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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27690 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Happy Birthday Elon Twitter

We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.

Premium Twitter seems to be paying off. It was almost embarrassing or shameful at first to actually shell out for the blue check but more and more people are clearly doing that.

Grey Enlightenment has talked about this alot.

Premium users get a significant algorithm visibility boost, so seeing more of them doesn't necessarily mean there's more of them.

Okay. I've seem quite a few blue checks who don't seem to get any more engagement than if they had never shelled out for that. You can't get lower than zero likes or replies.

But maybe they're just really terrible at getting attention, or agreeing enough with any subculture of Twitter users. Premium gives them no boost.

I said is it gives them a visibility boost, not a boost to engagement. Back in the day, visibility was largely based on engagement. This has some issues like creating a paradox where no one sees your tweet unless someone sees your tweet, but it worked well enough. If I check the replies on a viral tweet nowadays, there's a barren wasteland of very low engagement tweets (0 likes/replies), but they still show up at the top because they're from Premium users. The complaint about pay-to-boost is precisely that it degrades the experience for users by showing them more uninteresting tweets primarily/only because the other person paid money.

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