Manufactured consensus on x.com

It's really degenerated into a trash heap. I quit years ago.

I'm surprised how many upvotes this got (40 points as of me writing this comment), given how little "meat" is actually in this article. The author presents a graph where views for a given user dropped precipitously after a "feud with musk". That's certainly suspicious, and was worth bringing up, but the rest of the blog is just pontificating about "social engineering" and "perception cascades", backed by absolutely nothing. Are people just upvoting based on title and maybe the first paragraph? This post could have been truncated to the graph and very little would be lost.

Neuro network mimics human brain, what fires together wires together. X mimics human psychology (still brain). Call it halo effect, appeal to authority, selection bias. Some say it is a bug, some say it is a feature, a feature in decision making that developed under limited time and energy. Selecting X, but not other social network, as the subject of the article is a selection bias, it is also a feature, so is X's selection of sorting criteria

It’s hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a “public utility” without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the company as vulnerable to these issues. That’s why Masnick’s article “Protocols not Platforms” is still so spot-on.

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...