Hacker News Reader

Comment by russdill | Hacker News Reader

It's gotten worse and yet more bland. The top few comments are almost always AI generated engagement farming posts.

The new engagement bait technique is "vague posting" so that people need to click into the comments and ask for specifics, its terrible

Apple News does that a lot.

To be fair, as someone who used to manage an X account for a very small startup as part of my role (glad that's no longer the case), for a long time (probably still the case) posting direct links would penalize your reach. So making a helpful, self-contained post your followers might find useful was algorithmically discouraged.

Everything that is awful in the diff between X and Twitter is there entirely by decision and design.

Vagueposting is a different beast. There’s almost never any intention of informing etc; it’s just: QT a trending semi-controversial topic, tack on something like “imagine not knowing the real reason behind this”, and the replies are jammed full of competitive theories as to what the OP was implying.

It’s fundamentally just another way of boosting account engagement metrics by encouraging repliers to signal that they are smart and clued-in. But it seems to work exceptionally well because it’s inescapable at the moment.

Vague posting is as old as social networks. I had loads of fun back in the day responding to all the "you know who you are" posts on facebook, when it's clearly not aimed at me.

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