Thread with 7 posts
jump to expanded postSomething Happened on twitter, and i entered the longest most productive and emotionally significant period of hyperfocus of my life, and channeled my anger and sadness into creative ends, and what came out was this blog post that's… very plausibly the longest thing i've ever written in one sitting, and somehow the most coherent and digestible. it's about what's happening to twitter. please read it. i poured my heart into it. https://hikari.noyu.me/blog/2024-10-02-the-algorithm-is-killing-twitter-and-its-driving-me-insane.html
jesus if the responses i'm getting to this from just one friend are any indication, i may end up having to make another post composed entirely of discord screenshots that's just, god-knows-how-many other ways this situation sucks and relevant anecdotes. tip of the iceberg
something v funny is that, because the algorithm hates external links that might draw you out of the orbit of the Engagement Funnel, this post is actually blowing up far better w/ twitter refugees on fedi, rather than on twitter; it's safe from the algo!
(like, my twitter friends that have read it seem to find it resonates deeply with them, but the algorithm is refusing to recommend it, so it's spreading only in the traditional ways. very fitting.)
@hikari for some reason this reminds me of the period when twitter had just started allowing images on posts. For a while people would just add images when they had an image to share, but after a while Brands started adding images to every tweet, even if just clip art, because it attracts more eyeballs and take up more timeline space. I was so incensed by this abuse of the new functionality that I reported some tweets that were engaging it. Unsurprisingly it didn’t go very far.
@hikari
💠( putting links in tweets purely as a protective talisman )
@hikari yes, and you can actually follow the progression of your post through fedi by watching your notifications, and how people discover you is entirely organic, from what approximates to word of mouth, but for the internet, which is indeed a breth of fresh air because it allows us to realise that social media can exist without optimising for maximum engagement, maximum anything really. After all, you aren't like on tictock, turned on heat or however they call it, so you have the possibility to be who you want to be, even in a public space, and screw those who don't like it, you can just block or mute them and be about your day, without a random black box algorythm deciding that all the energy you just pored into a post is suddanly worth nothing anymore, and that no one, not even those who follow you, get to see it, not even if they search for it explicitly.