Twitter

What is Twitter?

Twitter (twitter.com), also called "X" (stylized "𝕏") by some, is a free social media website where you post small text messages, images, and videos in a feed, follow users to subscribe to their posts, and reply to users' posts (called "tweets"), and forward them to your own followers (called "retweets"). You can also create lists of users that you follow to be displayed in a separate feed.

Observations

Elon Musk: there are rumors that after billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform, he made its engineers change the algorithm to give him more views. Indeed, the first thing I saw when I created an account was an Elon Musk tweet. It's also worth noting that it's not possible to create an account without following at least one of the top brand accounts, so I assume this inflates their numbers by some amount. In platforms like this, it's possible to mute users you don't care about so they don't appear in your feed, or mark a recommended post as not interested if you aren't interested in it.

Not Safe for Children: the "For You" page on my new account was full of politics, anime, cosplayers, NSFW imagery, and "AI" solutions, so I'm having to click "Not Interested" a lot. Personally, I think the social network medium is simply terrible for anything political, and I'd prefer people focused on sharing their hobbies instead, which makes me very sad that attempted Twitter replacements, e.g. Mastodon, tend to be even more political than Twitter. Ironically, I also think it's a terrible idea to follow topics about TV shows and other series on social media, because you'll probably get hit by spoilers really quick if you do that. Online forums dedicated to talking about episodic series normally prevent spoilers by containing the discussion to a specific thread about that episode. Feed-based social media like Twitter and Tumblr are too unorganized for something like this. Every platform has a problem with user-generated content that is not marked NSFW, but other platforms do a better job at moderating it considering how quickly and with what volume it ended up in my feed. Notably, there was a black and white GIF of a couple kissing by an account with "couples" in its name, which I muted, but then I scrolled a bit and saw the same sort of GIF again by another "couples" account, which made me wonder if I mis-clicked the last time, but then I saw a third GIF and I realized these were three different accounts posting exactly the same style of content, which makes me assume they were all operated by the same person, and I'm wonder why, what is the goal here? I don't really want to know.

Fails to Make Users meet Creators: there were also many "verified" accounts (which in Twitter currently means nothing more than they paid for a subscription) posting some pretty cool photography and art, but upon further inspection these accounts made no sense at all. First of all, some of them had no information whatsoever on their bio, so there is no way to tell if they're curators or creators, and, in today's creative climate, if the images are real or AI-generated. While I don't think AI-generated images are comparable to human-made visual arts, I don't think there's a problem in posting them online, or even posting artwork you didn't make yourself, provided that you disclaim this instead of pretending you made something that you didn't actually make. Some of them had a link to their Instagram, where I presume they share the same photos and have almost as little information, because I can't actually access Instagram as Instagram instantly suspended me when I tried to create an account in it, so somehow Twitter is still better than Instagram in my book. One account's bio noted "DM me for removal or credit," which makes me wonder why not write the credit on the tweet instead of expecting people to ask you who made the thing you posted, which was likely posted without permission from the original creator considering "removal" is an option. And on top of that, one such account also had a subscription for $1. Why would I subscribe to someone who isn't even making the thing?

Illegitimate Socialization: some of the problems highlighted above might be solvable if I follow enough accounts that post things I'm interested about to make the algorithm stop recommending me things I don't want to see, however, I found doing that difficult. It's not that the "For you" page doesn't have some good posts, it's the majority of the posts I saw were from verified accounts. Verified accounts are accounts that pay a subscription for a blue checkmark on Twitter¹, priced at $8 a month as of writing. It doesn't seem to verify anything. It seems that one of the perks is that you appear more often on the "For You" page, as most of accounts I saw there were blue checks. The fact that they paid for a checkmark makes the whole thing feel illegitimate. They are not there because they posted good content, they are there because they paid for preferential treatment, so they're taking the place of someone who would otherwise have a more legitimate claim to the space they occupy in the feed. On top of that, the fact that they paid for it means it's an investment for them, and I'm wary of any business model on the Internet that I don't understand. Why are they investing on their twitter account? How are they making money off this? Is it promoted posts, is it some sort of inter-account scheme? I can't really trust them. Even in cases where it is clear, such as a game developer paying for greater reach on the platform, it makes me think that these are actually just ads pretending to not be ads, because you're really just indirectly paying for impressions, and many of the tweets by blue checks will appear indistinguishable from an actual ad, so it's really an ad, isn't it? I wonder if they'll have to abide by laws regulating ads on the Internet in the future. If that wasn't enough, if you check the replies on a tweet, the first replies are always blue checks, which means if you paid for one, you will always be ruining the social platform for other users every time you reply to anything, even by accident. However, the bigger problem is that some blue checks are intent on ruining the platform on purpose.

Bots: if you are the only blue check to reply to a tweet, no matter what you say, you will be the first reply, no matter how many other replies are on that tweet. This means that it's trivial to just post anything on every post you see just to make your account appear more often on everybody's screens. There are no downsides to this for you, only upsides. The downsides are for everyone else trying to use the platform. If enough people do that, the whole "reply" system becomes worthless for anything other than promoting your own account, because everyone without a blue check will be buried under all the blue checks spamming themselves on everything. Indeed, many posts are full of completely irrelevant blue check replies, literally spam bots posting unrelated funny GIFs everywhere to promote their funny GIF-posting twitter account, whose business model is still unclear to me. This is truly some of the worst UI decisions I have ever seen in my life. But not everything is bad. On the upside, I quickly gained two followers, much faster than I did on Youtube, by posting exactly nothing: they bots pretending to be real users—real women, specifically—considering they followed me out of nowhere before I posed my first tweet.

References

1. https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-x-verified-accounts (accessed 2024-08-27) ↩︎