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

Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
For the Second Time in a Few Weeks Microsoft Lunduke Makes False Accusations Against Senior Red Hat Staff to Incite a Despicable 'Troll Army'
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
 
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
Links for the day
su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
Microsoft is Losing Europe
Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
A day later he speaks in Sweden
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Plagiarism, Fake Articles, and FUD About Linux
not a day goes by without Google News feeding FUD from slopfarms
Gemini Links 01/10/2025: Chat Control and End of Life
Links for the day
Links 01/10/2025: Long Covid Risk Reiterated, "Bitcoin Queen" Caught
Links for the day
Links 01/10/2025: EA $55 Billion Deal is Debt and Slop "Raises Vishing Risks"
Links for the day
Bluewashing at Red Hat Means Redundancies
The man who sold Red Hat to IBM meanwhile became a Microsoft Mono booster
After Killing OpenSource.com, IBM ('Red Hat') and OSI Told Us OpenSource.net Would Replace It (But That Didn't Happen)
Now it's time to move on, perhaps tarnishing the "Open Source" label some more (for whatever sponsor wants this)
Linux is Not a Community Project, It's a Wall Street Product
The core goal should be freedom
Bad Actors Abusing the Free Software Community, Vandalising It Using Rogue Politics and Old Tactics
Oil giants have long attempted to do this; now, the digital equivalent of Big Oil does this in technology
Social Control Media Isn't the Future, The Federation or Fediverse Isn't Growing, People's Accounts Vanish for Good
users' accounts will get deleted, not just become inactive
IBM is Failing, This Helps Show Wall Street is Entirely Detached From Actual Commercial Performance
IBM is unable to grow, it's just constantly shrinking
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 30, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Clerical Aspects of Publishing and Development
In Free software, the management aspects are considerably reduced
Slopwatch: Fake Articles and Google News Promoting "Linux" Spam or Bot-Generated Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD)
These slopfarms help misplace blame
Third Wave of Microsoft Layoffs in September, This Time Many in Liverpool Affected
Be ready for more waves of layoffs ahead of the so-called "results" in late October