Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic
Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
You would think such people would be competent enough to proxy their operations through at least a layers of compromised devices, or Tor, or VPNs, or at least something other than their own IP addresses.
OP has just completely pulled this analysis out of their ass. They aren’t all constantly running g cyber operations on Reddit, that bears zero resemblance to what cyber operations look like in real life including the point that you raised.
Daily reminder (for myself especially) to engage as little with social media (reading/commenting) as possible. It's a huge waste of time anyways not like I don't have better things to do.
This is a special addiction because most of us are community starved. Formative years were spent realizing we could form digital communities, then right when they were starting to become healthy and pay us back, they got hijacked by parasites.
These parasites have always dreamed of directly controlling our communities, and it got handed to them on a silver platter.
Corporate, monetized community centers with direct access to our mindshare, full ability to censor and manipulate, and direct access to our community-centric neurons. It is a dream come true for these slavers which evoke a host of expletives in my mind.
Human beings are addicted to community social interaction. It is normally a healthy addiction. It is not any longer in service of us.
The short term solution: reduce reliance on and consumption of corporate captured social media
The long term solution: rebuild local communities, invest time in p2p technology that outperforms centralized tech
When I say "p2p" I do not mean what is currently available. Matrix, federated services, etc are not it. I am talking about going beyond even Apple in usability, and beyond BitTorrent in decentralization. I am talking about a meta-substrate so compelling to developers and so effortless to users that it makes the old ways appear archaic in their use. That is the long term vision.
Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.
I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).
I’ll take a stab: because twitter isn’t reality, it’s a microcosm. A tempest in a teapot. It’s something that if you step outside of, you realize it’s not the real world.
Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.
It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.
> Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
The shadows on the wall aren't fake, they are just... shadows of real things. Plato's cave is about having an incomplete view of reality, not a false view of reality.
No. I am considering home schooling my little one, but mostly due to the whole 2 Sigma problem rather than any perceived falsehood with public schooling.
I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
Yes and no. It also shows which app store country the account is tied to, and that my friend is a little bit more work. It also shows an icon when it suspects VPN. A lot of these foreign run accounts are in fact not using VPN and their host country matches their app store country. Lots of "e-girl" type of accounts are foreign owned, and there's an insane number of racist accounts LARPing as American run from places like Turkey, and other countries. I think my favorite call out was some Canadian account that nobody realized was Canadian. I think if you're going to inject yourself in the politics of other countries your audience deserves to know if you're not even living there.
You don't need an app to use X though. I've been on X for over 5 years and never installed the app. In fact, X is far better with Firefox+uBlock on mobile.
Country of origin is based on IP. Many British accounts are using VPNs due to the online safety act and this is noted by X. X also shows the country of the app store the app was downloaded from which is more accurate.
Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
> Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
It’s ironic but also completely typical.
Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.
>Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
Remember that China blocks Western social media, yet posts a lot of Chinese government propaganda on Western social media. Making VPNs illegal for the general public does not entail making VPNs inaccessible to government agents.
I'm not sure how they are getting the info but it's not as simple as logged in IP, mine says I'm based in Costa Rica, I was on vacation there 2/3 months ago, but it's not primarily where I use my x account and I've logged in from a phone and a computer from other countries since, and CR would be a relatively small amount of time in my total usage, so I find it strange it thinks my account is based there.
Interesting. Maybe gps location data snapshots factor into it. You could probably defeat that with app permissions though. GPS spoofing is also possible, but a lot more friction for troll accounts.
Or maybe they are able to link carrier-sourced cellphone location datasets to particular twitter accounts. Those aren't going to be real-time though, so something like that could explain the lag.
X shows a "LOCK" icon when they are coming in VPN. To out them.
Also, it shows which country's app store you installed your app. For this reason, when they use their mobile app, it will be outted that way.
It's not via IP address. I created my account using a US data center IP back in 2022 from Malaysia. I am now in the UK, using a Swiss VPN IP. My location shows up as Japan...
It was a bad example as it's quite easy to detect cloud operator endpoints (their internet gateway). Try it sometime and see how many web site make you go through some captcha maze.
They would most likely use residential proxy/vpns that show your traffic coming out of a regular household ISP. They can be purchased for cheap.
A VPN is just a tunnel to a server somewhere (in this case, an Azure VM) so anywhere you can rent/run a server is a place that you can setup a VPN and pass all your traffic through.
It looks like this shows where each account was originally created from. So new accounts can get around it, but all existing accounts that didn't have the foresight to be using a VPN from the start are now burned.
Going forward this is going to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. There are plenty of other tricks X can do to determine country of origin. Long term I agree the sock puppets have the upper hand here, though forcing them to go through the effort is probably a good thing.
Google thinks my account is American for Play Store geo limiting purposes, and if I recall correctly would only let me update it by adding a payment card, which I refuse to do. I don’t know where they even got that idea—they should have known full well I was Australian. My best guess is that for a few years I used a phone I bought while visiting America. But it was neither my first phone nor my most recent, and the account was at least five years old before I even visited the US.
It’s an interesting phenomenon. I don’t think people en masse have trust in any of these accounts. But when your feed is filled with the kind of stuff they say day in day out it still affects your overall perspective of the world. “No smoke without fire” on a subconscious level.
I've felt it through my guilty pleasure of scrolling instagram reels periodically. They've obviously changed their algorithm from time to time and it's crazy how I've intermittently have gotten endless right wing stuff and leftist ridiculing and thinking there's a lot good points. Then it's suddenly just convincing leftist material again or at best you're-all-dumb content.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
hacker news, Reddit and similar have always been about following subjects or topics you like, getting the latest discussion in a field of your interest. twitter was all about following people not topics, so you'd get a wider range of topics, but you tended to focus on accounts more and give more weight to specific users than you might here.
If you followed a variety of people it was quite addictive - so many celebrities or other notable people meant you got actual "first hand news", and it was fun seeing everyone join in on silly jokes and games and whatever, that doesn't hit quite as hard when it's just random usernames not "people".
But it suffered for that success, individual voices got drowned out in favour of the big names, the main way to get noticed becoming more controversial statements, and the wildly different views becoming less free flowing discussion and more constant arguments.
It was fun for a while if you followed fun people, but I think the incentives of such systems means it was always going to collapse as people worked out how to manipulate it.
For a long time, I did not get twitter either. But it seems to be the only popular platform where the academics and intellectual class want to hangout. Economists, researchers, policy wonks prefer posting on twitter over any other social platform.
It is also the only way to get my city's public transport system to reply to queries about why a bus is extremely late, when/if it is coming. I always get a nice polite reply because it's publicly available. If I call I get stonewalled with endless call center rerouting eventually leading to a dial tone
All social media (including HN) is horrible in some ways. And they all suffer from too many people being overly credulous to random comments.
But the problem with over credulity goes far beyond social media. I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.
> I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.
Yeah, but basically nobody is capable of evaluating those sources themselves, outside of very narrow topics.
Reading a wikipedia page about Cicero? Better make sure you can read Latin and Greek, and also have a PhD in Roman history and preferably another one in Classical philosophy, or else you will always be stuck with translations and interpretations of other people. And no, reading a Loeb translation from the 1930's doesnt mean you will fully understand what he wrote, because so much of it all hinges on specific words and what those words meant in the context they were written, and how you should interpret whole passages and how those passages relate to other authors and things that happened when he was alive and all that fun stuff.
And that's just one small subject in one discipline. Now move on to an article about Florence during the Renaissance and oh hey suddenly there are yet another couple of languages you should learn and another PhD to get.
Probably the thing I loved about it most was the fact that I could talk directly with people that I felt had a real impact in the world
Scientists/Researchers
Journalists
Activists
Politicians
Subject Matter Experts (for the fields I am interested in)
There were (when I was using it) a large number of "troll" accounts, and bots, but it was normally easy to distinguish the wheat from the chaff
You could also engage in meaningful conversations with complete strangers - because, like Usenet, the rules for debate were widely adopted, and transgression results in shunning (something that I rarely see beyond twitter to be honest)
Yep, I effectively landed my favorite job by engaging with the Erlang community on Twitter. I miss it, but it just got to be too toxic during the 2016 election cycle (in fairness, everything was too toxic then, and it hasn’t gotten better since).
It is basically two totally distinct products: the "Following" feed that you can make it as you like, and the "For You" that is just a stream of the stupidest posts imaginable by people you don't know.
I stopped using a few years ago it even so - while the Following feed is much better than the other one, the replies of anyone with even a bit of reach would still just be a sewer of bots and trolls. It was impossible to have meaningful dialogs with that. Twitter used to be better at hiding that nonsense but that changed.
A lot of people did not have trust and have been asking for this country-of-origin feature for years. Better would be if they bring back country of initial account creation, or some way to identify VPN usage.
I really don't as far as social media goes. If I see a link here the account posting it likely doesn't play any part, trust comes from the source of the content more than random user.
My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.
And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber.
It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now though!
> My main use case is to get up-to-date news on things that mainstream media doesn't cover accurately.
Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.
These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
It doesnt have to be US citizen only. It just has to be who they are claiming to be. If someone in india or europe wants to comment on foreign politics, thats fine. They just shouldnt be able to pretend they are from the US or anywhere else
a town square isn't just a place, it's always a polity that requires common values and a shared culture. Otherwise you at best have an airport lobby.
A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so.
Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designed to generate profit that in fact benefits from disorder, not a means of real world problem solving, the ostensible point of meaningful communication.
> how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
I had this same idea before and it’s not terrible. If it guaranteed user privacy by using an external identification service (ID.me?), it might get some attention. You would likely have to reverify accounts every 6 months or so to limit sales of accounts, and you would need to prevent sock puppets somehow.
If you allow pseudonymity you would get some interesting dynamic conversations, while if you enforced a real name policy I think it would end up like a ghost town version of LinkedIn. (Many people don’t want to be honest on a “face” account.) The biggest problem with current pseudonymous networks like X/Twitter is you have no idea if the other person really has a stake in the discussion.
Also, if ID were verified and you could somehow determine that a person has previously registered for the service, bans would have teeth and true bad actors would eventually be expelled. It would be better to have a forgiving suspension/ban policy because of this, with gradually increasing penalties and reasonable appeals in case of moderation mistakes.
wouldn't that happen with this too if you require people to sign up with their US passport because then now everything you type is going to have much more weight I guess facebook in a sense is already like this with all the verification required.
the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off.
this X feature does make it interesting like for example engaging with US politics while shouldnt stop commentary from foreigners it definitely should contain the limits of perception meddling
You could easily builds this, but my guess is people would use it but very sparingly.
My small neighborhood has a non-anonymous chat group, which is 2-3 streets (~50 houses) inside a village which is inside a city. It is basically just a mini nextdoor but without ads or conspiracies.
I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera.
Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder.
(Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
> and it is curious as to why they rolled it back.
I took a look at some X profile's I know where they're based, and a couple of other random, and I can see "Account based in" and "Connected via" for all of them, just logged in as a free user.
I'm not really surprised it was rolled back given Musks political leanings. I am surprised it was even added in the first place though, surely this outcome was obvious?
It was rolled back temporarily because the first version had an "account created in country [X]" indicator that was found to be unreliable. The new version (which is active now) just has the country the user is currently in.
I don't think so because it seems both sides were engaged with non-American IPs running hugely popular accounts and it makes sense, why wouldn't you play both sides when you are paid for attention?
I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
Seems like they would have had the statistics. It's a shame that they rolled it back. I'm not necessarily an Elon fan but I respected this feature immensely.
I’d be willing to believe Musk was actually surprised. Like a lot of people into heavy political ideology he seems to vastly overestimate the number of people who think the same way about things. He seems to inhabit a serious echo chamber.
If only there was some kind of PKI that could attest the identity of the person. It's a shame, that US doesn't have a government capable of running it.
if a guy in india can make great MAGA posts, is that really a problem?
its got the followers because the followers want to read and reshare it.
id maybe like to see the location of origin as a pie chart on the followers list, as well as on what theyre following, but if the idea is good(for whatever definition if good)
is being american even particularly relevant? i dont think the random guy in indiana's opinions on Mamdani are any more relevant than a random guy in nigeria's.
With the exception of evangelical Christian’s where there’s obviously a huge amount of overlap I’ve never seen a group so eager to be lied to and so lacking in critical thinking as MAGA folks.
every conversation of note here on HN is heavily manipulated too. any discussion platform where accounts can promote or demote other messages are all subject to rampant manipulation and propaganda.
On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change.
IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away.
Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.
I believe there are companies that offer more accurate geolocation services by essentially having a deal with phone companies where they get secret info where the customer actually is from mobile companies records.
Readit News
Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.reddit...
Funny nonetheless though.
Eglin has something like 50,000 people but it's actual population as a census designated area is more like 5000.
Oak Brook, IL was also "most addicted" but people didn't run with the idea that McDonalds HQ was running psyops.
It was generally being called astroturfing when it got more apparent on Reddit in the early 2010s, and definitely didn't get less after.
You would think such people would be competent enough to proxy their operations through at least a layers of compromised devices, or Tor, or VPNs, or at least something other than their own IP addresses.
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This is a special addiction because most of us are community starved. Formative years were spent realizing we could form digital communities, then right when they were starting to become healthy and pay us back, they got hijacked by parasites.
These parasites have always dreamed of directly controlling our communities, and it got handed to them on a silver platter.
Corporate, monetized community centers with direct access to our mindshare, full ability to censor and manipulate, and direct access to our community-centric neurons. It is a dream come true for these slavers which evoke a host of expletives in my mind.
Human beings are addicted to community social interaction. It is normally a healthy addiction. It is not any longer in service of us.
The short term solution: reduce reliance on and consumption of corporate captured social media
The long term solution: rebuild local communities, invest time in p2p technology that outperforms centralized tech
When I say "p2p" I do not mean what is currently available. Matrix, federated services, etc are not it. I am talking about going beyond even Apple in usability, and beyond BitTorrent in decentralization. I am talking about a meta-substrate so compelling to developers and so effortless to users that it makes the old ways appear archaic in their use. That is the long term vision.
Also don’t reply to this.
Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)
My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.
If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.
I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).
Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.
> Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall.
Homer pays to get the crayon put back up his nose
> Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.
Homer gets annoyed/surprised if someone calls him stupid.
The shadows on the wall aren't fake, they are just... shadows of real things. Plato's cave is about having an incomplete view of reality, not a false view of reality.
Ironically many of the people in favor of banning VPNs are themselves using a VPN.
It’s ironic but also completely typical.
Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.
Remember that China blocks Western social media, yet posts a lot of Chinese government propaganda on Western social media. Making VPNs illegal for the general public does not entail making VPNs inaccessible to government agents.
How do you know this as a fact?
Or maybe they are able to link carrier-sourced cellphone location datasets to particular twitter accounts. Those aren't going to be real-time though, so something like that could explain the lag.
Reason I ask is because there are few people I follow that use VPNs but their location is accurate on X.
Also, X also shows where you downloaded the app from, e.g. [Country] App Store, so that one might be a bit more difficult to get around.
They would most likely use residential proxy/vpns that show your traffic coming out of a regular household ISP. They can be purchased for cheap.
Going forward this is going to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. There are plenty of other tricks X can do to determine country of origin. Long term I agree the sock puppets have the upper hand here, though forcing them to go through the effort is probably a good thing.
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I don't do this with every topic unless I'm interested in discussing something just so I'm more informed just to reduce bias.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
If you followed a variety of people it was quite addictive - so many celebrities or other notable people meant you got actual "first hand news", and it was fun seeing everyone join in on silly jokes and games and whatever, that doesn't hit quite as hard when it's just random usernames not "people".
But it suffered for that success, individual voices got drowned out in favour of the big names, the main way to get noticed becoming more controversial statements, and the wildly different views becoming less free flowing discussion and more constant arguments.
It was fun for a while if you followed fun people, but I think the incentives of such systems means it was always going to collapse as people worked out how to manipulate it.
X and Reddit are no different.
But the problem with over credulity goes far beyond social media. I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.
Yeah, but basically nobody is capable of evaluating those sources themselves, outside of very narrow topics.
Reading a wikipedia page about Cicero? Better make sure you can read Latin and Greek, and also have a PhD in Roman history and preferably another one in Classical philosophy, or else you will always be stuck with translations and interpretations of other people. And no, reading a Loeb translation from the 1930's doesnt mean you will fully understand what he wrote, because so much of it all hinges on specific words and what those words meant in the context they were written, and how you should interpret whole passages and how those passages relate to other authors and things that happened when he was alive and all that fun stuff.
And that's just one small subject in one discipline. Now move on to an article about Florence during the Renaissance and oh hey suddenly there are yet another couple of languages you should learn and another PhD to get.
Scientists/Researchers
Journalists
Activists
Politicians
Subject Matter Experts (for the fields I am interested in)
There were (when I was using it) a large number of "troll" accounts, and bots, but it was normally easy to distinguish the wheat from the chaff
You could also engage in meaningful conversations with complete strangers - because, like Usenet, the rules for debate were widely adopted, and transgression results in shunning (something that I rarely see beyond twitter to be honest)
I really don't as far as social media goes. If I see a link here the account posting it likely doesn't play any part, trust comes from the source of the content more than random user.
And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber.
It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now though!
Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.
These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so.
Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designed to generate profit that in fact benefits from disorder, not a means of real world problem solving, the ostensible point of meaningful communication.
I had this same idea before and it’s not terrible. If it guaranteed user privacy by using an external identification service (ID.me?), it might get some attention. You would likely have to reverify accounts every 6 months or so to limit sales of accounts, and you would need to prevent sock puppets somehow.
If you allow pseudonymity you would get some interesting dynamic conversations, while if you enforced a real name policy I think it would end up like a ghost town version of LinkedIn. (Many people don’t want to be honest on a “face” account.) The biggest problem with current pseudonymous networks like X/Twitter is you have no idea if the other person really has a stake in the discussion.
Also, if ID were verified and you could somehow determine that a person has previously registered for the service, bans would have teeth and true bad actors would eventually be expelled. It would be better to have a forgiving suspension/ban policy because of this, with gradually increasing penalties and reasonable appeals in case of moderation mistakes.
the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off.
this X feature does make it interesting like for example engaging with US politics while shouldnt stop commentary from foreigners it definitely should contain the limits of perception meddling
My small neighborhood has a non-anonymous chat group, which is 2-3 streets (~50 houses) inside a village which is inside a city. It is basically just a mini nextdoor but without ads or conspiracies.
I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera.
Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder.
(Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
I took a look at some X profile's I know where they're based, and a couple of other random, and I can see "Account based in" and "Connected via" for all of them, just logged in as a free user.
Is it possible they enabled it back again?
I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
Dead Comment
its got the followers because the followers want to read and reshare it.
id maybe like to see the location of origin as a pie chart on the followers list, as well as on what theyre following, but if the idea is good(for whatever definition if good)
is being american even particularly relevant? i dont think the random guy in indiana's opinions on Mamdani are any more relevant than a random guy in nigeria's.
But there may be ways to link those records to a platform's users
X begins rolling out 'About this account' location feature to users' profiles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024417
Top MAGA Influencers on X/Twitter Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Trolls
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024211