Twitter's latest "feature" is basically confirmation of what I've been alleging: viral and high-engagement content is algorithmically forced into timelines at the expense of the content from actual accounts you follow, which is why you see better engagement on Mastodon with a fraction of the followers.
Go to an account you follow and check the view count for their latest tweet.
Notice how much smaller it is than their follower count.
We've all been shadowbanned by time-on-platform targets.
The most interesting thing about "view count" is that it's not a reflection of how much an audience likes a post - that would be likes. It's also not a measure of how well it's performing, that's RT count. Those metrics were already available.
The *only* thing Views tells you is how much algorithmic amplification Twitter itself is giving an account. How many timelines the company is pushing someone's Tweet into. It tells you nothing about the Tweet, but everything about Twitter.
Want to know how much your competitors are paying for ad placement of sponsored Tweets? That's now a viewable metric.
Curious how much help from Twitter your political opponent is getting compared to you? That's available.
There's a reason that when you click the button on any tweet it tells you analytics are only available on your own account. It's because being able to see this information about other accounts is uh, not smart.
Also total aside but in the Web UI each button under a tweet has a different color. Replies are blue, RTs green, likes are red.
The new Views (which is a button that now just loads a box displaying static text explaining what it is because they didn't know how to style it to fit in the engagement row without making it a button) is also blue. Because it comes right before Replies, which is blue, and they copied and pasted.
lol.
@rodhilton I was gonna say it would have been super easy to just make it gray, then I realized that everything that isn’t red, green, or blue probably needs to be able to change depending on whether it’s light or dark mode. A good gray for light mode will probably be hard to see in dark mode, and vice versa.
The secondaries (cyan, magenta, yellow) are gonna be either eye searing or hard to see (or both at the same time in light mode) depending on exactly how bright you make them. Too bright will hurt, maybe because it’s twice the amount of LED light compared to the primaries. Too dim will look sad and muddy, like the less popular colors in the old mspaint selection.
I’m having difficulty thinking of any colors that are recognizable as distinct in the same way as RGB and wouldn’t look very bad in at least one mode.
lol.
@robotrecall @rodhilton You get around that by loading different color versions per mode.
@karentotten @rodhilton That seems like it would be a super simple fix, if you had the knowledge and any time to do it!
@robotrecall @rodhilton it IS super simple. Unless you fired the people who can do it.
@karentotten @robotrecall @rodhilton Surely you are not trying to imply that super genius-level coder Elon does not know enough HTML & CSS to get that done in whatever templating system the dodo site is using?
@yacc143 @karentotten @rodhilton Perish the thought! I’m sure he’s simply caught up in the duty of using the wealth of free speech he has so carefully cultivated to engage in profound intellectual exchanges on vital matters, as he is wont to do, and he will wizard the problem away in a flash once he has the merest moment to spare.
@robotrecall @rodhilton @yacc143 Twitter invented Bootstrap - the open source UI framework it uses - which btw was widely adopted across the industry. But I doubt he knows that.
@rodhilton later there will be an $8 charge for that button also.
@rodhilton And since it doesn't tell you anything qualitative about those people looking at it, it's useless even for advertisers.
i mean, views tells you more than just algorithmic amplification, right?
when a quality tweet gets picked up organically and retweeted a lot, that counts as views as well as rt
and rt by high-follower accounts generates a lot more views than rt by low-follower accounts
and none of that is algorithmic, right?
it's obvious there was no strategy, no plan, all seat-of-the-pants chaos, which is why we get random, small, ignorant and insignificant changes like this
except for the random, large, ignorant and catastrophic changes, also seat-of-the-pants, like reinstating the worst of the worst, and banning journalists, and censoring links to other socials, and etc.
@ares it's so poorly thought out and poorly planned, no A/B testing, no consideration for various factors. And they keep changing it AS we're dunking on it.
But to launch it just before/during the holidays so those poor H1B hostages have to scramble to react as people make fun of him just sucks so bad.
@rodhilton it’s a shot on their foot