The Bird And The Snake

One four zero, three numbers in time,
A short sweet verse of astringent rhyme,
Tweet-tweet said the bird from atop its tree,
But alas the snake, it did not see.

If you follow me on Twitter, then depending on how much attention you pay to my profile you may have noticed I've been winding down my footprint on the site. I've unfollowed about a thousand people at the time of writing and I intend to reduce it even more. Like many people I've been weighing my options of how to respond to the future direction of the website. For me personally, right now my intention is to streamline my account then make it private. I don't know whether I will stay on the platform in the long term, that decision all hangs on how the platform changes going forward, but the direction of travel right now feels as if I'll eventually take my leave.

Unless you've been living under a rock, or have no social media presence at all on any social network, you will likely have heard by now that Elon Musk has bid to take over Twitter. A lot of people are rightly concerned by this move but a surprising amount of people think this won't affect them in any way. That complacency is the reason Cambridge Analytica was able to do what it did. If you use a platform, you are influenced by everyone else who uses that platform whether you are aware of that fact or not. Your presence and the visibility of that presence is constantly manipulated by an algorithm which takes as input the collective contribution of every single user on the platform, in the case of Twitter that means every single tweet, retweet, impression, like, and yes even the things you think no-one else sees like your private lists, DMs, bookmarks etc all of it feeds into the database that the website is built upon which the algorithm analyses.

I have a degree in Computer Science, I am a software developer, a game designer, a web developer, and many other things, most of which don't relate to the core topic or focus on this blog. I mention it here for that reason, it's not something I usually reference here but it is apt to include it so that you don't think what I have to say is based on speculation alone. One of the concepts that you learn about when you become a web developer is the Model-View-Controller architecture that is used to design websites. A surprising amount of people have developed misconceptions about the capability of the algorithm - or rather, algorithms, plural, as there is more than one at play. People seem to believe that an algorithm sees Twitter the same way you do, with access to some pieces of analytics you can't see but that's not the case. What you see is a user interface, it was designed for you to look at, and the controls that it provides give you a means to interact with the model which sits behind that interface. In a database driven application like Twitter, that model can simply be considered the database, it is that database which the algorithm accesses directly, the raw data which it processes, without limitation. In short, to the algorithm, privacy does not exist. These aren't the ramblings of a crazy person, this is how systems which rely on information discovery are built, or you may have heard it referred to as data mining.

You might argue that you don't care about numbers, you're not an influencer, Twitter isn't a source of income for you etc and that such manipulation doesn't affect you, but you would be wrong. Most users at this point are aware of the two feeds Twitter provides them by default "Home" and "Latest Tweets" and the fact that the former is curated by an algorithm and the latter is everything in a chronological order, except it's not. Both are curated by the algorithm, the second is indeed in chronological order but it isn't "everything" as you might think at first glance. If you follow hundreds, or thousands of people on Twitter then you probably don't try to "catch up" on everything that was tweeted since you last used the app each time you return to it, so you can be forgiven for thinking you simply missed tweets. If you're particularly attentive however and like to visit individual profiles, sooner or later you will realise that more than half of the tweets made by the people you follow never make it to your feed even when you're in the "latest tweets" view.

What you see is manipulated. While Twitter can deny this, it is self evident. Porn does not appear as trending topics [even though the feed when you click through to them often does]. Your trending topics show trends in the language you prefer to use on the platform everything else is filtered out, Twitter doesn't make any secret of the fact this happens but ardently argues the platform is incapable of filtering content. If an oven can bake a cake, it can bake bread, and you don't have to look very far to find the breadcrumbs.

Let's put aside the intricacies of the platform's architecture for a moment and focus instead on what might happen going forward. First of all a few facts. Twitter was founded in 2006 and for the first 12 years of its existence it was not profitable, it consistently made a loss. The only reason it survived was because of partnerships, corporate and institutional investors, funding rounds, and venture capital, on top of its advertising revenue. Today, Twitter receives 90% of its revenue from advertising and the remaining 10% from those same sources. Elon Musk has publicly stated that he wants to move Twitter away from reliance on advertising and that he favours a subscription based model which he admits "would be a hard sell" - but he doesn't care, he wants the platform to be profitable and is willing to shed users to make it profitable. Step into speculation and it's likely that Twitter will put greater emphasis on Twitter Blue its current subscription service, it's also likely that features that are currently free will slowly be made exclusive to it, Musk has already suggested making the ability to quote a tweet a premium feature, it's not a great leap from such a stupid suggestion to extend that to retweeting for instance.

Beyond these concerns however, more users who are considering leaving the platform are concerned about the possibility that it will become even more toxic than it already is. Twitter has problems and one of those problems is the inconsistency with which it applies its terms of service. Content is routinely reported that violates these terms of service and that content remains on the platform, meanwhile some contentious posts which don't actually violate the terms are reported and removed. This isn't an issue unique to one ideology as some people like to make it out to be, this happens to everyone right now. The lack of transparency and the piss-poor appeals process and near impossibility of engaging with a human being throughout the process has made Twitter's moderation laughable to say the least. Meanwhile conspiracies abound as to whether Twitter actually wants to remove the content at all, as anything inflammatory that garners a reaction increases engagement and as we've already seen in other forms of media there are companies whose entire commercial viability hinges on their ability to stoke the flames.

Musk has often described himself as a free speech absolutist, supposedly willing to tolerate ideology he doesn't agree with in defence of platforming controversial ideologies that he does agree with. A quick Google however will throw up article after article that gives cause for concern and casts a long shadow of doubt over those claims. His personal and professional life is irrelevant here however, what is relevant is that absolute free speech is incompatible with moderation in any form beyond what is legally required and unfortunately as Twitter is considered in law as a publishing platform its not currently legally liable for the content it hosts. That means left to its own devices there's very little Twitter's moderation team would be legally obligated to remove if you chose to go down this free-for-all path, which ironically won't be free and definitely won't be for all. Retaliatory Regulation by Governments is the only hope for salvation from this doctrine but the thought of relying on the US or even the UK government to challenge this ideology is not something that inspires confidence.

On top of all this, for a platform that has a reputation for having a problem with harassment and abuse, Twitter does have a penchant for introducing features that facilitate it, which is either incredibly misguided and ill thought out, or intentional; the latter of those two was initially the least plausible in my mind but as time marches forward my view shifts further and further toward the inclination that Twitter's brand is actually built on toxicity. From the ability to use private lists to follow accounts without them knowing, and the ability to keep track of them even if they change their @ name, to the ability to control who can reply to a tweet, which admittedly has its uses but arguably should be disabled for public figures whose abuse of the feature prevents engagement from their constituents.

Twitter's latest offering is yet another feature stolen from another platform with the introduction of Twitter Circles. This is a rebranding of the experimental Flocks feature, which will allow people to make tweets that only a subset of their followers can see that they explicitly control, essentially Twitter's implementation of Facebook's post-level privacy controls. This feature is one of the reasons I left Facebook over 10 years ago and deleted my account never looking back, it was abundantly clear that the people who used the feature were "collecting" friends to inflate the numbers on their profile to make themselves feel good but locking down the content they shared to only a select few which defeats the point of being "friends" with them in the first place. This isn't the only feature that Twitter is testing however.

Twitter "Facets" takes the concept of having an "alt" account and tries to incorporate it into your profile. With this new feature you'll be able to create what will essentially be alter egos for your account, all the same @ but with individual content streams that people can choose to follow. You'll be able to create for example an "XXX" Facet that you can tweet porn to under your @ and only people following that Facet will see it. Make no mistake this isn't about providing functionality to the user, this is about data mining, nothing more. With separate accounts you create separate data streams that Twitter associates with two "different" people as far as it is aware.

The introduction of Facets is an attempt to make you "nest" those alt accounts under your existing account so that all content posted on those profiles and all data associated with it can be associated with you as a single targetable advertising entity. You might be interested in pausing here for a moment and considering the ramifications of this feature, you may consider it a choice whether to use it right now but that likely won't be the case going forward. In Twitter's terms of service hitherto sparingly enforced it is actually a violation to have multiple accounts without a valid reason for doing so - such as business accounts vs personal. With reform of the terms of service on the horizon it's not unimaginable to think you'll be forced to merge any alt accounts you have into your main - you can already be forced to choose which one you want to keep if twitter actually flags your accounts; or perhaps you may be required to pay to keep them separate - Elon Musk has already made it quite clear paying for a service is your alternative to invasive advertising implying he has no problem with it being even more invasive if you're using the free version.  On the topic of business accounts Musk has also already suggested Government and Corporate accounts and anyone promoting a product will have to pay to have an account - that includes all of you authors and streamers who like to promote your books or your twitch accounts.

Twitter was founded with a purpose, as was Facebook. They both evolved as platforms, added new features, shifted focus, changed perspective, changed priorities, and mutated into what they are today. In the process they no longer serve the purpose for which they were created. Twitter was created as a microblogging platform, a place to share short 140 character status updates and connect with other people with shared interests. Facebook was created as a student network limited only to those who had academic email addresses at the institutions they attended who were part of Facebook's network. The early days of Facebook were a time when people openly shared their phone numbers right on their profile in their bio, some even shared their addresses, you belonged to the network for your School, College, or University, you could actually meet people through it, you had to be a member to view profiles, everything was public by default and it was useful, it actually served its purpose and provided a service to the user. Twitter was a powerful tool that allowed people to engage without using their real names, without having to share their location, without having to personally identify themselves in any way. Facebook was for people you knew, or had some connection to already, and Twitter was for people you didn't know but wanted to get to know.

This is no longer the case for either platform. Today if you have a profile on Facebook you lock it down as much as you can, you add people you know and you're careful about what you share, or like I said above, you inflate your numbers adding anyone that will accept you but use the post-level privacy options to hide your content and only show it to a select few. Today if you have a Twitter profile you've probably been on the platform for quite some time, joining as a new user with no established connection is incredibly difficult. It's near impossible to find like-minded people on the platform as a new user unless you have an "in" that can vouch for you, which you can argue is exclusionary or clique like, but I would argue it is demonstrative of the distrust people now have in the platform. If you have less than 100 followers, and follow less than 100 people, most Twitter users will automatically assume you're a bot, a spammer, or a troll - especially if your @ is @somerandomname123456789

In the showbiz world there's a name for celebrities as a collective, the Glitterati, a portmanteau of Glitter and Illuminati mostly used in a derogatory way to refer to the insular nature of those who are most prominent in the industry. The users of Twitter have jokingly been referred to as the the Twitterati for years but that moniker now seems to be living up to its affiliation; there is a transformation underway on the platform where power is being concentrated, what was once shaped by the collective users is now moving towards the vision of a select few. This was happening long before Musk made a bid to take over the platform, but make no mistake his intention is not to "save" it from this concentration of power, it's to be the one that controls it. No business man ever acquires anything they do not see as an asset - he knows exactly why he wants the platform and knows exactly what he wants to do with it. When people tell you who they are, listen. Now is not the time for this "well maybe he will be different once he's in control" bullshit, we saw how that played out the last time a billionaire was handed power and control.

This isn't something I want to be a part of or support.

I've used twitter since 2007 when I was in University studying for my degree. It was a welcome alternative to Facebook and gave me exactly what I wanted - a connection to the wider world that was not limited by my social circle. Over the years I've gone through about a dozen accounts. I've racked up thousands of followers, hundreds of thousands of tweets, deleted it all and started over many times. The account I have now has endured the longest and to be quite honest I am impressed it lasted this long, now standing just over 6 years. I think the longest break I took from the platform was about 3 years.

I am not new to online communities, tomorrow I turn 34 years old and in that time I have been a member of Yahoo*, MSN*, Bebo, Friends Reunited, WAYN, MySpace, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, and Twitter of the bigger names, and a member of smaller more local networks or Gay centred networks, Gaydar, GaySpeak, QueerUK, OutNation, to name a few. *Yahoo and MSN are synonymous with now minor search engines but both were also social networks back in their early days, with Yahoo Groups and MSN Groups serving as forerunners to the pages and groups features that Facebook and others would eventually introduce. I wasn't just a contributor either, I served as moderator on a few of these sites for several years. They all eventually succumbed to the same problem and declined as a result - their admins tolerated too much in the name of growth and created an environment that became toxic to the users and they eventually left.

The same pattern always followed, the community was born, it had a purpose, a demographic, it grew, it plateaued and became a place that was safe for its users and stable, then the owners tried to push for growth, against the protest from users things slowly changed, more and more conflict was tolerated on the platforms in an effort to expand their audience. The platforms stopped serving their demographic and even removed features that were core to their unique selling point as a brand and slowly they began to lose their long standing members, but their user numbers overall continued to rise so the owners didn't care, but the users they sacrificed for growth were the users who were loyal and who would have stayed, while those coming into the platforms on a trend were fleeting. When the last of the original members had left, and only those following a trend remained, as soon as they got bored the numbers declined and the platforms eventually collapsed.  This phenomenon is not unique to the digital realm, this is the story of gentrification and it happens repeatedly in the real world and destroys communities.

Twitter has lasted a remarkably long time in Internet Years, as has Facebook but the arrogance of those in control of both platforms matches that of the people who thought MySpace would never fall. No-one who owns something they truly believe will appreciate in value chooses to sell it before it hits the peak of its value. Jack Dorsey took Twitter public in 2013, cashing in on the perceived value of the platform, he has since moved on to other endeavours, as CEO of Block Inc, a $18 billion company, in contrast to Twitter's current $5 billion, he isn't going to lose much even now as a minority shareholder in Twitter if the platform fails he'll be fine. The company is of course worth more today after Musk's bid, than when Dorsey took the company public but that is perhaps more of an indication of the cult of personality that surrounds Elon Musk, intrinsic value is not the same as perceived value however, as illustrated by Twitter's 12 year stretch without turning a profit, the platform only continued because other people saw value in it and chose to continue to invest. This is also the case with Tesla, a company which under Musk's leadership went 18 years without turning a profit - reading that article you might find it interesting to note that Tesla is concerned about competition and worried it may not remain profitable, its vanguard advantage is now waning as the EV market is significantly larger than it was; in tandem it's interesting to note that Musk has been selling Tesla shares worth billions, some speculate the move is an effort to fund his acquisition of Twitter, a more cynical mind may cast aspersions of rats and ships.

Politics aside the thing I find most amusing about the prospect of Twitter failing isn't the disbelief people have that it could, but rather the disbelief people have that users might actually leave. As I said before, if you are a twitter user who has any significant relationship to other users on the platform you likely aren't new, you've likely been there for a fair few years at this point. The denial of the idea that people will leave is nothing more than a stage of grief. Twitter has not served its demographic for many years now. I am a millennial, my use of the platform is a habit at this point, not a loyalty. I joined the platform when I was at the end of my teenage years, entering my twenties. I am 34 tomorrow and in the last 14 years the generations that came after me went to Snapchat, then to Vine, and now to TikTok - Twitter isn't gaining new followers from these demographics, Twitter's user base is predominantly in the 25 to 34 age bracket, followed by 35 to 49; new users are people that didn't want to join Twitter in the first place when it served its demographic and provided a service, they're attracted to the platform not for what it was but for what it has become - a cesspit. If you're a long-standing user of the platform, you need to take off the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia and look at the platform with honest eyes and see it for what it is, not what you remember it to be in its glory days.

The disbelief that people have that users might actually leave is amusing because it's detached from reality, they're already leaving and Twitter has quietly admitted it has been overstating its user numbers for the last three years.  Personally, I have seen people who follow me already leave. There's a tool called Unfollower Spy, which some twitter users are afraid to use because of automated tweets, but you can actually opt out of those. One of the features of this tool however is its ability to search for inactive accounts. You can set a time-frame, like the last day, week, month, year, or from a given date, etc, and see all the accounts that have not tweeted since then. I was following around 1,300 people before I started winding down my twitter account. I used that tool out of curiosity to find out how many were inactive. I set the cut off date as January 1st, 2022. Around 300 of the accounts I was following had not tweeted at all this year. That's roughly a quarter of the people I was following are no longer using the platform. It's easy to look at your profile and see the numbers remain high and think that means everyone is still there, but as has been the theme of this post, what you see through an interface, versus what the underlying data actually tells you is very different.

In winding down my account I've chosen to focus on the people I actually interact with, the people I actually want to stay in touch with. In the meantime I am looking for other platforms, somewhere to go that will serve my needs. I'm not a visual person, Instagram does not interest me, I don't particularly like taking pictures of myself and videos appeal even less so to me, Youtube and TikTok don't appeal - I'll still consume content on both of those but I have no intention of becoming a content creator or contributor. This whole process isn't as disheartening as you would think, to the contrary actually. When I left MySpace it felt like it was time, the same was true with Facebook, and Tumblr, and I'm approaching that mindset with Twitter - I've already purged my profile of old tweets en masse, everything older than a few weeks is already gone, and I've deleted hundreds of DM conversations. I know the murky world of data protection laws mean it isn't as straight forward as deleting a tweet, meaning the data isn't actually gone, there will be residual data I can't purge without deactivating the account entirely, but I am fine with that for now, I haven't reached that point, yet. I will reserve judgement and make that choice based on what actually happens, but the fact remains I've been here before, many times as have many others my age, we have seen this game played out, time and again, if things are different I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I really don't think they will be.

To that end, RIP Twitter, you're already dead to me. You're just a ghost now, lingering in the periphery, trying to decide whether or not it's your time to cross over. I'll stay with you for a while yet, but I won't stay until the end; I'm not going to ruin the good memories I have with the shit show I know is coming.

Update: [2022-11-30]

Since writing this post I have deactivated my twitter account and left the platform.  It has been about a month since I did this now, and I don't regret it. I hate to say I told you so [that's a lie, I love it] but most of what I said above has now come to pass and it hasn't surprised me in the least.  What remains of the platform at this point is a car crash that many people are now rubbernecking, and I won't lie, the schadenfreude is gleeful even if the sorrow at the loss is bittersweet.