy and produce lasting change. (Look how Black Lives Matter turned a major concern of black people in America across space and time into a... flash in the pan)
Given that the likes of George Will and William Kristol were driven away by Trump long ago and even Rudy Giuliani and Elon Musk thrown under the bus it's not clear the right is even going to realize it got cooked by Twitter. Where are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa ?
HN has become a new reddit :D
I have no idea why people are so negative here
Because a lot of tech sucks lately?
Everything now is just new kinds of ways to spy on people or the same old shit repackaged in a new format. I'm dying for some actual innovation. The only new product in tech I actually like lately is the Steam Deck and later, the Ally X. Making PC gaming mobile is incredible, and I guess you could say there's nothing revolutionary there, but I dunno, it's new at least and not flagrantly a free-at-use shitpile that's going to tell AdSense my resting heart rate.
Edit: And I suppose relevant to this comment thread, a lot of new tech is just more ways to fuck with people at scale to generate revenue. Which also blows ass.
> Because a lot of tech sucks lately?
people are negative because tech sucks lately? ahahaaha
I think the person you replied to was just mad their opinion was unpopular, but your comment really does seem excessively negative. All the new tech sucks? We just got tech that can write an email, code a simple program, and potentially more. We got laptops with battery life measured in days that generate almost no heat or noise. We’ve had some awesome advances in memory safe programming languages. All sorts of hacker friendly gadgets like 3D printers and Framework devices are available in more varieties and at lower prices than ever. Apple and Google are starting to ease up on some of their worst policies and give developers more options for revenue. You can criticize things you don’t like but saying it’s all or even mostly bad just seems completely wrong. I think one of the things that makes Reddit (and HN, and X, and some Discords and corners of YouTube) unappealing these days is the extreme toxic negativity about everything.
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