Comment by Tepix
3 days ago
It's not just the user hostile website that forces their app down your throat. It's also the algorithm that decides what you get to see (and thus, what you think). We know it's biased. The creator doesn't exactly keep the fact secret that it's being manipulated to agree with a certain agenda.
For FF users I recommend https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/control-panel...
> By default, your Home timeline will be the reverse-chronological "Following" timeline, which will only contain tweets and quote tweets from the people you follow. The algorithmic "For you" timeline will be hidden
Can you substantiate the claims about the supposedly biased algorithm and what exactly the "creator" said about it?
In my experience it isn't noticeably worse than other platforms, and I'm not aware of concrete complaints such as the incidents with Grok's system prompt, which is a different product.
The more obvious bias is towards Premium subscribers over us freeloaders. The reply-ranking algorithm was a nightmare for a while; they strictly adhered to the rules of gold check > blue check > normal account. It's still not great, but eventually they added enough slack to let normal accounts with good quips outrank 30 paying users saying "lol", and tweaked some things so it's no longer so easy to shill tshirts/whatever by tagging Grok for the gold check double-boost.
But they're still reticent to ban any Premium account without a reason good enough to give up the $8/month. I have some sympathy for trying to moderate in the era of LLMs that can generate perfectly on-topic replies that even take images into context. But I think they need a more targeted approach against OnlyFans bots replying to popular tweets with a standard formula of some sexual reference and an insane claim. Sometimes they're less sexual and more straight up horrifying [0]:
> i breed mantises for fun and once tried grafting two ooths together just to see what hatched. got a whole clutch of nymphs that all just twitched in circles and died by day two. butterfly chimera energy hits different when it's your own disaster.
The other bot replies to the same OP are the more typical sexualized sort; they tend to reply in swarms.
[0] https://x.com/ariexsha/status/2110924715103514871
Here's just one example: https://www.itechguides.com/elon-says-hes-working-to-fix-gro...
AFAIK X published their algorithm which more or less just says: "we use grok to decide which posts to show".
My "For You" twitter feed is literally 100% pro-Trump bot posts. The site is entirely unusable unless you just follow specific people and use "Following" rather than "For You". I'd guess that less than 10% of the site traffic is human.
The algorithm will also basically ignore you unless you pay for a blue checkmark premium account (what used to be verified). It's like being shadow banned - you can post, but most people will not see you.
It's also my experience that visibility of my comments is quite low without paying.
Only occasionally, once the comment picks up some likes, more people view it.
I don't have that issue with my For You, it's mostly tech.
My "for you" has zero pro-Trump posts. It's quite easy to train the algo. Just click not interested, show less on that stuff and follow the odd person you like, say the author of this post. Within a day or two it'll have learned.
And the owner is despicable.
That's probably true for all major platforms and companies, depending on your framework, ideology and the particular political/moral lens you choose to use.
Fair.
But he made a flying car!
Let's be honest, it's probably just a falling with style car.