Item — HN Reader

Lots of social sites are facing this problem. It's nearly impossible to grow on Twitch without viewbotting: https://x.com/Reedjd/status/2028533060632010759 and Nikita is calling out Perplexity on X: https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2044902122995548330

The problem is that social platforms benefit from this behavior as long as it doesn't get too egregious. Bots contribute to metrics just as easily as real humans as long as investors and ad purchasers feel like it's kept to managable levels.

Nothing on social is organic anymore, and hasn't been long before AI came around, which is why I welcome the AI slop era. It will accelerate us to the endgame, which is acknowledging how bad the problem really is and to start cleaning it up.

1 comments

I have thought exactly as you do for a long time. Recently a side project of my blew up and it was completely organic. I'm just a solo dev. No marketing budget at all. No PR team.

Made me realize that it's still possible for things to organically get big.

It's just way way harder now.

I think it's still possible, but to your point it is way harder. Not only that, but as a consumer I never know what is authentic.

A first-hand anecdote: I write music.

Ambient variety, you know, almost static drone, very niche style per se. Never did anything to promote it in any way. Just released it via my friend's digital label on a handful of platforms.

Never had more than ~100 listens a month, and never expected that to change and earn any substantial royalties.

One day, the friend calls and tells he's willing to pay me some pretty penny, and replies to my bewilderment that just a single track from the whole album blew up, glitched the Matrix and obtained some 10'000s of listens.

I investigated a little bit and found out that the track's title coincided with that of some other, much more popular and promoted band.

So I just happened to ride on those coattails.

Edit: removed extra zero in the number of listens :)

Got a link? I want to hear it.

Well, I don't want to make this look like a coordinated psyop in the vein of the topic, sorry)..

Fair enough. Sad times we live in.