There seems to be very little discussion of this story on Twitter. WP’s tweet about it got only 75k views and 59 likes as of now, even though WP has 2M followers.
(I guess Twitter will hide your tweets even from your followers if the engagement rate is low enough. Not sure what the cutoff is, but 1 like to 100 views doesn’t seem uncommon for tweets, and this one is only 1:1000. BTW what’s a good article to read to understand Twitter better?)
There’s two things going on. First, Musk-Twitter appears to massively penalize external links. Musk has vowed to fight ‘spammers’ who post links on Twitter to what are other sites (gasp) - the traitorous scum! Substack is only the most abhorred of these vile parasites, but all shall be brought to justice in due course. There is no need for other sites. You should be posting everything on Twitter as longform tweets (after subscribing), obviously.
You only just joined Twitter so you wouldn’t have noticed the change, but even direct followers seem to be less likely to see a tweet if you’ve put a link in it. So tweeters are increasingly reacting by putting the external link at the end of a thread in a separate quarantine tweet, not bothering with the link at all, or just leaving Twitter under the constant silent treatment that high-quality tweeting gets you these days.* So, many of the people who would be linking or discussing it are either not linking it or not discussing it, and don’t show up in the WaPo thread or by a URL search.
Second, OAers/pro-Altman tweets are practicing the Voldemort strategy: instead of linking the WaPo article at all (note that roon, Eigenrobot etc don’t show up at all in the URL search), they are tweeting screenshots or Archive.is links. This is unnecessary (aside from the external link penalty of #1) since the WaPo has one of the most porous paywalls around which will scarcely hinder any readers, but this lets them inject their spin since you have to retweet them if you want to reshare it at all, impedes reading the article yourself to see if it’s as utterly terrible and meaningless as they claim, and makes it harder to search for any discussion (what, are you going to know to search for the random archive.is snapshot...? no, of course not).
* I continue to stubbornly include all relevant external links in my tweets rather than use workarounds, and see the penalty constantly. It has definitely soured me even further on Musk-Twitter, particularly as it is contrary to the noises Musk has made about the importance of freedom of speech and higher reliability of tweets—yeah, asshole, how are you going to have highly reliable tweets or a good information ecosystem if including sources & references is almost like a self-imposed ban? And then you share ad revenue with subscribers who tweet the most inflammatory poorly-sourced stuff, great incentive design you’ve hit upon… I’m curious to see how the experience is going to degrade even further—I wouldn’t put it past Musk to make subscriptions mandatory to try to seed the ‘X everything app’ as a hail mary for the failing Twitter business model. At least that might finally be enough to canonicalize a successor everyone can coordinate a move to.
Thanks for the explanations, but I’m not noticing a big “external links” penalty on my own tweets. Found some discussion of this penalty via Google, so it seems real but maybe not that “massive”? Also some of it dates to before Musk purchased Twitter. Can you point me to anything that says he increased the penalty by a lot?
Ah Musk actually published Twitter’s algorithms, confirming the penalty. Don’t see anyone else saying that he increased the penalty though.
BTW why do you “protect” your account (preventing non-followers from seeing your tweets)?
Ah Musk actually published Twitter’s algorithms, confirming the penalty. Don’t see anyone else saying that he increased the penalty though.
‘The algorithm’ is an emergent function of the entire ecosystem. I have no way of knowing what sort of downstream effects a tweak here or there would cause or the effects of post-Musk changes. I just know what I see: my tweets appear to have plummeted since Musk took over, particularly when I link to my new essays or documents etc.
If you want to do a more rigorous analysis, I export my Twitter analytics every few months (thank goodness Musk hasn’t disabled that to try to upsell people to the subscription—maybe he doesn’t know it’s there?) and could provide you my archives. (BTW, there is a moving window where you can only get the last few months, so if you think you will ever be interested in your Twitter traffic numbers, you need to start exporting them every 2-3 months now, or else the historical data will become inaccessible. I don’t know if you can restore access to old ones by signing up as an advertiser.)
As for the ‘published’ algorithm, I semi-believe it is genuine (albeit doubtless incomplete) because Musk was embarrassed that it exposed how some parts of the new algorithm are manipulating Twitter to make Musk look more popular (confirming earlier reporting that Musk had ordered such changes after getting angry his views were dropping due to his crummy tweets), but that is also why it hasn’t been updated in almost half a year, apparently. God knows what the real thing is like by now...
There seems to be very little discussion of this story on Twitter. WP’s tweet about it got only 75k views and 59 likes as of now, even though WP has 2M followers.
(I guess Twitter will hide your tweets even from your followers if the engagement rate is low enough. Not sure what the cutoff is, but 1 like to 100 views doesn’t seem uncommon for tweets, and this one is only 1:1000. BTW what’s a good article to read to understand Twitter better?)
There’s two things going on. First, Musk-Twitter appears to massively penalize external links. Musk has vowed to fight ‘spammers’ who post links on Twitter to what are other sites (gasp) - the traitorous scum! Substack is only the most abhorred of these vile parasites, but all shall be brought to justice in due course. There is no need for other sites. You should be posting everything on Twitter as longform tweets (after subscribing), obviously.
You only just joined Twitter so you wouldn’t have noticed the change, but even direct followers seem to be less likely to see a tweet if you’ve put a link in it. So tweeters are increasingly reacting by putting the external link at the end of a thread in a separate quarantine tweet, not bothering with the link at all, or just leaving Twitter under the constant silent treatment that high-quality tweeting gets you these days.* So, many of the people who would be linking or discussing it are either not linking it or not discussing it, and don’t show up in the WaPo thread or by a URL search.
Second, OAers/pro-Altman tweets are practicing the Voldemort strategy: instead of linking the WaPo article at all (note that roon, Eigenrobot etc don’t show up at all in the URL search), they are tweeting screenshots or Archive.is links. This is unnecessary (aside from the external link penalty of #1) since the WaPo has one of the most porous paywalls around which will scarcely hinder any readers, but this lets them inject their spin since you have to retweet them if you want to reshare it at all, impedes reading the article yourself to see if it’s as utterly terrible and meaningless as they claim, and makes it harder to search for any discussion (what, are you going to know to search for the random archive.is snapshot...? no, of course not).
* I continue to stubbornly include all relevant external links in my tweets rather than use workarounds, and see the penalty constantly. It has definitely soured me even further on Musk-Twitter, particularly as it is contrary to the noises Musk has made about the importance of freedom of speech and higher reliability of tweets—yeah, asshole, how are you going to have highly reliable tweets or a good information ecosystem if including sources & references is almost like a self-imposed ban? And then you share ad revenue with subscribers who tweet the most inflammatory poorly-sourced stuff, great incentive design you’ve hit upon… I’m curious to see how the experience is going to degrade even further—I wouldn’t put it past Musk to make subscriptions mandatory to try to seed the ‘X everything app’ as a hail mary for the failing Twitter business model. At least that might finally be enough to canonicalize a successor everyone can coordinate a move to.
Thanks for the explanations, but I’m not noticing a big “external links” penalty on my own tweets. Found some discussion of this penalty via Google, so it seems real but maybe not that “massive”? Also some of it dates to before Musk purchased Twitter. Can you point me to anything that says he increased the penalty by a lot?
Ah Musk actually published Twitter’s algorithms, confirming the penalty. Don’t see anyone else saying that he increased the penalty though.
BTW why do you “protect” your account (preventing non-followers from seeing your tweets)?
‘The algorithm’ is an emergent function of the entire ecosystem. I have no way of knowing what sort of downstream effects a tweak here or there would cause or the effects of post-Musk changes. I just know what I see: my tweets appear to have plummeted since Musk took over, particularly when I link to my new essays or documents etc.
If you want to do a more rigorous analysis, I export my Twitter analytics every few months (thank goodness Musk hasn’t disabled that to try to upsell people to the subscription—maybe he doesn’t know it’s there?) and could provide you my archives. (BTW, there is a moving window where you can only get the last few months, so if you think you will ever be interested in your Twitter traffic numbers, you need to start exporting them every 2-3 months now, or else the historical data will become inaccessible. I don’t know if you can restore access to old ones by signing up as an advertiser.)
As for the ‘published’ algorithm, I semi-believe it is genuine (albeit doubtless incomplete) because Musk was embarrassed that it exposed how some parts of the new algorithm are manipulating Twitter to make Musk look more popular (confirming earlier reporting that Musk had ordered such changes after getting angry his views were dropping due to his crummy tweets), but that is also why it hasn’t been updated in almost half a year, apparently. God knows what the real thing is like by now...