In a way, it's much more frightening to operate on the assumption that, while there are bots, it mostly is actual humans. Simply put, a lot of the actual humans are bots (in the metaphorical sense of having incredibly un-nuanced takes and reactively responding to certain heuristic phrases that "trigger" them).

I don't have any stats on what % of twitter is bots so I'm not saying that it's not overwhelmed by bots, but we should be aware that there might be an even more chilling explanation here: that it actually _is_ humans causing the toxicity

I've semi-recently created a new Twitter account account in order to dive head on into the deepest cesspools of Twitter. The topics and accounts I follow are mostly what I'd call "bot bait"--stuff like Hong Kong, Trump, COVID--and it's been extremely eye-opening to see the ways that people will respond back-and-forth for multiple tweets in near real-time.

But I've also come to roughly the same conclusion as you. I might be naive, but given the time I've spent on the internet, I'd like to think I can tell the difference between bots and humans. Some of the bots are obvious, some of the bots are non-obvious (blaming bots), but still definitely bots. But MOST of them, are probably real people. Really, really ignorant people, on all sides of the political spectrums. There's just these people out there now with phones and a Twitter account, and they're broadcasting their id.

You're describing humans that are frighteningly close to "philosophical zombies" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

Twitter is a pure pain box, but no one has the kindness of offering a gom jabbar.

Not really... philosophical zombies behave indistinguishably from "conscious" humans, we just don't believe them when they say they have internal experiences just like real people.

NPCs

I once was a coder like you, then I took a carpal tunnel to the hand.

Slide into their DMPCs

As I often say, "real people don't use twitter". Its bots and trolls talking to each other, with the news treating it as research.

Twitter has been the best thing to happen to my life in awhile. It has directly led to opportunities and people that I otherwise wouldn't have gotten.

Maybe this is an ML thing, though. The Twitter ML community is much tighter-knit.

If a community would be comfortable among bots, it would be the ML community, wouldn't it? Joking aside, I think it is rather despite Twitter than because of it that it works.