A significant amount of ebook reading now is romance/erotica or fantasy (or combined "romantasy") genres by readers for whom something a decade old won't appeal. An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time), or it isn't what one's peers are reading and one wants to connect with a community of other readers online or in school/university, etc.

Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.

When low effort goes to no effort one can expect the problem to worsen by several orders of magnitude.

Also not that it takes skill to come up with a remix/cover/homage of a song that is close enough to the original that people can enjoy it like the original, but not so close that you are just plagiarizing it. So this problem before AI is limited to talented musicians who for some reason would rather copy somebody else then to make their own music.

Mechahitler sure isn't helping.

You incentivize ragebait.

Twitter pay you for how much "engagement" your tweets get now. If you post something that angers people you will get a ton of replies, quote-tweets etc.

There are a whole lot of grifters on that platform making thousands of dollars a month winding people up.

Provide financial incentives to make it worse.

By turning it into a monetized /b/

I'm not sure if you actually haven't checked it since, but will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Accounts pushing white supremacy, the reversion of women's rights, hatred towards other on the basis of their race or religion, climate change denial, denial of science and promotion of pseudoscience, etc etc. are heavily promoted across the platform and get millions of engagements.

If you create a new account, the majority of the accounts you are shown and suggested to follow will be those pushing the above.

They've switched to a model of paying their users for engagement, which naturally encourages users to post the most engagement bait they can, which tends to be inflammatory and utterly lacking in depth or nuance.

CSAM?

X pays you for engagement if you have the premium subscription. Anyone with a verification symbol will be earning money from significant engagement, hence the rise of engagement bait on the platform.

How do you know / ensure you're getting all sides of the story? For one, many people have left the platform already because of its owner and policies, so you're not hearing those sides anymore.

> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.

Anecdotal; people get paid / pay to post and promote certain content. But that's nothing new on social media.

That said, escaping or avoiding bubbles is good, just be sure you're actually out.

You get both the white nationalist and the antisemite sides, yes.

Do you think it will be a net social benefit for people to be taught 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5 with equal weight, and let them come to their own conclusions?

How about if the person who owns the educational institution puts their thumb on the 2 + 2 = 5 side of the balance for their own ends?

Assuming you already pay for 'verification' on X, you just need to get more followers/impressions and then you'll start being paid based on your impressions. If you know/follow anyone with the 'verified' checkmark who has a lot of followers, they'll be getting paid for impressions.

> It's actually gotten better for those of us that value all sides of a given story so we can come to our own conclusions, instead of parroting stuff we hear in bubbles.

1. A different bubble is still a bubble.

2. Regardless of political leanings, paying for engagement is a really bad sign.

> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.

So? You don't have to know anyone being paid for it to be happening. The people who are really motivated by that are often poor by western standards and living on the other side of the world from you.

Facebook also pays for engagement, and what that's lead to is stuff like AI-generated shrimp Jesus and fake "I made this" memes, created by guys in India that don't even know English and don't own a computer. They throw crap at the wall from their cell phones to see what sticks, then do more of that.

IIRC the same thing happens for politics. Just the other day I read that a lot of popular "Alberta separatist" accounts are run by people who don't even live in Canada. They just use AI and shamelessly copy posts made by other accounts.

Paid to engage is a reference to the creator revenue sharing that encourages mass-appeal and ragebait content.

X is not a meritocracy of ideas, either.