My thoughts on X/Twitter
I recently joined X (after not being on there since 2018). It’s a site that i want to like. I approve of the direction that it is going in, being dedicated to free speech and fighting against censorship, these are things that are important. With that in mind, i really do want to like the site and support it, however, i would say that currently, it’s not the place for photographers.
After joining, i was hit with constant requests to confirm my identity (via email and text message checks), it felt like every time i did anything, it screamed and blocked my account. I thought that this nonsense would stop if i upgraded to a paid membership, so that’s what i did. Did it stop the issues? A little, though not completely.
The other problem was that if i followed (what seemed like) more than 2 people in a half hour period it would block my account (despite the home page showing me multiple suggested accounts to follow). Liking too many pictures, posting too many pictures, doing just about anything really would result in a block and having to go through some verification check or other.
Despite that i carried on. The next thing that became apparent was that as far as photography goes, there is Japan and there is little else. X is full of amazing Japanese photographers, most are of a very high standard. Apart from that, there are a few well established photographers that seem to get a lot of engagement, and then there is everyone else, who get no engagement.
The Japanese photographers seem to have a good scene going where they support each other, via reposts and likes etc, though they don’t seem to engage much outside of that scene. For the rest of the photographers on there, it feels like a wasteland a little bit. Many times i would see excellent pictures being posted that just got no attention at all, despite the users seeming to have done everything right (tags and descriptions and posted in multiple groups etc). Admittedly i have only been back a few weeks, so this is a limited review, but so far i would say it is not the place to be if you want to grow your photography.
Next issue, bots. Not long after joining i started to get followers, unfortunately most were bots. I blocked them at first but eventually gave up. It does make me wonder just how much bot activity there actually is. When i see popular accounts with lots of likes and followers, i suspect that a large percentage of that isn’t real.
Finally, and this isn’t a problem exclusive to X, AI fakery. There are some quite large accounts on X, with loads of followers and plenty of likes on images, that post AI pictures exclusively, but try to pretend they are real. I got suspicious about one that initially i really liked. They posted beautiful, nostalgic images, with great processing and mood, day after day. That was the first giveaway, every day they were posting 3 or 4 amazing pictures, no one has that good a hit rate :) I started to look at them a bit closer and things became obvious. Text that couldn’t be read, railings and fences that appeared from nowhere and merged into themselves, people with odd faces, locations that made no sense (apparently in Japan one day, England the next, Germany the next, and then Thailand, France etc, sometimes what looked like 100 years ago ) and too many images where the lighting and location was apparently perfect. Much of this was hidden beneath heavy grain and faded, film like processing, so fine details were quite vague and indistinct. Replies to comments about the pictures were also vague, never responding to direct questions about what camera and lenses they used (and most photographers love to talk about gear), and never going into detail about anything. They did however call these posts “photos” and that they “created” them and waited for the perfect moments, etc. There are many of these accounts that follow similar patterns, making me think the accounts themselves might be AI generated (very meta). AI making AI pretending to be human is quite a disturbing thought.
To sum up. X is not good. The platform itself is a mess, i don’t know if it is due to over strict security, or simply bad design. At this moment i can’t even use the app, it has an error every time i try to login, apparently it is well known and been happening for weeks now. The website works, sometimes, other times it also fails to login. As a place to possibly grow your photography following, it is not ideal. Photography isn’t that much of a thought on X, and outside of Japan and a few well established people, it feels very barren. Let’s hope it improves.