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Test #1: I went to kanye west, kim kardashian, Chris Dixon and Nick SzaboResult - my home feed has bitcoin junk and stuff about the culture war. https://t.co/fF1m761uqa
This seems to fit patterns I've seen in the past with how my feed shifts and confirms my sense of how this place is broken in a way that I can only describe as inducing enhanced majority illusion effects. Catering to brands and celebrity worship?https://t.co/pYVa1sZZpA
Hmm looking at my followerwonk analysis of tweet rates I'm not sure if i'll be awake, but it looks like I could run these tests between 10pm and 8am excepting an hour or so around midnight.https://t.co/NHuRmAdV0K https://t.co/5VapWlyDYu
Confirmed that my home feed is currently populated by content that is "so-and-so liked" and retweets that are out of order from when the appeared on someone's timeline. Going to look at ~biologists I follow to see if it shifts the home timeline.
Hmm, now its all real people again.Speculation:Maybe i'm reading into presentation of tweets? (need to compare to 'raw' feed to see bias?)Maybe I only see it after exhausting home feed? (can I automate that?)Maybe people tweet more at 6am on friday? (need better analytics?)
Interestingly, this popped up in my feed (and caught my attention).That policy_futures seems to be RT'ing it live, suggests I need to capture my home feed stream & analyze them with some kind of self-double-blind to avoid biasing my attention.https://t.co/R18O3etWTV
Remember that time I applied to work at Amazon on their "user journey" (click tracking) team, and they had me basically build a weighted graph and I recommended using a Markov model?I wonder if reverse engineering ML algorithms is against the law yet.https://t.co/iVDvDFM0j9
Another possibility is I might be giving twitter too much creditMight be something simple like what was suggested here: https://t.co/xMkoWtJuIk and nothing to do with exhausting the feed, but more just an engagement mechanism kicking on after not reading feed in a while.
for example; I think the 'withholding likes' phenomena is actually just an artifact of the way instagram handles content replication at large scale. The 'drip' of likes may be an artifact of "eventual consistency" across region partitions.That isn't to say others don't do it.
Here's an experiment you can do. Go to home feed and press 'end' to hit bottom and force it to load more tweets. Do it two/three times.Then search the page (ctrl+f) for the term "others follow" <- see how many of the tweets there are and note that many weren't RTd in your feed.
Many of the "others follow" tweets that have 0 RTs! For me, they're all hot takes by people I Don't follow, and stuff no one else felt like subjecting people they follow with. But twitter, seeing that engagement is low for that person, decided to throw them in your feed anyway.
I don't know about you, but I've noticed most of these tweets are about stuff that I react negatively. This is why twitter has felt so hostile to me and why I don't like it here. Its algorithms are literally showing me stuff that I don't want to see by people I don't follow.
What kind of person is going to have a streak of low engagement & a bunch of negative tweets that might make others react negatively too? Sad, frustraited, and angry people. People who are depressed. People who don't need "rando's in their mentions" fighting with them.Good job!
So yeah, I won't unlock my account even if I wanted to. If I'm having a bad day and venting to my followers but being uncouth or otherwise upsetting, all of a sudden twitter will be to shove my tweets in front of strangers.I'm sorry, but thats not the kind of engagement I want.
Now add these two game mechanics together: a system that makes people see upsetting things in their feed.... and a system where upset people venting to their ingroup are shown to strangers.I could not invent a better recipe for outrage cascades to ripple thru a network!
Thanks twitter for breaking my filter.https://t.co/eaB8A2AzTi
You think twitter had an outrage problem before? This system they've rolled out for the sake of engagement is an ill-thought and toxic system.Its not safe to tweet, not for me. Not for you. and not for other people.This is why I hate it here.https://t.co/9DAqSH5Gjl
I don't want to fix twitter anymore.This shit is unfixable.All I wanna do now is help my friends escape.https://t.co/mIhn8kf5ao
If you reframe your feed as a 'recommendation engine', the problem I'm talking about, with how Twitter's choice of what to show you, becomes clear with this quote:https://t.co/ZTO8AS7Qw8 https://t.co/KbAyKHYrVJ
I can't see a single "others follow" in my feed now that everyone is highly active. So if nothing else I can conclude that what I'm seeing is definitely content and engagement fillers. Stuff to show novelty at times when people who aren't online when you are.