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Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

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Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

#11

Post by lukan »

"The changes to the algorithm turned the platform into a form of attention roulette."

Twitters artificial limit of 140 character made the plattform always a shallow clickbait rage addiction thing to me. I never ever enjoyed reading anything there, before or after Musk aquired it. Anything good I did find, always would have been nicer to read as an ordinary blog post. But blog posts don't get as much attention as clickbait tweets, so people stay on twitter, as long as there is audience.

Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

#12

Post by zoidb »

> I've personally gone back to reading books and blog posts, talking to people via email, working on a book project, and prioritizing in-person, local relationships.

I mean, this sounds great? Or maybe I misinterpret that this change in how we view twitter is positive rather than a negative. I believe that Twitter as a centralized sounding board was a net bad for Internet culture anyway.

Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

#13

Post by SanjayMehta »

hristov wrote: post #5

So I have never really used twitter much and I don't think I even signed up for it ever. But I want to double check something -- is it the case now, as this post suggests, that if you follow somebody, you do not see their posts? Isn't that the main purpose for the follow function? Why would you do that? Why would you have a follow function and break it? And what else do you show people? I mean if your user follows so…

There are two tabs on the Twitter ios app. The first is called “For You,” and the next “Following.”

The first appears to be randomised or from The Algorithm, but as I far as I can tell, it’s mostly random.

The second also seems randomised but from people you follow.

Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

#16

Post by pavlov »

hristov wrote: post #10
pavlov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic premise with algorithmic feeds is that users are lazy and don't do a lot of active discovery, so their follow lists tend to be pretty small. The algorithm can show them a mix of content where some of it is sourced from their existing follow/like graph (e.g. followed by someone you follow) and therefore likely to be interesting, and some is pushed on other less user-centric grounds. (E.g. in Twitter's case:…

Ok but that does not explain why you would actively remove content from their follow graphs. Sure, perhaps you can use the follow graphs to see what other stuff the user might be interested in and serve that, but why actively prevent the user from seeing posts that he has explicitly said he wants to see?

Presumably because feed real estate is so scarce and there are commercial motivations to show something else, so they start filtering out followed posts on the pretense of improving the quality of the feed. And that becomes a slippery slope.

"Ok, this user follows N. But N's latest post is already 15 hours old and it had poor engagement. Probably that means it's low quality and it's not worth including at all."

Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

#17

Post by lukan »

hristov wrote: post #10
pavlov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic premise with algorithmic feeds is that users are lazy and don't do a lot of active discovery, so their follow lists tend to be pretty small. The algorithm can show them a mix of content where some of it is sourced from their existing follow/like graph (e.g. followed by someone you follow) and therefore likely to be interesting, and some is pushed on other less user-centric grounds. (E.g. in Twitter's case:…

Ok but that does not explain why you would actively remove content from their follow graphs. Sure, perhaps you can use the follow graphs to see what other stuff the user might be interested in and serve that, but why actively prevent the user from seeing posts that he has explicitly said he wants to see?

"why you would actively remove content from their follow graphs"

It makes sense, if you think you know better, what the user wants to see. Or, if you somehow make more money by doing so.

In either case, personally I like to decide, what I see myself, but I might actually be a minority (soon). Many people are apparently fine with intransparent algorithms making the decisions for them.

Re: Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

#18

Post by nottorp »

scrame wrote: post #4

this is news? social media and promotion algorithms have always been attention roulette for ad dollars, and nothing in that ecosystem has a knowledge of "meaning", just engagement through statistics.

Note that the post is about 'creating content'. Of course what they want is 'engagement'.

If you actually have something to say about a subject you care about, the term is not 'creating content'.

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