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.
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'
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
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)
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.
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.
yeah, I am mad :D, actually quite fine with people disagreeing and throw _hit at me. What I am not getting is why every opinion people disagree with gets downvoted, Maybe I don't understand how voting system is supposed to work here.
What's wrong with grok becoming a mecha or liking new twitter payout model? I think it's fun and helps people, why be angree about it?
I can flame asses here and have fun, but I don't want to, I want people to be happy and enjoy their life.
> We just got tech that can write an email, code a simple program, and potentially more.
It does the second thing decently well.
> We got laptops with battery life measured in days that generate almost no heat or noise.
So? Laptop's a laptop. And while they increased the battery life they also took away a ton of the ports and made them spy on you.
> We’ve had some awesome advances in memory safe programming languages.
That one I'll give you. Now if we could just get industry to actually use them instead of putting everything in fucking React.
> All sorts of hacker friendly gadgets like 3D printers and Framework devices are available in more varieties and at lower prices than ever.
That's... kind of exciting, as long as you set aside concerns about microplastics. However the Framework laptop still isn't a mainstream thing and neither is linux, so the vast majority of users are still being ravenously exploited by the tech sector's surveillance industrial complex. I do not consider this a victory until everyone is saved, not just people technically literate enough to innovate themselves out of it.
> Apple and Google are starting to ease up on some of their worst policies and give developers more options for revenue.
Oh wow they're only crushing 29 orphans per hour instead of 30, throw a fucking parade.
> 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.
It IS mostly bad, and I don't say that as some bitter old hacker, I say that as someone who grew up, fell in love with technology, and then watched Big Business Assholes utterly ruin it!
The Internet is nearly UNUSABLE now for anything that isn't motherfucking commerce. Blogs and forums are dead and the majority of social networks are more anti-social than they've ever been. I don't even SEE friends on Facebook anymore, it's just a wall of generated bullshit content trying to either make me horny or piss me off, sometimes both. Instagram is a dead mall. Tiktok is psychological torture. Twitter is open mic night at the Reichstag circa 1941. We're more connected than we've ever been yet somehow I'm less informed on anything I actually give a shit about. If it doesn't make money, nobody will help you spread it around. Except Blusky and Mastadon.
Damn near every application I use daily is now written in JavaScript. Websites run by companies worth billions just don't load sometimes and that's just an understood thing that happens. Apps make my phone hot sending text messages. Every software update has the potential to completely redesign UI's almost always for the worse, and I am unable to opt out in any way. Windows is an utter nightmare to use, practically adware itself now, with parts of fucking EXPLORER written in React because even MICROSOFT can't be fucked to develop software properly now apparently.
