Comment by Aurornis
2 days ago
> 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 ?