5 ms·

X will pay its Premium users to engage with each other

36 points by LordAtlas 2y ago

ryandvm 2y ago
Seems like it ought to be possible to link your identity on another platform (e.g. Blue Sky or Threads) with your Twitter identity through some sort of specific post (similar to a DNS proof) and just transplant entire swaths of the network graph to another social network.
- mcherm 2y ago
  I don't think that would be possible. Either there would be so few people doing it that it would not be effective at transplanting the network graph, or else it would be widely enough used that X noticed and cared, in which case they would block it.
- tivert 2y ago
  It should be possible, but companies don't serve their customers or users, they serve their shareholders. Giving a user a feature like that will only hurt the company, so it won't be implemented.
- verdverm 2y ago
  https://github.com/marcomaroni-github/twitter-to-bluesky https://github.com/marcomaroni-github/twitter-to-bluesky (it's imperfect, there are also bots which mirror content and many of the creator tools support posting to multiple platforms including Bluesky)
teejmya 2y ago
How to create an Echo Chamber 101
- verdverm 2y ago
  Perhaps we might call this a Clyde Chamber?
andyjohnson0 2y ago
> the company announced today that creators are instead going to be paid based on “engagement with your content from Premium users.” Circling the drain. The incentives only point one way now. If Twitter/X ever was a forum for genuine conversation or debate, they just killed it.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  > Twitter/X ever was a forum for genuine conversation or debate, they just killed it. It never was. Twitter is shit now under Elon, and was shit before him. Some very annoying people just happened to like how that turd used to smell, is all.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    Careful though: something only has to be partially (5% is adequate) shit to "be shit". Twitter also has lots of value (and thusly, "is not shit", simultaneously). Consider all the soothsaying in this thread, does this cause HN to "be" a soothsaying platform? In part yes, but not in whole.
    - surgical_fire 2y ago
      Twitter was by very far always the most toxic cesspool in the internet. The format creates incentives for the most inane but inflammatory posts to gain traction, and the userbase it cultivated was all in for the drama. So many witch hunts started on Twitter, for the most asinine reasons, and the mob mentality of the userbase made it the norm.
      - mistermann 2y ago
        > Twitter was by very far always the most toxic cesspool in the internet. And also not, simultaneously. Related: do you disagree with the theory that the speed of light is relative to the frame of reference of the observer? EDIT: I must say though, you're not wrong. Twitter is a lot like the Wild West, lots of clever racists, it's nuts.
jsheard 2y ago
Surely this is only going to encourage the proliferation of LLM reply bots? There's already enough of those.
- rideontime 2y ago
  And rage-bait. "Engagement farming" was already a term before it became the specific relevant metric for monetization.
faefox 2y ago
With what money? Nobody's buying ads and the dollars from "Premium" subscriptions are needed to keep the lights on.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > With what money? The world’s richest man owns it as a plaything.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Alupis 2y ago
    And there's plenty of advertisers on twitter still - despite this constant, baseless narrative. People want Musk to fail so badly they literally make things up.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      IME a significant portion of those advertisers still on Twitter are absolute bottom of the barrel AliExpress dropshipping outlets. Technically advertisers, but not really the type you want given the choice, so it's no surprise that Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value at ~25% of what Musk paid for it.
      - Alupis 2y ago
        > IME a significant portion of those advertisers still on Twitter are absolute bottom of the barrel AliExpress dropshipping outlets That's your retargeted ads. From my experience, I haven't noticed any changes. > Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value is ~25% This is an entirely made up figure based on guesses and politics. Nobody, including Fidelity, have any clue to the internals of Twitter now that it's private. The world's most important news still breaks on Twitter (including the sitting president's announcement to not run for re-election), despite all the Musk hate.
buildsjets 2y ago
So a company internally consuming it’s own product is dogfooding. In this case, Twitter is intentionally consuming the waste of it’s own product, and so I think it is wholly appropriate to call this process “dogshitting.”
emptyfile 2y ago
[dead]
bangaroo 2y ago
i don't think i'm making a controversial statement by saying that "premium user tweets are, on average, the lowest quality content on twitter right now." i'm kind of astounded by how bad the top replies to any viral tweet are - it's not even that they're offensive (though they often are) or that i disagree with them - they're just useless. they're inane. they're pointless. they're uninteresting. i left twitter functionally long ago, but occasionally get sent a tweet and i'll try and read the replies to see what other people are saying and rarely do i ever reach a point where i see anything useful. it feels like the last major shift in quality occurred around the time twitter started doing revenue sharing. the algorithm incentivizes provocative or "relatable" content so many people who were given that opportunity shifted to an "engagement bait" strategy, which doesn't lead to high-quality content, it just leads to stuff that provokes a reaction. alongside that there seemed to be a huge flood of "me too" content in replies. i can't imagine the majority of the people responding to everything and anything with the most inane nonsense are benefitting from this program, but that was really the time i felt the first profound shift in quality on the platform. people's relationship to what they were posting changed meaningfully, and the overall quality of content suffered as a result. this shift moves the motivation to exhibit engagement-bait behaviors from implicit (when people see ads near my content, i make money, therefore i should game the algorithm to be seen by as many people as possible) to explicit (engagement is how i make my money.) i cannot imagine this improving the situation with regards to what's being posted. it kind of seems like a recipe for more of the worst parts of twitter to blossom - accounts that just rush to swipe and repost viral hits from other platforms first to gain traction, explicit incitement through saying increasingly controversial things (to both juice the people who agree and coerce argument from people who don't) and so on. realistically, couldn't this potentially directly add up to rewarding people who post misinformation? if someone with a lot of visibility posts a false claim, people rush to correct and provide context, juicing engagement numbers, leading to them making more money lying than they would telling the truth. it's kind of perverse. if i was more conspiracy minded i feel like i would suggest this was explicitly designed to promote the creation and dissemination of misinformation but i really don't think there's anyone thinking that strategically at twitter.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Really, all it is doing is surfacing the asinine nature of Twitter itself. Those inane, dumb, wrong, malicious tweets have always been there, you just weren't looking for them. Now there are promoted tweets, and the tweeters being promoted are people you didn't find interesting in the first place. The only thing that has changed is Twitter is directly speaking to their average audience, which you are not, and that is now painfully more obvious.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
I think they are doing it to match threads, see https://www.yahoo.com/tech/metas-threads-paying-creators-thousands-055858673.html https://www.yahoo.com/tech/metas-threads-paying-creators-tho... .
- pixxel 2y ago
  No, it’s because Musk is an evil loser. The usual types who jump on these X topics told me so.
beders 2y ago
So you now get free speech (Basic), fee-er speech (Premium) and free-est speech (Premium+) for your replies?

36 points by LordAtlas 2y ago

Seems like it ought to be possible to link your identity on another platform (e.g. Blue Sky or Threads) with your Twitter identity through some sort of specific post (similar to a DNS proof) and just transplant entire swaths of the network graph to another social network.

mcherm 2y ago
I don't think that would be possible. Either there would be so few people doing it that it would not be effective at transplanting the network graph, or else it would be widely enough used that X noticed and cared, in which case they would block it.
tivert 2y ago
It should be possible, but companies don't serve their customers or users, they serve their shareholders. Giving a user a feature like that will only hurt the company, so it won't be implemented.
verdverm 2y ago
https://github.com/marcomaroni-github/twitter-to-bluesky https://github.com/marcomaroni-github/twitter-to-bluesky (it's imperfect, there are also bots which mirror content and many of the creator tools support posting to multiple platforms including Bluesky)

teejmya 2y ago

How to create an Echo Chamber 101

verdverm 2y ago
Perhaps we might call this a Clyde Chamber?

andyjohnson0 2y ago

> the company announced today that creators are instead going to be paid based on “engagement with your content from Premium users.” Circling the drain. The incentives only point one way now. If Twitter/X ever was a forum for genuine conversation or debate, they just killed it.

surgical_fire 2y ago
> Twitter/X ever was a forum for genuine conversation or debate, they just killed it. It never was. Twitter is shit now under Elon, and was shit before him. Some very annoying people just happened to like how that turd used to smell, is all.
- mistermann 2y ago
  Careful though: something only has to be partially (5% is adequate) shit to "be shit". Twitter also has lots of value (and thusly, "is not shit", simultaneously). Consider all the soothsaying in this thread, does this cause HN to "be" a soothsaying platform? In part yes, but not in whole.
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    Twitter was by very far always the most toxic cesspool in the internet. The format creates incentives for the most inane but inflammatory posts to gain traction, and the userbase it cultivated was all in for the drama. So many witch hunts started on Twitter, for the most asinine reasons, and the mob mentality of the userbase made it the norm.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      > Twitter was by very far always the most toxic cesspool in the internet. And also not, simultaneously. Related: do you disagree with the theory that the speed of light is relative to the frame of reference of the observer? EDIT: I must say though, you're not wrong. Twitter is a lot like the Wild West, lots of clever racists, it's nuts.

jsheard 2y ago

Surely this is only going to encourage the proliferation of LLM reply bots? There's already enough of those.

rideontime 2y ago
And rage-bait. "Engagement farming" was already a term before it became the specific relevant metric for monetization.

faefox 2y ago

With what money? Nobody's buying ads and the dollars from "Premium" subscriptions are needed to keep the lights on.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> With what money? The world’s richest man owns it as a plaything.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Alupis 2y ago
  And there's plenty of advertisers on twitter still - despite this constant, baseless narrative. People want Musk to fail so badly they literally make things up.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    IME a significant portion of those advertisers still on Twitter are absolute bottom of the barrel AliExpress dropshipping outlets. Technically advertisers, but not really the type you want given the choice, so it's no surprise that Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value at ~25% of what Musk paid for it.
    - Alupis 2y ago
      > IME a significant portion of those advertisers still on Twitter are absolute bottom of the barrel AliExpress dropshipping outlets That's your retargeted ads. From my experience, I haven't noticed any changes. > Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value is ~25% This is an entirely made up figure based on guesses and politics. Nobody, including Fidelity, have any clue to the internals of Twitter now that it's private. The world's most important news still breaks on Twitter (including the sitting president's announcement to not run for re-election), despite all the Musk hate.

buildsjets 2y ago

So a company internally consuming it’s own product is dogfooding. In this case, Twitter is intentionally consuming the waste of it’s own product, and so I think it is wholly appropriate to call this process “dogshitting.”

emptyfile 2y ago

[dead]

bangaroo 2y ago

i don't think i'm making a controversial statement by saying that "premium user tweets are, on average, the lowest quality content on twitter right now." i'm kind of astounded by how bad the top replies to any viral tweet are - it's not even that they're offensive (though they often are) or that i disagree with them - they're just useless. they're inane. they're pointless. they're uninteresting. i left twitter functionally long ago, but occasionally get sent a tweet and i'll try and read the replies to see what other people are saying and rarely do i ever reach a point where i see anything useful. it feels like the last major shift in quality occurred around the time twitter started doing revenue sharing. the algorithm incentivizes provocative or "relatable" content so many people who were given that opportunity shifted to an "engagement bait" strategy, which doesn't lead to high-quality content, it just leads to stuff that provokes a reaction. alongside that there seemed to be a huge flood of "me too" content in replies. i can't imagine the majority of the people responding to everything and anything with the most inane nonsense are benefitting from this program, but that was really the time i felt the first profound shift in quality on the platform. people's relationship to what they were posting changed meaningfully, and the overall quality of content suffered as a result. this shift moves the motivation to exhibit engagement-bait behaviors from implicit (when people see ads near my content, i make money, therefore i should game the algorithm to be seen by as many people as possible) to explicit (engagement is how i make my money.) i cannot imagine this improving the situation with regards to what's being posted. it kind of seems like a recipe for more of the worst parts of twitter to blossom - accounts that just rush to swipe and repost viral hits from other platforms first to gain traction, explicit incitement through saying increasingly controversial things (to both juice the people who agree and coerce argument from people who don't) and so on. realistically, couldn't this potentially directly add up to rewarding people who post misinformation? if someone with a lot of visibility posts a false claim, people rush to correct and provide context, juicing engagement numbers, leading to them making more money lying than they would telling the truth. it's kind of perverse. if i was more conspiracy minded i feel like i would suggest this was explicitly designed to promote the creation and dissemination of misinformation but i really don't think there's anyone thinking that strategically at twitter.

zdragnar 2y ago
Really, all it is doing is surfacing the asinine nature of Twitter itself. Those inane, dumb, wrong, malicious tweets have always been there, you just weren't looking for them. Now there are promoted tweets, and the tweeters being promoted are people you didn't find interesting in the first place. The only thing that has changed is Twitter is directly speaking to their average audience, which you are not, and that is now painfully more obvious.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

I think they are doing it to match threads, see https://www.yahoo.com/tech/metas-threads-paying-creators-thousands-055858673.html https://www.yahoo.com/tech/metas-threads-paying-creators-tho... .

pixxel 2y ago
No, it’s because Musk is an evil loser. The usual types who jump on these X topics told me so.

beders 2y ago

So you now get free speech (Basic), fee-er speech (Premium) and free-est speech (Premium+) for your replies?