ClyncyeRudje

biting you biting you biting you bi

strange moon creature, infected with ff14 & exalted ttrpg brainworms


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spookybiscuits
@spookybiscuits

honestly super weird to look back at twitter and see all the algo woowoo people deal with over there. don't say the word patreon, don't say the word ko-fi, don't even put a link in the post, don't even put a link in the REPLIES. the most you can do is allude to some other website where something is going to happen. all for a perceived algorithmic effect that is not at all proven, but the mere existence of the algorithm and the distrust it creates in people causes this behavior. how the hell does anybody treat twitter like a website worth posting on? if you can't post links out of the website, why try to start an audience there?


REP-Resent
@REP-Resent

For the audience who somehow doesn't know about George Orwell's 1984, Newspeak is the analogue for exactly what "advertiser friendly" verbal language is. Like the FCC's restrictions on 'obscene language', it forces people to make up words, use references or insidious allusions to what they mean to say. Some of my favorite examples include Ukraine War updates saying things like "today in Zaphoriza, there were 9 loud noises and smoke coming from the nearby military airport", or my favorite "Ukrainians dropped weapons, and 300 Russian troops were... eliminated".

Probably one of my favorite content creators who does this is Wendigoon, who is a person that owns firearms and will often talk about them in the context of horror fiction and real life. Each time he shows off or makes reference to one of his firearms, he says "for youtube, this is uh... Airsoft". It's fascinating to see how these little levers and systems of speech control have fucking destroyed the ability to talk about certain topics. If you say "this person committed suicide after being sexually assaulted and then harassed on social media for being transgender", you will have your content on youtube demonetized, meaning no ad revenue and therefore no money for your labor. How fair is that, really?

Ultimately, the purpose of the above is to highlight the old Orwellian Reference as a continuously present cultural context. Despite the work highlighting it as problematic, the reality is that we are all too vulnerable to deplatforming by the powerful. If you aren't paying directly for a service or given an employment contract, you are the product and are not entitled to the earnings in any manner. If you're not paying the fair market rate for the product, your data and attention are the revenue-generation. Oh hey, I'm doing that right now on behalf of Cohost, ain't for-profit webspaces a treat?


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in reply to @spookybiscuits's post:

yeah a lot of services are just freebased brainworms in terms of how people interact, both in what they do, and what their expectations of others are

whether it's algorithm dodging/appeasement or not, good lord i do not like it

but it definitely feels like people on cohost have actively tried to shed that in ways they haven't on any others

a lot of it is just genuine cargo culting; some people started doing a thing, saying it helped with [whatever], and now everyone does it. whether or not it actually has real effects is sometimes irrelevant

in the case of the funny misspellings on twitter, a lot of that is real, but driven more because of the amount of bots that will crop up the instant you mention those terms. a fucking twitch streamer friend of mine mentioned working on rigging their model and some bozo joined their discord to advertise because of it, or the countless bots that reply to "hacked" with "i got my stuff fixed by instragamdude42069"

cohost's lack of functional search means there's not really anything like that going on, thus you don't need to arbitrarily censor stuff right now

it's all a horrible swirling vortex of fuck

i wish to plunge a cursed and explosive spear into the heart of that vortex

the bots, the spying, the monetization and demonetization,

so many forms of communication with genuine use, killed in the name of "free commerce" consisting solely of ads and scams

if only they faced that fate, for once

this is actually why jul (my forum) has had a robots.txt blocking it for the last few years; i feel like on some level the only way to create a useful private space is by deliberately cutting yourself off like that

it's weird to think of how much of our lives are public through no actions of our own, but purely because that data can fetch a price for others

people frequently have no idea what they're talking about with twitter. like whenever people talk about the algorithm there, they act like it ever even does anything for them when most people don't have the amount of followers, likes, etc. to even hit the algorithm. oh no can't post a link, it wont do as well, yeah cause it's self advertising, you still just get likes and shit from people that already follow you, it's just nobody wants to do much with those posts cause they're just inherently less interesting. algorithm didn't do shit for you to begin with.

only time the algorithm even does anything there is when you're tweeting about a topic a lot of people are tweeting about currently, usually cause it's a current event that just happened like a nintendo direct or something in the news or whatever. the majority of posts I see people try to do all that, which are going live posts, I just wonder, why? it's only gonna reach whatever followers are online within the next hour or 2, or whatever ones are scrolling a lot later, so why not give them a convenient link, not like twitter's hiding your post from your followers.

but yeah that's kind of the thing though, it's always been a lower engagement site, kinda like reddit. building an audience on twitter isn't really a thing unless you already had one to begin with. straight up if you have below maybe like 10k followers, your posts probably will not gain traction to begin with, without being friends with larger accounts that retweet your shit for you. it was always not worth posting on if your goal was to grow on there, it's more of a place to just post for fun or engage with an existing audience. most growth on there has always been from off platform, unless your account is big on there already. also the website is super dying: posts there just get less engagement when compared to earlier in the year, cause people are leaving & it's only gonna get worse until they go out of business or get bought out.

tldr: people dont even realize the algorithm doesn't even do shit for them anyways, just post links. also it has always sucked over there for starting an audience.

Because despite the blossoming of alternative options it’s still the social media service where the most people I enjoy interacting with are, and I’m not someone with the pull to pull them to any one given alternative. Trust me, I’ve tried similar things in the past, multiple times over multiple years.

(Also having joined the birdsite in ‘09 may have helped mitigate a lot of the negative algorithmic cruft they heap onto newer accounts at creation, my Not For You timeline is usually still fairly okay.)

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