The latest seismic wave off the ongoing perpetual Twitter implosion has me thinking about the way that site works and the way people are just. meant to put up with it
Like, despite everything, I actually did start trying to use the For You tab instead of the Following tab purely for the sake of potentially finding cool art, and for the most part, it's... kind of worked...? At least, I get an okay ratio of 'Cellinia Texas doing a cool sword pose' to 'other shit I don't care about'.
But something that genuinely gets under my skin in the way it feels is the fact that like... The Nightmare Algorithm the site runs on seems to, at this point, have literally no means of telling what a tweet's purpose is or who it's for. And, sometimes the effects this has is just strange or harmless-- occasional Russian posts I have no way of understanding when I have done nothing to imply to this website I can even read Cyrillic much less understand it, schedule posts from content creators I've genuinely never heard of, that sort of thing.
But I get kinda fucked up over the way that it'll just sorta show me vent-posting from people I do not know and will never meet. Like, sometimes I get presented a very emotionally charged, genuinely concerning thread, completely orphaned of its context, of someone very clearly Going Through It posting to a side account or something about how difficult things are for them at the time, or otherwise sounding depressed and angry. And literally, without exception, it's someone far enough removed from my sphere that it's not even like 'oh this person is followed by someone you're following'-- it's just someone whose feelings ended up getting way more exposure than they probably intended due to the black-box near-random nature of Algorithmic Content™️
How did we get here? Who thought this was okay? Does there exist a single person who's actually alright with someone's raw human emotion getting thrown into the No Context Content Mill? Genuinely I almost (big, hefty 'almost' putting in a lot of work here) prefer ragebait shit because at least that contributes to my block list. When it's just 'someone's post with like 17 likes and 0 replies about their depression somehow inexplicably ended up on my timeline', it just kind of makes me incredibly uncomfortable. It's a unique kind of social media interaction-farming depravity that I sure wish would stop happening to me.
Also, the fact that apparently these will now eat up One of my X00 Limited Number of Tweets Viewed Per Day sure is... something alright. That's an emotion I'm feeling, sure wish I could tell what kind. Just gonna call it 'distress' until I think of something better.