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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   1842 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 1, 2024

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Last week I said that Twitter was better than ever. I was wrong.

Let me preface this by saying that most Twitter hate is just political signalling. Support for BlueSky is incredibly astroturfed (the social network equivalent of Brat Summer). It's doomed to fail because of network effects and because the deranged leftists will drive the normies away.

That out of the way...

It appears that Elon is trying to turn Twitter into Tiktok.

I deleted my well-curated Twitter account a couple months ago and then (like a degenerate junky) came back a couple weeks ago. On the new account, I followed Elon, Scott, Cremieux and a couple other people. But since I wasn't following that many people I have mostly been using the "For You" tab.

The quality has been extremely bad and it's getting worse. I keep seeing lots of videos of butts, boobs, and black people fighting. And you're already ready to say "this just proves you are engaging with trashy content, loser". You're right, I guess. It's hard to look away. But when I see this stuff I flag the post as "Not Interested" and block the account. It doesn't matter. They just keep showing me more.

So, what's going on here? One possibility is that Elon just doesn't care. His plate's a bit full at the moment. But another possibility is that Elon is seeing the massive influence of Tiktok and is trying to do a similar thing. Most people still get their political opinions from emotional responses to pictures and videos. A video based platform could have a lot more influence than a text one.

If anyone has any better theories I'm all ears.

EDIT: And like that, it's gone. Not a boob or butt in sight. I guess the A/B test didn't work.

Yeah I said something similar on Friday. There doesn’t appear to be any line in terms of keeping stuff you wouldn’t want to be seen watching in public, especially porn, away from the normal side of the site. Even Reddit has seemingly managed to do this, so it’s unclear why Musk hasn’t.

My Twitter feed is right wing actually-political politics and actually-religious Catholicism, with the occasional conspiracy theory or obvious racism on the ‘for you’ tab. Clearly if you follow enough people for the algorithm to learn your interests it doesn’t do that.

If I wanted to turn Twitter into Tiktok, I would grandfather existing users into a legacy experience and then give new users the new experience.

Perhaps they are but are looking at total engagement and are giving people who engage too little some of the new experience to drive up engagement.

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