The Atlantic’s David Frum has been running an experiment on his Twitter account.
On my computer, I am checking the latest tweets by people I follow. On my phone, I’m checking whether their most recent tweets are showing up in the “Following” column. I’m just getting started, but even in the first dozen cases, Twitter failed to show me an absolute majority of the tweets I had requested to see. That’s the reason your engagement is down, people: Twitter is withholding requested content from those who requested it.
For me, Twitter is most valuable as an information source. But Twitter is now rapidly mutating into a source that capriciously withholds information I asked for - including from such highly official sources as the Tate Gallery in London.
It’s as if, in the days of the old newspaper, my subscription were delivered with random stories scissored out by the publisher itself, for some capricious whim of the publisher’s own.
John Gruber points out at Darling Fireball that the analogy isn’t quite right. The reality is worse.
…because if you were delivered a newspaper with random stories scissored out, you’d know that there were missing stories. You wouldn’t know what they were, but you’d see the gaping holes in the paper. With Twitter now, there’s no indication that you’re missing tweets — let alone a huge number of tweets.
I can remember when I advised everybody here to follow me over to the bird site. That would’ve been in the mid-to-late noughties. I remember promising myself that it wouldn't interfere with my personal blogging, which I still enjoyed and which had created a really nice little community around the old Burger. But of course, it did interfere. It's hard to justify working for an hour on a post for a couple of hundred people, when you could blast out a tweet in less than ten seconds that might reach a hundred thousand.
Still, I've been trying to lean back into personal blogging. It feels much friendlier and less stressful than hanging out on any of the social media sites. There’s a lot less traffic here, of course. But I suspect there's about to be a lot less traffic on Twitter. Somewhere near zero would be my guess.
It's possible that squeezing the menchies is a deliberate ploy by Space Karen to force people to pony up his eight bucks a month. It's the exact same play that Zuckerberg made over at the Book of Face after enticing millions of businesses online to set up Pages as points of contact with their customers. The initial deal with Facebook was almost equitable in a way. You gave up your privacy, you provided content, and the Zuck aggregated your audience into exploitable demographics for advertising. Then he figured out he could make a lot more money by denying you access to your audience unless you paid for it.
Maybe that's what Musk is doing. Or maybe he has no fucking idea. Honestly, now that I look at those two sentences one after the other, the second seems more likely.
Twitter appears to be holding back all of my wittiest and most charming missives. I feel sorry for those unable to appreciate my genius due to a failure of the tech platform.
I was in the old AOL debate politics chat in the early 2000s for a few years. It was interesting and fun for quite a while . It was anonymous with screen names which was ok. Of course it dissolved into a cesspool of personal hatred’s and folks trying to out others and reveal identities of those they didn’t like and all that . A forerunner of social media like Twitter. Doesn’t matter what you say half the people will hate it and you for saying it .
I've said it before, but I'll say it again: there are vanishingly few companies or organizations that you would care to know what's going on at, or which provide interesting updates (such as the Tate Gallery in the quote) who _only_ announce things on the socials. Most have their own web sites with a news or blog section, and those almost always have RSS feeds. Follow the sites that you're interested in with your feed-aggregator of choice and never miss out on a thing. Curation and selection is entirely up to you. Some of the ones that don't do RSS (sad) do email newsletters, which also work, but are a bit more unwieldy, IMO, as they require "signing up" and "unsubscribing" when you decide against it, and we've been trained to expect unsubscribing to work only some of the time...
Substack does RSS, but more importantly Wordpress does RSS by default. Almost half of the web sites in the world run on Wordpress, so they all have RSS feeds, unless their proprietors choose to turn it off.
In the phrasing of a popular movie
"It’s so dumb.” “It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant!” “NO! It’s JUST DUMB!”
Twitter appears to be holding back all of my wittiest and most charming missives. I feel sorry for those unable to appreciate my genius due to a failure of the tech platform.
Here is an article describing the phenomenon as the process of the "enshittification" of social media platforms: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I was in the old AOL debate politics chat in the early 2000s for a few years. It was interesting and fun for quite a while . It was anonymous with screen names which was ok. Of course it dissolved into a cesspool of personal hatred’s and folks trying to out others and reveal identities of those they didn’t like and all that . A forerunner of social media like Twitter. Doesn’t matter what you say half the people will hate it and you for saying it .
I've said it before, but I'll say it again: there are vanishingly few companies or organizations that you would care to know what's going on at, or which provide interesting updates (such as the Tate Gallery in the quote) who _only_ announce things on the socials. Most have their own web sites with a news or blog section, and those almost always have RSS feeds. Follow the sites that you're interested in with your feed-aggregator of choice and never miss out on a thing. Curation and selection is entirely up to you. Some of the ones that don't do RSS (sad) do email newsletters, which also work, but are a bit more unwieldy, IMO, as they require "signing up" and "unsubscribing" when you decide against it, and we've been trained to expect unsubscribing to work only some of the time...
Substack does RSS, but more importantly Wordpress does RSS by default. Almost half of the web sites in the world run on Wordpress, so they all have RSS feeds, unless their proprietors choose to turn it off.