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

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. ⬆