this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024

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1097

X's controversial changes to blocking and AI training saw half a million users leave for rival Bluesky in just a single day (www.techradar.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Elon Musk’s latest changes for X are driving more users away – not exactly a surprise, granted – and many of them are flocking to rival social media outlet Bluesky. So many made the switch, in fact, it led to Bluesky briefly going down due to the volume of incoming new users.

The central move initiated by X that made the headlines for driving migration away from Musk’s platform is a change to the way the ‘Block’ button works. This was actually announced back in September, but is officially being implemented now (well, it’ll be in place ‘soon’ we’re told).

It means that going forward, X users who you have blocked will still be able to view your (public) posts – though they won’t be able to engage with them in any way (from replies to liking and so forth).

This is problematic for obvious reasons, in terms of enabling stalkers and trolls who will still be able to view the posts of an account that has blocked them, when previously this wasn’t the case. In the past, blocking meant that the blocked user couldn’t see any posts (or anything at all, save for a message telling them that they’ve been blocked), but soon, this will change.

Bluesky posted to say it had in excess of 100,000 new users inside 12 hours following the announcement by X, after the rival network highlighted the fact that its block function stops those who are blocked from viewing any posts.

In an update, Bluesky noted that it has now gained half a million new users in the past day.

There’s another reason that some folks are rapidly exiting from X stage left (and right, and indeed center, clambering over the audience, it would seem), and that’s a change to X’s privacy policy.

As TechCrunch reports, the new policy includes an update that allows third-party collaborators to use content on X to train their AI models – unless the user opts out. This is a notable extension of the reach of AI training on X, which has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI (unless users opt out, again).

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[–] [email protected] 172 points 2 months ago (5 children)

What a garbage dataset to train off. The majority of everything there is all bots and AI anyway lol

[–] ohellidk 82 points 2 months ago (6 children)

bots training bots. maybe this will (hopefully) corrupt the AI's data. its kind of like copying off a copy again and again.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 2 months ago

This is in fact precisely what happens. LLM output becomes increasingly incoherent with each subsequent generation trained off of previously AI generated data.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sound like human

50und 11k3 hum4n

50()|V[) 11X3 |-|()|/|4|V

$[]|||||) |!|<[- #|_|///-||

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Don't forget to yell into the data PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS PENIS!!!!

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

The AI version of mad cow disease.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Elon decided Microsoft’s Tay chatbot was a guidebook …

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[–] [email protected] 147 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Come on over to Mastodon, the water's nice

[–] ruckblack 87 points 2 months ago (20 children)

I've stopped recommending it. The discovery and trending post mechanisms are either garbage or non-existent, and it's really hard to get a feed that's remotely entertaining. Devs also seem ideologically opposed to adding any features like that. It'll just give normal people who aren't willing to deal with all this crap a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to the fediverse. I do recommend lemmy to people tho.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

I feel like its the opposite.

Mastodon's hashtag following is by far the best discovery method out there.

I've stopped using Bluesky because I can't find any content and there's just too much "screaming into the void" making it impossible to find anything of substance.
I've stopped using Threads because it's just engagement bait.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Yeah Threads has nothing of substance, just engagement bait as you said. X is similar now that users can make ad revenue

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)

While I agree that it makes Mastodon less entertaining I also think that it makes it a lot more fair, representative and trustworthy as a lens through which to observe & participate in social discourse and share information and opinions. That in itself will probably mean that it remains less popular but I think it's also what makes it more valuable IMO. We need to calm down from the urgency of the digital dopamine cycle, for many reasons. If social media is a truly human media then it should be boring at times because that is a human reality that we are adapted to.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

I agree. I love Mastodon's calm columnar UI with lists and hashtags where I feel I'm in control of my experience, and that I can just stop whenever and come back in three days.

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Dude, that’s gonna be one hell of a racist AI just based on the dataset it’s gonna receive

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's gonna train the little robot dog, which they're gonna put a gun on. And drones. It's gonna train drones, he'll sell it to anyone who'll buy the data.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (8 children)

Just helpful to remember, as all this horseshit persists, Bluesky is Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is former head of Twitter and musk's good buddy.

It's all a losing proposition, whatever direction you move - except if you move... Away.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (5 children)

He left in May.

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[–] ayyy 50 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Wait this whole article just baselessly assumes that 1 new bluesky account = 1 person leaving twitter. That is so obviously unrealistic. Sure some people were probably curious and wanted to check out something new but that doesn't mean they will immediately switch platforms.

You can’t just make fun of Those Guys for endlessly believing fake bullshit while unquestionably parroting this garbage.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Twitter is for narcissists, and when they say Mastodon is not as good as twitter they really mean that there's not as many people watching them as on Twitter. So Bluesky gaining 500,000 new accounts could help in making it "better".

[–] ayyy 16 points 2 months ago

The headline directly says half a million users left twatter. As far as I can tell that is literally a lie.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago (4 children)

These mfs will use literally anything except for open source, decentralised social meda

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago

The masses yearn for the corporate boot

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Social media like Twitter preys on people's fear of missing out.

Manufactured Problem - not being up to date on internet bullshit. Marketed solution - be on twitter. Supply and demand died a long time ago. Now it's all about manufactured problems, and conveniently marketed solutions.

This sort of psychological manipulation in marketing works. It's why it's so hard to get people to leave websites like Twitter, reddit, fb ect. They've made their brands synonymous with media trends.

It took long enough, but I'm genuinely happy to see folks wising up and realizing they don't "need" Twitter. It's like watching a bunch of people break up with a toxic ex all at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Not just Twitter. FOMO was what kept me on Reddit far longer than I should have been there.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (3 children)

So let's say on Twitter, someone blocks me and I can't read their post. Can't I just log out and read their post that way? I don't have a Twitter account, so I've never seen a blocked link before.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago

Opt out is such a shitty practice. Especially for AI generation

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (2 children)

While anything that gets people off Twitter is good, I'm sorely unimpressed by those artists who "had to" to patronize the racist transphobic neo-Nazi hellhole "because my audience is there"... until Musk's policies happened to offend their own personal interests, by requiring training for their AI. Countless models trained on all public images already exist, jumping ship won't prevent their work from being scraped elsewhere, and frankly, any one image or even portfolio will contribute virtually nothing to the result, so quitting in protest is largely symbolic. But so many peoples drew the line at that, and not at Musk making "cis" a slur, or protecting child pornographers, or boosting white supremacist supremacy theories. It's really disappointing to see.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And that’s on top of all the Brazil users who fled to BlueSky when he refused to comply with a court order (and pay a fine) so they blocked Twitter for a few days. I’m not sure how many went back after he paid the fine but BlueSky was fairly popular in Brazil even during the closed beta so I’m sure a ton stuck around.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

lol

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Just like a real girlfriend, but better. Apart from you having absolutely no sex life and apart from the fact that it has absolutely no emotional attachment or attraction to you whatsoever. And it will also never do anything like buy you dinner or a birthday present. Enjoy throwing money at your robot that you can't even fuck like a fleshlight.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (8 children)

How do we know this bluesky isn't just the same shit run by different assholes?

[–] mm_maybe 20 points 2 months ago (3 children)

We don't. It probably is. Mastodon is the way, but they need to fix a few things themselves.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

We can't, but at least there is a chance it is not.

With Xitter, we know for certain.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

We know that it is run by the same assholes. Bluesky is VC backed and Twitter was also. There is no way that Bluesky won't go the same route as every other VC backed social network. Sometime in the future they will start to meddle with your feed to push ads and sell your data to everyone.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago

Lol, that's probably 30% of real people still using it

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (10 children)

Bluesky is pretty great once you learn how to use it. I plan to slowly back off twitter.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Bluesky is vc backed by investors, it is a false promise that I am sure a lot of people working on the project believe, but it is a false promise all the same.

Bluesky is in the part of its lifecycle where investors tolerate no return on their investment in favor of drawing more people in. That is the relevant difference between Bluesky and other social media.

There are cool parts to Bluesky but it is absolutely a false promise of a future the fediverse already provides (however imperfectly). It is also full of "liberal" sheep who tell themselves they think differently but are so locked into the mindset of the way things are that they NEED their social network to be owned and operated for a profit by people orders of magnitude more wealthy than them.

Bluesky will end up essentially the same as all investor backed for-profit social networks, it will grow into a toxic, centralized (or in this case pseudo-centralized because of the moderation system), shithole where only popular accounts get any engagement with their posts. Mark my words.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

has so far only been used to train Musk’s own Grok AI

The Grok models are a laughing stock in the LLM space. They aren't good over APIs, and they're even less useful after Elon "open sources" them far later. Qwen 72B, and heck, Qwen 32B is already better than Grok 2, which is probably hundreds of billions of parameters. Qwen is runnable locally right now, Apache 2.0, and released day one. Grok 1 is... well, I dunno, no one has even bothered to try hosting it for anything.

I dunno what Twitter is doing with all those H100s Elon hoarded, but it seems like a big waste so far. Its certainly nothing to help the open source/self hosting space or to "decensor" and "democratize" LLMs like Elon fans seem to think.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Is 500,000 actually a lot? Honest question, my sense of scale with these things is shaky.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

For Twitter? No

For Bsky? Yes

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

Wonderful. Negative press for Musk makes me smile.

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