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For five years, I ran a network of Twitter accounts promoting local tech events. They were (uncreatively) called the "Tech Events Network" and included ATXTechE

For five years, I ran a network of Twitter accounts promoting local tech events. They were (uncreatively) called the "Tech Events Network" and included ATXTechEvents, DENTechEvents, NYC_TechEvents, and 50+ others that would broadcast local meetups, even supporting basically unknown tech communities like Albuquerque with ABQTechEvents. All received massive traffic, engagement (RTs & likes specifically), and became an active megaphone for their respective communities.. gaining almost 300k followers. More importantly, the meetups and events they tweeted saw attendance rise and more people know about them in general. It was great for everyone and I had hundreds of thank you tweets, emails, and DMs. But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our behalf and zero progress. After dozens of suspensions, I finally shut it all down. I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off..

winternett 5y ago
In all honesty, the Shadowban was the worst thing they ever did... I've had 3 accounts, 1 of which has been stuck at sub 130 users for over 10 years of posting, no matter what I've tried. That would be f*ing impossible on any platform that truly fosters creativity and even a scrap of post equality/fairness. There is also absolutely no indication nor procedure for contesting a limited status placed on social accounts on platforms like Twitter, it's all done in secret, which adds insult to injury. Truth is, the minute you mention anything now that is remotely perceived as critical of a platform on the platform, a switch is flipped that prevents you from building anything positive within that community. Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things really die a slow death these days. Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable growth, and metrics... Focusing on my own site is a lot less stressful than relying on the gaslighting and unexplained "growth-hobbling" that is now far too typical on social sites...
- huijzer 5y ago
  > Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable growth, and metrics... Since you don’t have social media anymore (or at least Twitter), how do you get new traffic to your site? All via search engines?
  - winternett 5y ago
    I still have those old social media accounts, now they serve to drive content to my site (the primary focal point of content I create) though... I make full music videos for my site, and then cut smaller snippets of it to post as I can on social sites, which makes my life a lot easier.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    I wonder what fraction of traffic these days is from nor search engines, neither social media ?
- baryphonic 5y ago
  > Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things really die a slow death these days. I think I know what you mean, though I typically frame it almost like they have an Anti-god problem. Big tech leaders are often explicitly trying to avoid passing moral or ethical judgment, so instead rely on "data" or "numbers." What a lot of the "I-follow-data" cultists seem not to realize is that "data" is basically inherently meaningless per se, thus decision-making based on data alone builds interpretive value judgments into the decision rule being used. It also invites fanatics to start producing manipulated/biased/tendentious "data" that appears to be some impartial metric, but is in fact just veiled motivated reasoning exploited to drive an agenda. Facebook and Google appear to have followed this to its logical extent, allowing literal algorithms to make decisions "based on data." So has Twitter, though Twitter's system is probably even more dysfunctional. At least when God damns you, you can argue your case and be presented with the evidence and know who to complain to. Tech damnation involves receiving a vaguely-worded message about polices or "community guidelines" being violated (per some unknown interpretation), or no reason at all. You have no recourse or chance to argue your case, even though many times the damnation was an error.
ENOTTY 5y ago
Did you run @DC_TechEvents? I used to get IFTTT to deliver me alerts, but that died when the account got suspended. Sad day.
- caseysoftware 5y ago
  Yes, that was me. I'm glad it was useful to you. That makes me smile. :) Here's my very frustrated sign off message: https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents/status/1321837596926947330 https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents/status/1321837596926947330
ChuckMcM 5y ago
A great use for the technology. But this ... I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off.. Might simply be "money". The "Web 2.0" business model, which actually sometimes makes money, is Revenue = Transactions per second X Revenue per Transaction - (Capital Expense + Operating Expense). It really is that simple. Capital expense is both the cost of servers and what not which records quarterly as depreciation expense, operating expense is everything you pay per month, whether it is developer salaries, licensing fees, or network bandwidth charges. And transaction revenue is typically in units of $ (or local currency) per 1,000 transactions. Twitter, is an information business. That is to say the value it provides to people who use it are the consumption of, or distribution of, information. In previous technologies, one could inject "forced information distribution" (aka advertising) into the "good information" that people valued. And for MBA types without any vision that became their "go to" mantra. We can force ads on the users which people will pay us to do. It is an adversarial relationship to be sure, there isn't much incentive for Twitter to be "compelling" like there is for audience metric based information services like television shows or movies. And there are plenty of technological mechanisms to utilize for injecting information and for collecting demographic data and reselling it. The failure in that model, and the one that probably shut down the event tweet network, is that Twitter was not getting enough money from NYC_TechEvents and others for their use of the system in these ways. The "easy"[1] coin was personal data and forced impressions. As a result anything that interfered with those revenue streams was to be shut down. The road not taken was to exploit the time value of information and the imbalance between readers and writers. There are a number of ways that information gains value, one is its timeliness. The canonical reference for this is stock market quotations. Getting a stream quotes that are 15 minutes delayed is "free", getting those same quotes within a few seconds costs money, and getting them within milliseconds costs exponentially more money. Notice that the "information" here is all the same, it is just "when" (or the time) you see it that is valuable. So let's apply a business model that collects the value in "timeliness" of Twitter. Twitter keeps me up to date To extract this value, create two tiers of service, one which is free and the Tweet stream is 15 minutes delayed, one which costs $4.99 / month and the tweet stream is instantaneous. Twitter lets me reach my group To extract this value, create two tiers of service. One is free and reaches 10 people per minute. Which is to say your tweet goes out and 10 random followers see it right away, and then in the next minute another 10 see it, and in the next minute another 10, until all of your followers see it. A paid account can increase this diffusion rate from 10 to 100 @$4.99/month, to a million $49.99/month. These are just a couple of examples of creating a model where the more you value timeliness of the information, the more you have to pay for that. What this does is provide a system that captures the intrinsic value of timely information and allows you to create a value proposition around it. No advertising, just people talking to people, and some wanting to talk to bigger crowds or stay more informed etc, and a whole lot of people who are fine with things being delayed a bit because its free. Its fun to model these things too. You can analyze what sort of return you would need to have a margin that sustains a business and it becomes just like modelling making widgets in a factory, all of the classic business mechanics work like you would expect. Pricing the value add is just as hard as it is in a goods economy, and pricing mistakes are just as costly. But it equalizes out exactly like it does for goods. [1] The term easy here is a way of expressing a technique that has worked, for the definition "generated revenue" for worked, in other situations.
logicchains 5y ago
>But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our behalf and zero progress. Fundamentally that's the result of a toxic, lazy engineering culture that thinks the solution to heavy load is to punish users rather than improving the system. Whoever was in tech leadership positions there at the time should be ashamed of themselves.

winternett 5y ago

In all honesty, the Shadowban was the worst thing they ever did... I've had 3 accounts, 1 of which has been stuck at sub 130 users for over 10 years of posting, no matter what I've tried. That would be f*ing impossible on any platform that truly fosters creativity and even a scrap of post equality/fairness. There is also absolutely no indication nor procedure for contesting a limited status placed on social accounts on platforms like Twitter, it's all done in secret, which adds insult to injury. Truth is, the minute you mention anything now that is remotely perceived as critical of a platform on the platform, a switch is flipped that prevents you from building anything positive within that community. Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things really die a slow death these days. Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable growth, and metrics... Focusing on my own site is a lot less stressful than relying on the gaslighting and unexplained "growth-hobbling" that is now far too typical on social sites...

huijzer 5y ago
> Since I decided to just bolster my own site, I get reliable growth, and metrics... Since you don’t have social media anymore (or at least Twitter), how do you get new traffic to your site? All via search engines?
- winternett 5y ago
  I still have those old social media accounts, now they serve to drive content to my site (the primary focal point of content I create) though... I make full music videos for my site, and then cut smaller snippets of it to post as I can on social sites, which makes my life a lot easier.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  I wonder what fraction of traffic these days is from nor search engines, neither social media ?
baryphonic 5y ago
> Tech sufferers greatly from a "God Complex" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. Even the largest social platforms are not insulated from bad leadership being accountable, and frankly, that's the reason why things really die a slow death these days. I think I know what you mean, though I typically frame it almost like they have an Anti-god problem. Big tech leaders are often explicitly trying to avoid passing moral or ethical judgment, so instead rely on "data" or "numbers." What a lot of the "I-follow-data" cultists seem not to realize is that "data" is basically inherently meaningless per se, thus decision-making based on data alone builds interpretive value judgments into the decision rule being used. It also invites fanatics to start producing manipulated/biased/tendentious "data" that appears to be some impartial metric, but is in fact just veiled motivated reasoning exploited to drive an agenda. Facebook and Google appear to have followed this to its logical extent, allowing literal algorithms to make decisions "based on data." So has Twitter, though Twitter's system is probably even more dysfunctional. At least when God damns you, you can argue your case and be presented with the evidence and know who to complain to. Tech damnation involves receiving a vaguely-worded message about polices or "community guidelines" being violated (per some unknown interpretation), or no reason at all. You have no recourse or chance to argue your case, even though many times the damnation was an error.

ENOTTY 5y ago

Did you run @DC_TechEvents? I used to get IFTTT to deliver me alerts, but that died when the account got suspended. Sad day.

caseysoftware 5y ago
Yes, that was me. I'm glad it was useful to you. That makes me smile. :) Here's my very frustrated sign off message: https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents/status/1321837596926947330 https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents/status/1321837596926947330

ChuckMcM 5y ago

A great use for the technology. But this ... I haven't come up with a theory beyond Twitter hates tech communities but that feels off.. Might simply be "money". The "Web 2.0" business model, which actually sometimes makes money, is Revenue = Transactions per second X Revenue per Transaction - (Capital Expense + Operating Expense). It really is that simple. Capital expense is both the cost of servers and what not which records quarterly as depreciation expense, operating expense is everything you pay per month, whether it is developer salaries, licensing fees, or network bandwidth charges. And transaction revenue is typically in units of $ (or local currency) per 1,000 transactions. Twitter, is an information business. That is to say the value it provides to people who use it are the consumption of, or distribution of, information. In previous technologies, one could inject "forced information distribution" (aka advertising) into the "good information" that people valued. And for MBA types without any vision that became their "go to" mantra. We can force ads on the users which people will pay us to do. It is an adversarial relationship to be sure, there isn't much incentive for Twitter to be "compelling" like there is for audience metric based information services like television shows or movies. And there are plenty of technological mechanisms to utilize for injecting information and for collecting demographic data and reselling it. The failure in that model, and the one that probably shut down the event tweet network, is that Twitter was not getting enough money from NYC_TechEvents and others for their use of the system in these ways. The "easy"[1] coin was personal data and forced impressions. As a result anything that interfered with those revenue streams was to be shut down. The road not taken was to exploit the time value of information and the imbalance between readers and writers. There are a number of ways that information gains value, one is its timeliness. The canonical reference for this is stock market quotations. Getting a stream quotes that are 15 minutes delayed is "free", getting those same quotes within a few seconds costs money, and getting them within milliseconds costs exponentially more money. Notice that the "information" here is all the same, it is just "when" (or the time) you see it that is valuable. So let's apply a business model that collects the value in "timeliness" of Twitter. Twitter keeps me up to date To extract this value, create two tiers of service, one which is free and the Tweet stream is 15 minutes delayed, one which costs $4.99 / month and the tweet stream is instantaneous. Twitter lets me reach my group To extract this value, create two tiers of service. One is free and reaches 10 people per minute. Which is to say your tweet goes out and 10 random followers see it right away, and then in the next minute another 10 see it, and in the next minute another 10, until all of your followers see it. A paid account can increase this diffusion rate from 10 to 100 @$4.99/month, to a million $49.99/month. These are just a couple of examples of creating a model where the more you value timeliness of the information, the more you have to pay for that. What this does is provide a system that captures the intrinsic value of timely information and allows you to create a value proposition around it. No advertising, just people talking to people, and some wanting to talk to bigger crowds or stay more informed etc, and a whole lot of people who are fine with things being delayed a bit because its free. Its fun to model these things too. You can analyze what sort of return you would need to have a margin that sustains a business and it becomes just like modelling making widgets in a factory, all of the classic business mechanics work like you would expect. Pricing the value add is just as hard as it is in a goods economy, and pricing mistakes are just as costly. But it equalizes out exactly like it does for goods. [1] The term easy here is a way of expressing a technique that has worked, for the definition "generated revenue" for worked, in other situations.

logicchains 5y ago

>But Twitter's repeated, bizarre, and unexplained API limitations hobbled the system more times than I can count. They'd suddenly suspend one for "API abuse", I'd get it manually reviewed and they'd release it.. only to have 10 suspended the next day. I even started asking followers to tag @TwitterSupport on our behalf and zero progress. Fundamentally that's the result of a toxic, lazy engineering culture that thinks the solution to heavy load is to punish users rather than improving the system. Whoever was in tech leadership positions there at the time should be ashamed of themselves.