Bonum Certa Men Certa

Twitter -- Like Google's YouTube -- is 'Hiding' Tweets From People Who Follow You

Primed for manipulation at the expense of information and friendships (social control media mostly divides society)

Twitter throttling
It's not just me...



Summary: So-called 'entertainment' platforms disguised as 'social' aren't the future of media; they need to be rejected

I quit Twitter more than a year ago (it merely reposts what I publish in Diaspora). With about 900,000 'tweets' since 2009 I've decided it would be better to sort of 'shelve' the account, not delete it. It still gets quite a bit of traffic (old 'tweets' in particular). A couple of weeks ago I noticed something awkward, which reminded me of things I had heard about YouTube; it began not alerting users about channels that they followed. Instead, YouTube would promote to people all sorts of seemingly random crap for the purpose of "engagement" or for YouTube's business model. So-called 'creators' don't matter to them; advertisers do. That was after all the 'infinite scroll' nonsense (Ryan reminds me that 'infinite scroll' causes "serious resource drain on the computer," which is bad for the planet); they try to turn YouTube into a 'Facebook', as does Twitter. As it turns out, in my case as an example, with over 7,000 followers (not bought, not bots) how is it possible that less than 100 see a 'tweet'? I've asked around and I'm not alone. It wasn't always like this. Twitter is changing, and not for the better. It's bad enough that it blocks Web browsers without JavaScript, as if to read a single paragraph of text one needs a whole lot of bloat and proprietary software at the client side.



The graph above shows what happened a couple of weeks ago (the bar at the bottom shows number of 'tweets' for the day). It was bad enough that they banned me for 3 months over Bill Gates tweets when he was paying them. Little by little, once in a few months, Twitter gives yet another reason to quit altogether. I've lost count of the many issues (thankfully we wrote many articles documenting those issues), which started around 3 years ago when they cut off 'third-party' applications and started pushing loads of ads everywhere. It has only gone downhill since.

Twitter has not been profitable for almost its entire existence, but it serves some people's agenda in ways that are not directly measurable in terms of money. It's a filter for social control (hence we call it social control media; censorship and throttling, shadowbans and mutes), it's not social at all. If it was social, it would show your friends what you post, not some 'curated'-for-'engagement' partisan stuff and sponsored 'tweets' (basically ads that don't look like ads). Almost all the worst aspects of Facebook are nowadays imitated by YouTube and aped in Twitter. It's about profit over communication (they do not care about the latter). Thankfully, Techrights is not in social control media sites, so it does not rely on them for audience. Moreover, we've cut off entirely our dependence on Freenode (the IRC bridge was decommissioned a few days ago).

Twitter will likely slip, slowly but surely, into irrelevance. It wrongly assumed that readers and posters would stick around regardless of all those unwanted changes.

Recent Techrights' Posts

New XBox Leaks Probably Serve to Confirm XBox's Collapse (Many More Layoffs)
It's very much consistent with what many other sites have reported lately
 
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
Google itself is a slop pusher these days
Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
"everyone is ditching the xbox."
Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Farewell to Jane Goodall, California Bans Algorithmic Price-Fixing
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Lost Wages and a Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
Links for the day
Richard Stallman's Talk in Helsinki is Done. Tomorrow Göteborg.
There are scarce details in Finnish about Dr. Stallman's talk
The Slop Song
The train wreck marches on
LLM Slop/Advanced Plagiarism Flooding the Zone With Capital That Does Not Exist
Many publishers out there still participate in this bubble instead of calling it what it is
Links 09/10/2025: Sacked Microsoft Workers Make "Sackbird", IBM Taps CockroachDB for PostgreSQL
Links for the day
"Happy Hacking Day" Richard Stallman Talk This Afternoon (From 14:00 to 16:00) at Haaga-Helia University in Pasila
Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 08, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 08, 2025
Links 09/10/2025: Impact of Microsoft Layoffs, More Data Breaches
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Autumn Blues and C IRC Bot
Links for the day
Slopwatch Appreciated by Real Authors of GNU/Linux Articles
We do try to keep on top of those things
Upgraded R.R.R.R.R.R. Today
The Web of 2025 is full of garbage, not limited to slopfarms
Freedom From Proprietary Prisons
Forking always an option
IBM's Watson Died in 1956, Now Watson Dies Again
IBM is becoming just a reseller of GAFAM and other stuff
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, and Google News
We've also just noticed more slop from UbuntuPIT
Microsoft Says That Constant Mass Layoffs Are Success, the Media Isn't Buying This Microsoft Narrative Anymore
If people in the media feel an obligation to repeat whatever lies Microsoft tells, what point will there be to the media?
Links 08/10/2025: "Mali Puts Free Speech on Trial" And Apple Enforces Dictatorship
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: ‘Death to Spotify’ and Law to Ban Loud Commercials on Streaming (Dis)Services
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: Real Innovation and Nina.chat is Dead
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2025: Y2K38 Bug is a Vulnerability, Chat Control in Europe a Threat
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows is No Longer an Operating System, It's Surveillance Project
Why is this even legal to preload on PCs outside the US?
How and Why Once-Legitimate Sites Turn Into Slopfarms
Many sites will go offline and many social control networks will shut down once they realise or even openly admit they spend money and time gardening a bunch of bots and slop
UbuntuPIT Became a Slopfarm and Gnoppix Tarnishes Its Own Brand With Slop
It fits all the characteristics of mildly-edited (if at all) slop
Slopwatch: Linux Journal and Other Slopfarms
GAFAM needs to go the way of the dodo
Gemini Links 08/10/2025: "Seek Seek Revolution" and Gradient Backgrounds
Links for the day
Qualcomm Arduino Takes Aim at Raspberry Pi
Qualcomm is a Microsoft partner
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 07, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 07, 2025
Stagnation of the Economy and What Free Software Can (or Could) Do For It
If your economic model is based on a pyramid of lies, it won't last very long
Social Control Media is Sinking
it would rightly seem like the era of centralised "social" sites (they're not social, they're about controlling the users) is ending, not overnight but gradually