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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   1841 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.

The quality has been extremely bad and it's getting worse. I keep seeing lots of videos of butts, boobs, and black people fighting

Seriously, how do you do that? I also follow Elon and a bunch of other accounts, and I don't get any butts or boobs. Don't get me wrong, I know where the sites with butts, boobs and much more are, just my experience there is so different... My feed is suitable for the most judgmental grandma on the most prudish family gathering (well, maybe some coarse language will be there, I admit). I am not complaining, I am just confused why the outcome is so different. I just follow a bunch of people that post stuff (mostly political stuff but not exclusively). I don't do anything special.

It’s a new account. I don’t know. My old one didn’t have any of that content.

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