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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1431 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.

My account is following exactly zero people and all I get is Musk, crypto, Alex Jones, random establishment politicians, people drawing themselves with Grok, Cristiano Ronaldo and something in Arabic. Which is about as useful as the front page in Edge that is tries to spring on my from time to time. But no NSFW stuff.

New account or old? But the differences could also be A/B testing.

Old, but it spent a lot of time being suspended for inactivity.

My feed is also full of asses and boobs, but not that kind.

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.

Have you tried replacing Twitter with Substack Notes? It's clearly more bereft of content, and the algo isn't great, but at least I'm not getting a lot of porn in my feed.

Funny you should mention that, I was browsing Substack Notes earlier today and saw some rando complaining that Notes kept showing them porn.

(Haven't seen any porn pop up in my own Notes feed yet, tbf.)

My For You has always been fine, 95% of it is just people i follow already. It's a bit too consistent tbh. I imagine this is because I mostly use Following, so the algorithm's just learned I like that.

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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