A year ago, I went on record speculating that Elon Musk may have bought Twitter to destroy it.
If the latest wave of censorship on the embattled platform – including dissident account ban waves and the apparent implementation of a subtler “social credit” style policy are any indication, Twitter’s demise may be the result, intended or not.
You may recall that I was cautiously optimistic about Musk’s takeover. But I’m forced to take a step back and reevaluate in light of ongoing user throttling.
Take this dog’s word for it.
The Beagle is correct.
I know because Twitter’s social credit system is affecting my account.
Longtime mutuals aren’t being notified of my posts, even though they subscribe to my feed and have alerts turned on.
It’s not just anecdotal, either.
I’ve got numbers to support what my followers are – or rather aren’t – seeing.
I can hear some of you arguing, “Those numbers aren’t due to them throttling your account. You’re just neglecting Twitter.”
That’s the exact opposite of the truth.
In August I rededicated myself to growing my Twitter following.
I put my nose to the grindstone and doubled my efforts to interact with other Twitter users.
And I got some promising early results.
Keep in mind, those are net new followers, not all the followers I gained in that time.
If I had to guess, I’d say I gained 1.5-2x that many.
But Twitter now has this frustrating habit of making other accounts unfollow you.
Ask around. Lots of other counterculture folks have noticed it, too.
What happens is this weird two-steps-forward-one-step-back effect whereby you’ll gain X number of followers one day, lose all but a few the next, and gain them back plus one or two the day after that.
Anyway, we can see my approach was working. It more than tripled my net new followers, despite Twitter’s meddling, in a month.
Now let’s look at my engagements.
The above graph covers my Twitter engagements over the period from July 14 to October 12, 2023.
You can see the downward trend at the start which suddenly reversed in early August when I started getting serious.
I was trending upward for about a month. But then an even sharper downturn set in.
Like somebody threw a switch.
It’s not like I slacked off, either. I’ve been diligent in following my daily Twitter regimen.
Note that the dropoff happened right in the middle of the 60-day period Beags mentioned.
That’s a pattern we’ve seen with these tech companies lately.
If you break the written rules and/or spout unfiltered political opinions to the right of Charlie Kirk, that’s when they just ban you outright.
What if you follow the rules and shun politics but voice Death Cult anathemas their censors can’t (yet) openly ban you for?
Like, for instance, upholding basic Christian morality?
That’s when they roll out the plausibly deniable gaslighting shit.
- Manipulating your follower count
- “Losing” your book’s preorders, then claiming they didn’t have backups
- Blocking your live chats and/or erasing your video comments
- Marking your blog links as sensitive
- Disappearing dozens of reviews while making sure the positive-negative ratio lowers your overall rating
- etc.
I can name Christian creators all of the above and more have happened to.
This is persecution, but not the masculine Roman kind; a passive-aggressive HR manager kind engineered to deny targets the martyr’s crown.
It’s as petty and catty as everything else our tech overlords do.
If I could sent them one message, it would be to forsake their misplaced faith in the Nerd Rapture and embrace Jesus Christ.
And if I could send them two messages, it would be to embrace Jesus and work out more while reducing contact with plastics.
Look, I don’t use Twitter for fun.
I’m running a business, here.
I avoided getting a blue check for over a decade and only got one because the new boss said that it would be necessary for maximum exposure.
I’m not a bot, as evidenced by how bad I am at math. But I am verified on Twitter now.
So why the engagement throttling?
To be honest, I wouldn’t mind that much if Twitter wasn’t a key part of my marketing strategy.
Like 20-25% of my crowdfunder contributions have historically come from Twitter.
Now, sales through Twitter and this blog are down 5%.
Even though I have more followers.
What am I paying you for, Elon Musk?
To be frank, this situation is going beyond absurd to verge on business interference and fraud territory.
It can’t not be absurd, though. Because they are censoring a novel called The Burned Book.
Deep lore: The fictional book got its name due in part to the number of Soul Cycle universe rulers who got their jimmies rustled by its prophecies and banned it.
Now the real-life version may be having the same effect.
I would prefer that life not imitate art in this respect, Elon Musk.
Please call off your feral girlboss.
In fairness, it may not be her fault.
Word in dissident geek circles is that the previous management crammed so many censorship tools into Twitter’s code that no one can fix it.
This does look more like a problem Elon inherited than one his people caused.
So there’s a real chance that Twitter implodes on his watch.
And I’ll call that a win.
In the meantime, get the gripping fantasy book they don’t want you to read, along with your pick of myriad awesome perks.
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This is just me in my humble and correct opinion, but the amount of time programmers have spent complaining that they’ve lost control of the platforms they maintain due to algo complexity, could have been spent rebuilding the platform on the side to be better and less gunked up. Now it feels like all platforms are mirroring the “too big to fail” businesses from the Great Recession in 2008. There’s no way to fix them so either you just deal with how bad they are or you nuke them entirely. With the latter option, I will be shocked if we see it happen. Though if things slipping through the cracks are even 1% of how bad it is under the surface, it’s time I start making it a priority to develop my presence on other platforms.
I see what you did there.
Joking aside, Silicon Valley has embraced the “Your customers don’t have to be your audience” mindset from the #GG days. Only their intended audience is themselves.
This will end in tears.
I avoid the For You algorithm feed like the hellpit that it is (My apps and extensions remove it entirely) but I don’t run a business that depends on that visibility and engagement either.
You do what you have to do to play the game. I rely on retweets by people I follow to find new and interesting people to watch. Heck that’s how I got here reading you.
That is all helpful reader feedback. Thank you.
Brian,
I had a similar problem at the end of September. All of a sudden, I was receiving no notification. Then slowly I started receiving notifications. It’s not back to what it was, but I receive them more regularly.
And I’m an absolute nobody
xavier
You’re someone to me.
Brian,
Thanks😁👍
xavier
Say it with me everyone!
PROTOCOLS, NOT PLATFORMS.
You know where I don’t have issues with algorithms made by bugmen determining who shows up or doesn’t in a feed of people I want to follow and hear from? My open source RSS feed reader that pulls updates directly from this website and others using the RSS and Atom protocols.
We’ve had, what, twenty years of this corpo-technocratic monopolistic proprietary platform garbage? Get the hint. If you want to reliably follow someone on the internet, ESPECIALLY dissident voices, find a way that isn’t at the mercy of the people that hate both you and the people you like to hear from. Websites with RSS feeds may be “old school”, but who’s laughing now? Reject modernity, return to tradition! Give Brian some relief here that he doesn’t have to engage in moving heaven and earth just to make sure you receive an update from him about his next book’s release date.
As for authors and other artists? I understand you gotta do what you gotta do to market. That said, the time has long been past for some serious thought on how to most effectively convert followers off a fickle “platform” onto something that you control and isn’t going to undermine you once a month approximately. Lord knows those of us trying to create and disseminate “alt tech” that isn’t beholden to Silicon Valley overlords could use some help from the dissident arts.
Signed,
A grumpy, thirty something year old IT nerd
(I apologize for the half-baked schizoposting nature of this comment)
The only way that I interact with Twitter is by reading feeds that I have bookmarked, read through a Nitter client. This means that unless Twitter outright deletes a tweet it doesn’t affect me. I realize that this puts me well outside the realm of the average internet user, so advertising only to people like me isn’t a profitable strategy.
I do agree with MacDhughaill above that in the long term we need to make “non-algorithmic” way of serving content. The tools are there and have been there for decades, but the trouble is determining a way to entice the average user to use them.
I read Nethereal several years ago, but I was trying to force it to be straight sci-fi. I was imagining what the real-world names for “ether” and “prana” were, and which of the spheres was Earth under a new name, etc.
Because of that, it didn’t click. I was confused.
After enjoying your blog so much, I started re-reading a couple of weeks ago. With 3 kids 3 years and under, I don’t have a lot of reading time, so I’m having to go slowly. And this time, I’m letting the book be what it is and am not trying to force it into a box.
What a difference! I’m hooked. I had to back The Burned Book, and I can’t wait to read the entire Soul Cycle. Sometimes, only the certain knowledge that the baby will be up at 5:30 AM is what lets me put the book down.
I guess there are such things as bad readers, too. 🙂
Let us instead say there are readers who are not yet ready.
Thank you for the insightful feedback and your support!