hikari's blog

the algorithm is killing twitter and it's driving me insane

… and it breaks my heart.

i am Upset about something right now, and i gotta get it off my chest in the way only an unplanned blog post can achieve, so here goes.

first off: there's three types of people who'll read this post:

it is impossible for me to have a meaningful conversation with you if you are in the last group, sorry. please, i am begging you, switch off your outrage and cringe reflexes for a moment, if you are somehow reading this. because otherwise we are just wasting our time here. thanks.

anyway, to the meat of it:

algorithms are not new

i think complaining about algorithmic recommendations on social media is almost cliché at this point, so let me get this out of the way first: i don't think chronological timelines are the only good ones. sorting posts chronologically is itself an algorithm, with its own tradeoffs. i think it's a well-understood one with some clear benefits, though, and it might be a reasonable basic expectation that a microblogging-type service provides this as a convenient option, at least.

secondly, uh, twitter has had algorithmic recommendations in one form or another for a really long time now. i don't even remember when they started being a thing, but they've probably been on the site for at least half the time i've been on it, so probably half a decade. but i am not complaining about the 201X algorithm. it was a different beast. i'm complaining specifically about twitter (x) in 2024. elon's twitter.

nuance is hard on twitter

so, i think anyone who has spent a non-trivial amount of time on twitter is probably aware that it is kind of a terrible place to have a nuanced discussion, and it always has been. and yet it is also The social media site for politics, and it always has been that, too. the problem is that any meaningful political topic is practically drenched in nuance.

historically there's been basically two different things that make nuance hard on twitter: the character limit, and audience escape.

tweets are too short

the character limit is very easy to grasp. if we're talking just about the english language here: 140 characters was quite limiting; these days most users are instead limited to 280 characters, which allows a slightly larger or more detailed thought to fit into a tweet. this character limit is one of the essential things that makes twitter twitter. it makes every tweet into a little byte-sized thought. easy to consume, easy to process.

the problem with the character limit, of course, is that there is fairly little room for nuance, for context, for explaining what exactly you mean. the nature of language is such that we can never communicate an exact idea; we can only throw words to someone else, and hope they can paint an image in their mind with vaguely similar colours. even with many words, it is an inherently lossy process. that is both the tragedy and the beauty. but on twitter, well, there is not enough room to use many words, and that very much increases the risk that the images become wildly different. the image in the reader's mind is always made up from parts of the reader's self, not from the writer's, but this is in some way much more true on twitter than when, say, reading a blog. the words that are left out must be filled in, and when too much is absent, the reader can bring in too much of themselves.

Very low-resolution JPEG screenshot of that memetic tweet that goes “Twitter the only where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted.” etc except I've very obviously edited it by blanking out some words and adding others, so now it says ‘Twitter just like any other place, sentences get interpreted. You can say “I” and somebody will say “So you?” Dats a whole new sentence’

…ok i may be a bit of a linguistics nerd artsy type, but i think “tweets are too short to provide full nuance and context” is straightforward.

wait, what about threads?

tweets are too short to be nuanced, but what about threads? it's a good question. in what's probably an accident (like many other great twitter features), a tweet can be chained (sewn? threaded?) to another tweet, allowing a string of byte-sized thoughts to be attached to eachother. great! doesn't that provide more room for context?

yeah, it does, but that context can easily become separated. for example, unless you pre-plan a thread and post it all at once, the first tweet will be read and digested by some people before they had any chance to see subsequent tweets. but the bigger thing is that each tweet in a thread still exists as its own thing, which can be individually retweeted, replied to, or, god forbid, quote-tweeted. which leads me to…

audience escape (traditionally)

the intended audience is an important aspect of any work. like anything public, tweets can find their own audience, but usually they are intended for a particular group, consciously or not. the original and standard audience for tweets is your own followers, or at least some subset of them. there are many important things about this audience:

this is a fairly comfortable group to write for. the limitations of tweet length and language itself are somewhat mitigated by having an audience like this, because their familiarity with you helps them to guess what you mean. they also are probably not hostile to what you have to say, if they have chosen to follow you. besides, if they are hostile, you can actually remove them from the audience.

and the nice thing about twitter has been that, historically, this intended audience has had a considerable overlap with what we might call the found audience of people who actually see and read a tweet. your followers were the first and often only people to read your tweets, because they are who twitter would deliver them to first.

now, this “found audience” has always had an ability to widen beyond your followers. for one thing, someone could always just visit your profile (perhaps someone who doesn't even have a twitter account!), or perhaps the tweet might actually leave the website if it had some special significance to someone. but more importantly, twitter has explicit features for increasing the visibility of someone else's tweet: you can retweet it, or quote-tweet it.

these features can be wonderful and they can be terrible. someone whose followers absolutely hate your guts might choose to retweet or quote-tweet you, and now some of their followers might fill your replies and notifications inbox with very horrible things. but it's also very likely that someone whose followers are really into what you had to say might find your tweet in this way, to both your and their benefit (assuming you can handle the level of interest!).

another thing that must be said about these features is they have an inherent context-stripping effect. as mentioned before, a tweet that gets quote-tweeted or retweeted is effectively severed from its original thread. sure, someone can click or tap on the tweet to see where it came from, but they have to choose to do so, and twitter for some reason doesn't even inform you that there is context you are missing (whether a tweet is part of a thread or not) unless you choose to check for this, which is wild. and let's not forget that the new audience the tweet finds this way may not know who you are!

and this gets very annoying if someone replies to you without bothering to read the rest of your thread. potentially Very Very annoying. made a mistake in a tweet, that you addressed later in the thread? hope you like being reminded forever. if you think that deleting the original tweet is always the answer, please at least apply your brain a bit to thinking about why this is in fact a bad thing in many cases. (btw, a few years ago, twitter started prompting you to read an article before retweeting a tweet that links to it… i can only wish they did the same for replying to tweets from threads. :<)

but, for all the downsides of these features, they at least maintained those important properties of the default audience i mentioned before, just in a more complicated manner. if you think your followers are going to annoy someone, you can choose to avoid retweeting their tweet. if someone retweets you, you are made aware of this, and you can potentially stop them from retweeting you in future, and you can look at their followers to figure out what their audience is like. the overall theme is: legibility, transparency, control.

granted, twitter has never let you completely disable retweets on a tweet (that is public, anyway), and it doesn't show you how retweets chain etc, so it could be improved, but these features are… manageable. and they are a huge part of what made twitter great, not just what made twitter terrible. everyone has their bangers that brought them a bigger audience, their unusual posts that struck someone the right way and brought them a wonderful new friendship, their thoughtful posts that prompted interesting discussions and discoveries, all because the right people retweeted or quote-tweeted them at the right moment.

pray the eye of sauron does not cast its gaze upon you

but we must talk for a moment about what makes twitter terrible, then as now. there is this idea of the “five minutes of fame”, where everyone can become famous for something for a brief moment, and twitter definitely exemplifies that. but it also features its natural counterpart, which i guess you could call the “five minutes of infamy”, but i've never actually heard that phrase. the very online like myself tend to call it “being the main character”.

what does it mean to be a main character? it means to be the subject of the “two minutes' hate”. i guess there are too many names for this phenomenon. okay, what it really means is that you did something — most likely, tweeted something — that pissed people off, and now they hate your guts. probably something with a political message they really don't like. probably something so offensive that you are literal scum and Deserve Death. something with that emotional intensity.

and if you're thinking for a moment “why is hikari no yume complaining about this, these people deserve their fate”, please go fuck yourself, because the whole point is that half the time this is an absurdly disproportionately violent response, and the dogpiling does nothing good for the actual underlying issue you think somehow motivates your participation in today's episode of public shaming. even when it is somehow justified, i think there's a lot to be said about how participating in these events is not healthy. i will not elaborate here, but i will ask you to please look deeply at your soul and feel how it is hurting. i'm serious.

i'm not so keen on the eye of clownron either

okay but twitter can also suck even when people don't hate your guts, but in fact superficially seem to like them. see, another way to have a Bad Day or Bad Week on twitter is just for your post to reach an audience that, uh, thinks it knows what the hell you're talking about, but doesn't, and will give you many very annoying replies.

i'm not sure how well i can explain this phenomenon to you if you haven't experienced it, because i think it might be less common and legible than the everyone hates your guts thing, but uh… this happens a lot when i tweet about tech or programming topics, if i dare to speak about something that's too widely comprehensible or relatable. i suppose this must happen to people with other interests too.

hell, i think there's also just such a thing as too much engagement. even if something only gets good replies somehow, it kinda sucks to not be able to talk about certain topics without them dominating my notifications for ages, preventing me talking about anything else during that time. yes, i can mute the thread and disable replies, but that's a band-aid on the problem, and it comes at the cost of potentially missing future really great replies, as well as doing nothing about how rts and qts keep increasing. it also doesn't help with the sometimes excessive influx of new followers that can result, followers who i suspect won't like most of my other tweets (or at least that's my gut feeling). often i end up just deleting the thread or locking my account, which sucks for everyone involved. twitter, just let me disable likes/rts/qts on a tweet, i beg you!

what guides the gaze

why do i bring these awful phenomena up? because, of course, they are amplified and to some extent caused by the kind of “audience escape” i outlined before.

your followers are, in the first place, probably following you because they like your tweets, or they like something about you. so there is less risk of them getting upset at you over something you tweet, than there is for most people. and there's various ways to signal or control who should follow you, to avoid predictable upsets.

importantly, your followers are also likely to correctly understand the meaning of a tweet, both at the literal level and in a pragmatics sense (what is the function of your tweet). they have some background on who you are and what stuff you tweet about, so they have more reference points to fill in the gaps in what you said. they also get to see the rest of the thread your tweet is from in their following timeline!

and, perhaps most importantly of all, your followers are likely to be willing to understand your tweets. most followers are following you in good faith. they probably like you; if they don't like you, they will probably unfollow you; if they like only some of what you say, they might choose to ignore or tolerate the stuff that's not to their taste, because they still appreciate your other work.

all of this starts to be less true once you're retweeted or quote-tweeted. your followers' followers are not quite the same as your followers, and this is likely more true the more steps removed you get. also, the context-stripping effects come into play: the new audience might not know who you are, or not know you as well; the new audience won't see the rest of your thread unless they tap through; and perhaps worst of all, not only have you lost control over how you frame your work, but someone may frame it for you. the wording in a quote tweet, or even who retweeted you, gives the person expanding the audience of your tweet the power to simultaneously create a preconception in the reader's mind of what you meant, and one that might be wrong, or worse: hostile. some people are always looking for someone to hate, but some people only do it when told to, and quote-tweets give anyone the power to not only direct angry people at you, but potentially make those people angry about an entirely misconceived notion of what you were trying to say.

but as is a theme at these point, these problems are at least something you can kinda learn to live with… so long as these audiences are legible, and you have some degree of control. legibility is a kind of control, incidentally; if i can tell what people will get mad or annoying at me about, i can just shut up about it, as much as that sucks. and while i wish twitter would add more tools to deal with this stuff, it at least has had some.

okay but wasn't this gonna be about the algorithmic timeline

yeah, here's the part where i get to that. so: i've outlined all these things about how nuance is hard on twitter and how people will get mad at you and how audiences and your potential lack of control thereof are a deciding factor in how much of a Good or, perhaps, Bad Time you will have on the site. most importantly, i've emphasised how legibility and control are what made it manageable. so of course, the algorithmic timeline is making us all suffer by taking these specific things from us.

“if you don't like it just don't use it lol”

no you don't understand. the problem isn't whether i use the algorithmic timeline (i mean, that's also a problem, but i'll get to it later). it's whether my readers do. and i can't control that at all. as i was saying…

audience escape (2024 edition)

as i mentioned before, twitter's had algorithmic recommendations and algorithmic timelines for a pretty long time now. however, as far as i can tell, they used to work differently. at least at some point, they used to just recommend stuff from people you follow, or at least people followed by people you follow. this had questionable legibility and some other problems (for example: followers who only read the algorithmic timline might only see your tweets that already got popular, not your ones with low engagement, punishing you tweeting about things only of interest to a smaller fraction of your audience). but it was not the beast we know now.

i do not know how the new algorithm works. i can only guess at the principles or construction. but i can intuit some things from my experiences of how it seems to be working. i think it's based on two things: topics and… (sigh)… engagement.

topic, interest, subject matter, ämne, Thema, you name it

i'm calling this “topics” because i swear i've seen that label somewhere in the twitter ui before for some kind of algorithmic recommendation. i do not remember if they still do it, i don't really care. but it provided a great insight.

basically: at some point twitter started trying to figure out, algorithmically, what kinds of topics particular twitter accounts talk about, and then recommend random tweets by those accounts to other people who seem to have some interest in those topics. i do not know by what means they did this, but i know for certain that they were trying to do it. it used to be (last year? two years ago?) that i would frequently see recommended stuff explicitly labelled by the app with a topic like, let's say, “Gaming”. and then the tweet might be about games, but it might also just be something that happened to have been tweeted by a gamedev that had nothing to do with games. that gives us some pretty strong clues as to what's going on. it was certainly legible, i'll give you that. there are lots of screenshots from that era of people laughing at the incogruous topic labels.

anyway, in the current iteration of the algorithm (the one that's been in use in uh… all of 2024, i guess?), at least when i'm on the “For You” page (people call this the fyp btw), i don't think i've seen these explicit labels, so the legibility is out of the window. but it seems like things are still based on topics/interests/whatever, and they've gotten a lot better at it; it seems to have a more precise idea of what you'd find interesting, and is better at finding things that match it. it's actually alarmingly good at it. you can tap on a niche tweet, from the algorithmic timeline, and then you scroll down, and there's algorithmic suggestions under the tweet (in a section titled something like “discover more” in whatever language you're using) that are from stuff in exactly that niche.

and this is cool and all, but…

twitter is not meant to be a content slurry.
twitter is a social network.

how do i put it… there are certainly advantages to the app and website showing you tweets that might interest you. but it does it in a very impersonal way, and it was the personal aspect first and foremost that made twitter what it was, and to whatever extent it remains true, makes it still worth using at all.

it's really hard to fully convey this because like, from a certain perspective twitter is just giving me, and everyone else, more of what we like. isn't that good? but uh…

i can't form a relationship, parasocial or otherwise, with a stream of content, and an algorithm is not an audience.

maybe it's starting to come through now for some of you, but i think maybe it'd help if i illustrate it with an example?

twitter is not just for Tweets About [Thing].
it is for Tweets By People Interested In [Thing].

in other words, twitter is for subcultures and friend groups. like:

and i think this kind of generalises to a lot of people? like don't get me wrong, generally interesting content is also something twitter is for, but what made the site unique was the ability to really find people by your interests, not find content per se. the content is also an end in itself, sure, but it's primarily a means to connect people. twitter has been responsible for most of the friendships, romantic relationships, and useful acquaintanceships that have defined my adult life.

facebook is where you keep up with people you know but have little in common with (family, old highschool friends you've outgrown), and feel the eternal pressure of keeping up appearances. linkedin is facebook but for your colleagues. reddit is where you discuss your hobby. twitter is where you discuss the intersection of all your interests, and make friends that truly get you in the process.

or made, at least…

okay, but can't you still have that? doesn't the following timeline still exist?

yes. twitter's not quite dead yet. they're trying very hard (consciously or not) to make you forget what twitter's meant to be, but the following timeline's not completely dead yet. but here's the problem…

the algorithm expands the audience of everything, and it's killing the socialness

if it feels like all your tweets are blowing up too much lately, in all the wrong ways, you're not alone. and i think i know exactly why: it's the interest-based recommendation algorithm that's being pushed so hard.

the audience for a tweet is no longer mostly people who follow you and who your followers choose to spread it to (and so on). it's anyone who the algorithm thinks might find your tweet interesting or engaging.

this has a ton of implications that i'm not sure i can fully cover. but here's some things…

the algorithm is the death of the subculture

twitter has, historically, never had a “tech community” or a “gamedev community” or an “anime fanart community” or a “politics community” or what have you. well, the word “community” is so horribly vague and overused these days that i guess it kinda has, so let's drop that. rather, instead of a “tech community”, you have an uncountable number of little subcultures with an interest in tech. you don't have an anime fanart community, you have lots of little subcultures that, in broad strokes, you could say are interested in anime fanart. and so on.

the importance of this distinction is that these groups are not fungible, that is to say, they're not identical to eachother, not interchangeable, not even close. humans have an immense capacity for creating new kinds of diversity. we are so fractally interesting! yes, in broad strokes, there might be one hundred groups whose unifying theme is “programmers”. but that's only through the lens you've decided to look at them through. maybe some those groups are specifically women programmers. maybe some of those groups are specifically C programmers. maybe some of those groups are specifically programmers who hate C. but it goes deeper: maybe a further subset are specifically C programmers whose primary interest is 3D graphics. and some subset of them are emulator developers. and remember… this is just what the groups have in common between eachother, and through a particular lens. and as i hinted with the mention of women, common interests aren't the only things a group might have in common; a subculture might also be defined by like, a particular vibe, a particular philosophy, a particular style of interaction, or many other things i can't immediately think of.

(i apologise at this point if i'm misusing the word subculture but hopefully it's close enough.)

and unfortunately… the algorithm does not care for subcultures. it cares for interests alone. and it is crushing them all together at hyper-speed.

the endlessly antagonising subcultural hypercrush

one problem with merging subcultures together is uh… sometimes they hate eachother. more typically though, they just kinda don't get along? subcultural differences are just like cultural differences: if you put two people together from different subcultures who aren't really familiar with eachother, they're likely to accidentally antagonise eachother, or create misunderstandings. like:

a lack of diversity is bad, actually!

it's not just that subcultures antagonise eachother by being squished together that is the problem. it's that we lose something by forcing everyone into the same space.

first of all, there is a straightforward solution to the antagonism for people it affects: be boring! be as milquetoast and unobjectionable as possible! if everyone with your interest is now in the same ~community~ as you, simply avoid pissing anyone off.

i hope i do not need to explain why that is, by itself, destructive to culture.

i think some of you might think, oh, isn't this just cross-pollination? isn't that good? and yes, it is cross-pollination, but you can have too much of a good thing. a famous example of a nightmare scenario is how europeans visiting the americas for the first time brought horrible diseases with them that wiped out a lot of the native population because they lacked the europeans' immunity to them (yes i am aware there was also some deliberate spreading of disease and other genocidal activity, but it is indisputable that a significant part of the damage done was inadvertent).

but also like, the diversity of human experience and our shared cultural inheritance benefit not just from things being brought together, but also things being separated, and the constant ebb and flow between these trends. like, for example, the cold war did some wonderful things for science by effectively creating two separate worlds of researchers who couldn't fully communicate, and who therefore were able to pursue separate inventions and lines of research that wouldn't have happened otherwise; this is true even if it was also a wonderful thing that the cold war “ended” and allowed those scientific spheres to once again make full contact, resulting in its own wonderful things (like the international space station :). the benefits of that reunion couldn't have happened without the initial split; we can never really know, but i am convinced that some good things must have come out of this that couldn't have happened in a world where there was no cold war.

and it's like… can you imagine if different artistic scenes were never a thing? if every fucking electric guitar player was just the same. if it was all just rock, if there were no subgenres. who'd want to live in that fucking world.

i'm surely being overly apocalyptic here but, i hope i can convey a bit why too much cross-pollination at least has the potential to be bad, and is causing some damage.

but enough about subcultures

it's not just the horrifying subcultural hypercrush that's the problem here. it's also just that… you've lost control over and legibility of your own audience. sure, both were quite imperfect before, but it's so much worse now. uh, here's some examples of why this sucks.

DON'T YOU DARE BE VULNERABLE YOU MONSTER

being publicly vulnerable on twitter is one of the things that can be wonderful, that can be very rewarding. yes, you could keep your heart locked away in a private account, you could hide the interests you feel embarassed about, you could pretend not to have emotions some would find problematic, you could avoid sharing that art you're not very good at, you could avoid talking about a niche political thing that's important to you but some people will HATE you for. yes, it's risky, someone might in fact make fun of you or get mad at you. but your world, and your subculture, and your circle of friends, and your own soul, are going to be so impoverished if you never feel able to do this. sometimes you gotta let it out! sometimes you gotta cultivate a culture that allows someone to make themselves vulnerable sometimes.

but of course, it's not just about yourself. to be vulnerable requires having a space where you feel, or are, at a low risk of bad outcomes happening. and twitter — yes, even public twitter — has been able to be that space for many people. hell, i think it is for everyone to some extent. it's not a binary: vulnerable versus invulnerable. you cannot choose your vulnerabilities entirely. it's a sliding scale.

and you know what you need to feel emotionally secure in being vulnerable? LEGIBILITY OF YOUR AUDIENCE. it's really easy to be vulnerable around your friends. (…i hope. your friends allow you to be vulnerable, right?) but when you don't know who you're being vulnerable to, that's threatening.

and practically, you need CONTROL OF YOUR AUDIENCE. people aren't gonna willingly sign up for an emotional whipping by randos if it just keeps happening. you gotta be able to keep the people who can't handle it out.

and, yes, imperfect as it was, this used to not be so risky on twitter! you could cultivate a following that wouldn't retweet your vulnerableposts, or wouldn't do so if they thought their followers would be dicks about it, and you could actually be a pretty open person.

but you guessed it. the algorithm does not care if you're being vulnerable. it only cares for interests and engagement. it'll show your tweets to the absolute worst people for them to see it.

remember what i said earlier about the algorithm forcing people to become milquetoast? this is the same deal, but rather than it being about culture, it's about emotions, and politics. though i guess Everything In The World Is Exactly The Same really.

yeah, this was the thing that actually pissed me off enough to get me to write this post. which is kinda remarkable, because normally i really struggle to write blog posts, and normally i'd respond to something with tweets, but like… i am so angry right now about what is happening to the spaces i used to call home, and for once i can channel that anger into something productive. i really hope you're enjoying reading this so far, btw! <3

making up a guy to get mad at

okay so this is another online kinda expression but there's this idea of “making up a guy to get mad at”. basically it's when someone… invents an imaginary person that symbolises, say, their political opponents, but which has some absurd combination of opinions or something that either does not exist in reality, or is very much unrepresentative of reality, and then they just post about it. or in the case of twitter, tweet about it. they're expressing anger or disgust or whatever at a kind of person who literally only exists in their imagination. if that's not what “making up a guy to get mad at” means to you then uh well let's just roll with it anyway.

point is, people love shadowboxing fake political enemies and deluding themselves into thinking they're real-boxing real ones. and the key part of this is the “making up a guy”. also i mean “politics” also in a very broad sense. everything is politics at some level. Everything In The World Is Exactly The Same.

anyway, uh, because the made-up-guy-to-get-mad-at symbolises a political opponent, they're not always an entirely fictional entity. people love to project preconceived notions onto people they think are their political opponents. often self-flattering ones. and, alas, the “main character” problem of twitter, or the “eye of sauron” thing, has always been deeply connected to this! people love finding real, flesh and blood, guys to get mad at, but they're also in a sense guys who are made up because the beliefs they have about this person are wrong.

and the algorithm is, you guessed it, making this worse, because it's smashing groups together, and so people are getting exposed to other people who they assume have particular commonalities and differences in worldview and philosophy and so on, but who… don't actually. the algorithm is very good at finding these guys for them. and then the making-up and the getting-mad-at happen basically reflexively at this point.

if you think i've lost the plot at this point, i assure you, this is extremely real. i've seen it happen. i have had this incredibly weird long conversation with a weird hostile guy replying to a friend of mine, who was hostile about things they assumed she thinks, but she doesn't, and… slowly, by trying to model how the hell they came to their conclusions, and by asking them pointed questions to verify it, i realised… oh my god. the algorithm is making up guys for them to get mad at. AND THEY HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA

Part AAAA/CMVLI helvete we are in hell now please save us:
THEY HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA

the worst thing is. the really truly worst thing. is that so many active twitter users seemingly have no fucking idea that this is happening.

the reason it's bad is because when you realise you're in a toxic environment you can uh, adapt to it. consciously, i mean. eventually natural selection will sort of… make things more manageable (but not good), but we are humans and we are not only social creatures, we are very intelligent social creatures. we can identify problems and figure out ways to make the best of things despite them. we are not blindly driven by instinct.

BUT THAT REQUIRES US TO NOTICE THE PROBLEM TO BEGIN WITH!

this is like… almost a trap for autistic people? am i allowed to say that because i'm autistic? but also at the same time it can be a trap certain autistic people are immune to and particularly gifted in being able to identify? i guess what i'm really saying is, it's a really terrible trap for people with no social awareness, or limited social awareness. you have to be able to… not just read the room, but read the website, and so many people DO NOT KNOW. and hell, i don't think they can be convinced.

like okay i might be going too far here in my assumptions, but i think there's like:

idk maybe there's some other groups also. i can't rotate this shape in my mind enough to find all the vertices. but, you see the problem, right?

lack of social awareness has always been the thing that makes someone Annoying on twitter. but you at least could insulate yourself from the unaware people to some extent by controlling who follows you. (you can also try to help them! lots of people start unaware but eventually develop that mental muscle and become someone you can be friends with. i am being vulnerable here by even talking about this, so please don't crucify me.)

but now we have a massive problem that… probably isn't limited to just people with generally poor social awareness? it's just that…

IT'S ALL SO ILLEGIBLE! you could always infer things based on followers-you-follow and stuff like that before. but now people will just find your tweets out of nowhere and you have no idea what subculture they're from, you possibly don't even realise they're not from yours.

we are in hell and we don't know it and that is half the fucking problem

aren't there political implications—

don't you fucking dare, okay.

blood for the blood god. wait i meant Engagement. Engagement for the Blood God! wait i meant—

man i somehow haven't even talked about engagement yet! just the topics thing. but this is probably the other half of the algorithm problem?

look, i do not know how the algorithm knows what interests you. but a frequent criticism of algorithmic recommendations is that they tend to prioritise the nebulous, nefarious concept of “engagement” above all else. and it seems very plausible that this is true of the current twitter algorithm.

basically, either all engagement is equal to the algorithm, or it at least probably isn't very good at classifying what kind of engagement some piece of content produces. does it know the difference between reflexive outrage and joy? can it tell anger from love? can it understand what separates boredom from indifference? can it tell what sings to the heart apart from what blackens the soul?

i don't know! it's a black box, it's beyond my insight. honestly, if it's based on machine learning, then it's probably beyond the insight of twitter's own engineers. they do not know what they have built. or, maybe i should say, they do not know what they have summoned. that should scare you. but it is par for the course in the modern technology industry, for better or… worse.

but i do at least suspect that it might be kinda indifferent to whether something makes you outraged or whether it makes you happy, and that's really, really bad news for people who can't control their outrage reflex, and for their victims.

the most upsetting thing would of course be if outrage bait is an intentional feature of the algorithm. and that leads me onto…

the algorithm is the “solution” to its own problem

i really don't know what goes on in the-company-formerly-known-as-twitter-inc's executives' and engineers' heads. i must emphasise this. at this point i am really in the land of pure speculation, i'm giving you just a hypothesis of my own that i don't think anyone else has even influenced me on. so take it with a lot of salt, but…

look, we all know that twitter's been in a nosedive since elon bought it. we may disagree on the reasons exactly, but i think the site is really dying. and my guess as to why the algorithm is like this now is that it's partly a response to that death. but it is, as i hope i've made clear, also responsible for a lot of that death.

basically i think it went something like this:

and. fuck i'm going to cry, aren't i.

part number the somethingth: fuck i'm going to cry

look. i am very, very online. too online, clearly. i am still hopelessly addicted to twitter, though maybe this'll be the adrenaline-fuelled rant that gets me to finally acknowledge i must move on from it. but you gotta understand. i've been on it my entire adult life, more than a decade. it is responsible for seemingly everything good about my life, it's brought me almost all my friends, it's immensely enriched me in so many ways, it took me from a reclusive and boring and socially-unaware person to someone with dreams and friends and a vision and a life which is… not just värdigt att leva (TL note: worth living), but which feels meaningful and joyous and so many other things.

and like. the reason i feel i know and understand all of the shit going down on twitter now is that i've been on the site so terribly long that i've been, like, all the types of guy i talked about above. all of them. i'm only human. we are fallible and we are prone to change. and i can even tell the scorched-earth engagement strategy works, because regrettably, eventually i caved to them pushing the algorithmic timeline on me, and i do check it often. too often. it's definitely engaging. but it's so superficial. i find myself bookmarking so much stuff from it thinking it's interesting and i'll want to refer to it later, but i never do, because without that social connection everything is just… meaningless. i may as well just check hacker news or reddit or something. and like… while my following timeline has been slowly dying, it still brings life. the reason i haven't totally quit the site is not the engagement. i will eventually flip the switch in my brain to make myself not care about it. what brings me back is the people there i care about, who are my friends or who just interest me. you know, for all the engagement the algorithmic timeline has brought me, it's had almost zero lasting impact on me beyond wasting my time while making me feel like i'm learning things. meanwhile the schizoautist isekaijin pico-subculture i've ended up following lately has already gotten to my heart in a really good way. so…

i mean, look, there's too many ways twitter has influenced me and i can't list them all, but here's one very symbolic one: why am i called “hikari_no_yume” online? well, it was the name of my secret public twitter alt once… i took “hikari” from my ffxiv character and i needed to attach something to that, and i liked the idea of 's dream or dream of and so, “hikari_no_yume” it was. and that alt gave me an outlet for a different part of my personality. you know, people don't just use anime avatars because they like anime. the profile pic is a second face, arguably the primary face for someone who is online, and the username is a second name, and this is… beautiful, this is one of many reason why online spaces are so precious. and in the process i accidentally created my MOTIVATING EPITHET, the SUMMARY OF MY SOUL, a username for me that somehow only becomes more meaningful and more fitting with time. and, like, that's why you should make a twitter alt. i'm serious.

except of course, twitter is not what it was, now. you can't have that experience i had. it's dying. and it's just… it's just tragic. and it's so unnecessary, that's what upsets us all. twitter was a sustainable business, twitter could have kept going another ten years, twitter had to, damn it. twitter was the public commons, a public good, twitter was such a beautiful thing, even if it also had its daily dose of terror and queer disposability and tedious political bullshit and whatever else. it was not just a website, it was the website of our times. maybe. at least to people like me, and i know i'm not alone.

we can rebuild it! we have the techno—

no, we can't. i really fucking wish we could, but the problem is twitter is not just a web app you can install, it is a specific website, it is the community that formed on it, and it can't be replicated somewhere else. you can never rekindle magic, you can only create something similar. and people have tried! there's the fediverse, there's bluesky, there… was (;-;) cohost, i guess there's facebook's threads thing, there's a few others that are more obscure. and they each capture something of what twitter was, but it's like… three websites that each have a different 1% of what twitter was, are not twitter individually, nor are they twitter combined.

i guess some of you still won't get it but like… look, i'm a diverse™ person with diverse interests. twitter has been an amazing site for someone like me, because it really contains multitudes. it contains people from all walks of life, people from every artistic genre, people from every country, people speaking every language, people from every niche subculture, etc etc. it also had the amazing privilege we take for granted of it just being the default website, the canonical one in its class. twitter invented the concept of twitter, and it was always the biggest and best one. and you know, network effects compound. i really do want twitter's successors to recreate the magic, but they can never get all the way there. even if there's only one of them, because… it'll still be a different website, y'know.

man i've also barely talked about politics. twitter has also had the special position of being The place for journos and politicos and whatever else to hang out. that happened by accident, in a less cynical and less fractured time. you really can't replicate that.

if i may have your attention for one more moment

the final thing i want to say is something i should've weaved into this post somewhere earlier, but didn't, so it's kind of awkwardly placed at the end here. but it does also have special significance maybe, and has a value beyond twitter, so maybe it's a good parting message.

i think the most important skills you need to survive on a site like twitter are social awareness and an ability to control your reflexive outrage, cringe and disgust. the former i think i've already covered. but i cannot stress enough how important the latter is. one of the things about twitter that can destroy you if you let it take hold of you is there is always a guy you could get mad at, for a multitude of reasons. and, like, some of those reasons might even feel, or actually be, quite legitimate. but you must not give in. it's just… even if the fate of the world, or millions of people, or whatever, is at stake, reflexive outrage just eats away at the soul and can make you a horrible person to be around. this is true for cringe and for disgust, too. maybe there's some other things too, but it feels like these are the reflexes that rot the brains of half the website, and… like, i totally understand why it happens, but… please. if that's you… please heal your heart.

and so i close

thanks for reading. i cannot believe i just wrote something this long or detailed or comprehensible in so little time. i guess it's fitting that it's about… the website that defined my life. i hope it was… good? fuck. if you actually read this in one sitting, uh, please drink some water and look after yourself, okay. i did take some brief breaks while writing this. goodnight