This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."
@pluralistic Did you see that pranksters are tweeting links to stories on Elon, so that his smirking mug shows up, but then adding their own headline? E.g.:
#Xitter is completely useless without the ability to post links. The only other major user base they have besides neo-Nazis are journalists posting links to their stories.
@pluralistic it is most likely also why X has just removed both the "excerpt" and the URL itself (!) in link rendering - this way one is less tempted to click on it. Good, enshittification of that platform continues.
I hate to say it, but this practice drove my creative partner + me away from publishing so much of our work online (mainly travel photography with cultural analysis).
We could put 20, 30 hours into a photo-heavy post, link to the usual platforms, and get 7 hits. Whereas in the past we might have gotten 1-3k.
A year or so after publishing, we would start to see Google referral traffic -- all people who were trying to buy the sandwich we wrote about, no doubt.
Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.
In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical #enshittification
Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).
Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.
I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the "Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we'll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it."
That will be pitched as the answer to publishers' complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.
All of this seems to me to be an "unfair and deceptive business practice" under Sec 5 of the #FTC
If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.
Hmmm, I also read right past that opening sentence. D'oh.
I don't follow how people (try to) monetize on Facebook, so can I get some confirmation: Not only did FB try to do this, but they successfully did it, and have been doing it for X years?
This is very analogous to the #NetNeutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.
I've written about how an #EndToEnd principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn't form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:
@pluralistic This also reflects the pattern, going back to the beginning of the WWW, of deliberately undermining its fundamental design principles; in this case, part of the point of hypertext is that people aren't locked down to one site. Which, come to think of it, also echoes the much older pattern of trying to lock down nomadic people.
@pluralistic The thing is, the earliest versions of this "algorithmic" ordering was vaguely justifiable, in that people were signing for a longer Twitter/FB feed than they would ever get through, and so one could see -some- justification to ordering it in a fashion that showed them a "better" set of posts than they would see just going purely time-ordered, given that they were always going to miss some posts.
@pluralistic This also shifts the ad-viewing traffic to X/Twitter's advertising, instead of the advertising on the publisher's site.
So X/Tw gets to charge premium prices to advertisers, while also charging a premium price to the publishers for traffic and engagement. Essentially double-dipping on the same resources - X/Tw users' eyeballs
@pluralistic they've already tried pivot to video a couple of times - hence the Tucker Carlson show there. Blocking links to other sites, as well as slowing them is already part of the playbook.
@pluralistic I wonder if Twitter will be as helpful as YouTube, whose notification options include one for being told what to do as a creator.
I imagine this is why so many YouTube videos are now 35-45 minutes long. They are unwatchable, even though creators spend days or weeks on them. At some point it becomes a cruel joke on all users.
A few years back, Many Youtube creators went to 10+ minute video. The algorithm promoted 10+ minutes, and longer videos could also have more than one ad. The amount of sudden padding for what often was 3-5 minutes of content was incredible and often unwatchable.
@TonyJWells there was a trend to go shorter, too, for a while. I personally like to have a mix of short, medium and long videos. Depending on how much time I want to spend. Especially in the retro-tech community there are some repair or deep dive videos that thake 40-45 minutes and it’s totally fine.
Hmm, this explains all those desperate employees at X talking about the checks they are getting to create 'long form boring videos' about their 95% down traffic from usual platform as a service that somehow monetized only ~0.7% of the Userbase because no one is there but... Bots? idk.
Bots don't buy shit do they? If they do do you want them to buy your shit though? You do? For real? 🙊🙉📲💩
@pluralistic They tried this with Mastodon and Linktree links in the past but had to revert it due to backlash. I can definitely see them trying it again
@pluralistic Musk's algorithm does not try to optimise time spent on twitter, as it shows me ads every 5 tweets which push me away from the hellsite! QED
@pluralistic I remember a few years ago when publishers faced an existential threat when site traffic slowed down. The solution was to post headlines to social media (where people were spending their time) and have that traffic come back their way. If they can't generate traffic organically, they stop receiving traffic from social media, and now AI text generators will summarize articles without accessing the page how are they supposed to generate revenue? Maybe dedicated apps on your phone?
I’m over the primadona’s ideas of what and how people should be. He’s just another facist despot wanna-be that spent a lot of money to be able to manipulate people. And his bet failed.
@pluralistic I'm getting in my mind this running comedy sketch idea:
an image of Elon at a table by himself next to a table of normal people talking, enjoying each others' company, and not even noticing him. Over at his table, Elon tries to pretend he's having a great time on his phone in a loud, obnoxious way that makes it obvious he's trying to interrupt them. (cont)
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