A fucked up thing is that people are being shunted into the "for you" recs on Twitter without their knowledge. So I've seen a number of folks with viral tweets asking, "Why am I suddenly getting all this attention and why are people mad at me?" and someone will eventually explain that their posts are getting served to users who don't follow them. One time the answer was basically, "I keep seeing your shitty tweets and I'm dunking on you because it annoys me," and the OP was like, "I don't know why?? I can't control that??" and only then did it occur to the person doing the dunking that this random stranger was not setting out to demand their attention.
This isn't an attempt to do a "the algorithm's out to get you" PSA, just an observation--random dogpiles are always a thing people have done on Twitter, and I don't have any evidence that this is happening on a wide scale.* But I've seen so many recent shitstorms across multiple communities that started with people who should know better jumping on a random Outrageous Opinion from an account with fewer than 100 followers without any obvious search keywords in their post, and somehow everyone in their immediate circle also saw it independently and got upset by it.
*Apart from my experience with social media users leading me to guess that way more people are using the "for you" tab as their home feed than the vocal dislike of it would suggest.
this shit has been happening on twitter since day one. the exact mechanic that makes it happen keeps morphing over time but it's still the same shit since launch. it's the reason i've never touched the site. there's no way for the social dynamic of that place to be anything else.
Yeah. I think the idea I associate most with Tech Bullshit has two parts:
- Forcing people to interact is good for them, like insisting that a little kid needs to try a bite of carrots before getting dessert.
- If those interactions go badly, that's what the block button is for.
For it to make sense at all in the first place, you have to think of privacy and autonomy as treats people can't be trusted not to overindulge in, and you have to believe that there are no social interactions so complex that they can't be sorted--consequence-free--into either Hailing Frequencies Open or Fuck Off.
I've seen this taken for granted in the design of so many fucking things and it never goes well, and the people who implement it are always flabbergasted when the exact situations they were told would happen actually happen, and the only way they don't decide the answer is to do more of it is if they're no longer decision-makers.
