"Mainstream social media needs to realise that the current deal, in which we exchange our entire personal dossier for an opportunity to be hidden out of sight whilst we're force-fed with editorially-sanctioned news, is wearing very, very thin."
I looked at his Twitter profile, and realised I couldn't actually see any of his content at all. I could see Promoted Tweets, a “Who To Follow” block, a “Topics to Follow” block, Retweets… If I'd scrolled down a little further I could probably, in fairness, have found a Tweet of his own. But the reality is that Twitter profile pages are now such a chaotic daub of digital migraine, that there's just too great a disincentive to bother.
Yes, what little chance the average person ever had of being visible in such an overcrowded environment, has steadily been eroded to a new, subterranean low. Eroded, in fact, to the point where even when we make a deliberate effort to notice them, ordinary people are swamped out of sight by what the platform wants us to look at instead.
Let's dispense with the illusion. Twitter is no longer a social network. It's slowly transformed into an editorially-curated news portal, increasingly dominated by large publishers rather than peer to peer chat. And the content management dynamics have evolved towards those of a news blog, where non-publishers are relegated to low-visibility “comment threads”, and do not define the topics. Indeed, even the commenting system is steadily being closed off, as Twitter opts both to hide Replies at whim, and give publishers a means to block Replies outright.
Deluged with adverts, Twitter is now more in keeping with the news portals of twenty years ago than it is with the idea of a peer to peer social network. Look, for example, at the main “Explore” page. It's not an overview of Twitter as a whole. It's a news portal. And its high commitment to user-friendliness contrasts starkly with the trashed down, migraineous hell of profile pages. There's little doubt about where Twitter wants its users' eyes focused - on the news portal.
But the story for many of the old portal providers, we should remind ourselves, did not end well. In fact, there has not been an instance of anyone fully turning an already successful web project into a portal without suffering commercial damage. AltaVista was an incredibly popular search engine in the late 1990s. Then it turned into a portal and… Well, where is it now?
Twitter doesn't merely want to add editorially-curated news publishing to its traditional array of functions. It wants to focus on that to the extent that everything else, other than paid ads, is backwatered.
If you're a celebrity, a household name or an approved news outlet, you essentially are the news, so provided you publish within the confines of Twitter's tolerances, you have a voice. If you're not, you're not, and whilst there is currently still scope for unknowns to build an audience, it's an incredibly labour-intensive process. Almost all of the major “indie” account successes on Twitter have been fed from behind the scenes by established profile-networks and/or established publishing outlets. For everyone else, there's a ceiling, and even for those with immense talent, that ceiling is comparatively low, and getting lower.
The colossal labour investment required to build audience reach in the 2020s must also be offset against the increasing risk of suspension. Twitter's suspension rate has already topped the one million accounts per day mark, and whilst most of the casualties are bots, the net is being cast ever wider across the live community. The policing of speech is now approaching the level of hysteria.
And disciplinary measures are not the only controls Twitter is exercising over what people say. We also have to recognise the way news spotlighting systems osmose down into the peer to peer discussion, so that even when the public do have a voice, they only use it to talk about “hot topics” anyway. The grip that these huge sites now have on what their users talk about, is unthinkably strong. It is indisputably the case that if the average user Tweets about a done-to-death “hot topic”, they are vastly more likely to be seen than if they Tweet a new and interesting idea. There's built-in motivation to stick to the script.
But for Twitter, there's major danger in heading further down this road. The more Twitter filters out peer-generated discussion and bulldozes ad-strewn, publisher-driven news into its visible environs, the more vulnerable it becomes to attack from other news delivery systems. The only thing currently keeping Twitter at the top of the news delivery food chain, is its integration of the public voice. Take away the public voice, and it becomes just another news site. And slowly, Twitter is taking away the public voice. It's becoming an editorial curation, which controls content visibility way beyond the simple management of rule-breaches.
And let's not kid ourselves that this progressive hiding of content is about app store rules, with platforms the size of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram cowering in fear of being dumped by Apple. If Apple dumps Twitter, Facebook and Instagram it doesn't have an app store. Apple has already shown double standards, consistently blind-eyeing Twitter's failure to eradicate all sorts of offensive and illegal content, whilst spot-banning smaller networks for lesser breaches of the rules.
So no, it's not about fear of app store bans, and neither is it a real concern about the public manipulating political outcomes. Social media bosses don't care whether elections are fair. It's already been shown that they've knowingly sat back and watched the manipulation of political outcomes with popcorn in hand. So again, no. What this push towards an editorial lockout is really about, is advertising. These huge platforms want to be considered “safe” by advertisers, and they know that if they don't fall into line with brand values, advertisers will go elsewhere.
As a business, you may be tempted to see that as a positive. But if platforms such as Twitter are focusing public attention on generic news stories and “hot topics”, rather than encouraging people to express their individual passions, how do they know which ads to serve? The answer is, they don't. I've accepted targeted marketing on a couple of my Twitter accounts, and I haven't yet seen a single relevant ad.
And it gets worse. Twitter search has now taken to rejecting certain keywords it doesn't like, under the construct that you “must have been looking for something else”. I typed Wetherspoon into Twitter's M2 Mobile search. Wetherspoon was the pub chain that high-key dumped social media in 2018, and Twitter appears to have taken deep offence. Obviously, people still mention Wetherspoon on Twitter. It's a popular brand. But if you search the keyword, you get “Did you mean: Witherspoon”, followed by a series of results for Witherspoon, and no mention of Wetherspoon whatsoever. Blatant manipulation of results, for what appears to be the pettiest of reasons. And maintaining such tactics amid a pandemic which is hitting the hospitality industry incredibly hard, shows what sort of people run these platforms…
Anyone who thinks Twitter stands for business should take note. These vast, heavily parasitic, attention-blagging machines, which knowingly steal content by proxy to drive their sham of an advertising network, are not on the side of business. They're only on the side of money.
Even the language social platforms use to describe their offerings insinuates their contempt for users. “Here is your feed” is something farmers say to their sheep and cattle, and the parallel doesn't end there. But we're slowly waking up to the problem. Mainstream social media needs to realise that the current deal, in which we exchange our entire personal dossier for an opportunity to be hidden out of sight whilst we're force-fed with editorially-sanctioned news, is wearing very, very thin.
It all adds up to a system in which the public falsely believe there's some remote point in them tapping their keys, while businesses falsely believe they're targeting niche-profiled consumers. There's only one way to bring a truly targeted consumer to a product or service, and that's user-initiated search, a la Google. Classic inbound content marketing achieves this admirably. But far from increasing the prominence of its search function, Twitter has in fact made it less visible, to the point where it's now only available on the “portal” page. A page expressly designed to divert the user's attention away from their intended search and onto news items.
So, are alternative social platforms doing any better? Are they the answer? In a word, no.
None of them are recognising the fundamental issue that links status with visibility. And it doesn't have to be like that. Old style forums have never suffered from this problem. On an old style forum, a brand new member's voice is just as loud as a Reputation 2,000 Goldmember with 125K Thanks to their name. A celebrity is no more visible than a road sweeper. So don't tell me that social media can't be done any other way. It's done the way it's done because that black-hole treadmill system benefits the platforms. It shames users into importing their friends and existing audiences. And that builds the membership (and revenue potential) without the need for any publicity work or investment on the part of the platforms themselves. That is why social networks are set up as they are.
And don't imagine that platforms which claim to be algorithm-free are not hiding you just as the mainstreamers do. Don't ever believe the Fediverse is reliably federated. Try setting up accounts on different Fediverse instances, then posting on one, and searching your hashtag from another. You will sometimes see it. Other times you won't, and there will be no logical explanation as to why. And at other times still, you will see it, but only after an hour or so delay. Don't assume that alternative social media is not manipulating what you see. All social media manipulates what you see. The search functions can't find anything at all on some platforms. That's how bad it is.
Businesses in particular should remember, search is the only means to reliably attract properly targeted interest. Force-feeding does the opposite. So if you're a business, and you are posting on a platform where the search either can't instantly be found or doesn't work, you are wasting your time. Testing the search function should be the very first thing you do on an alternative social network. If you type in "Facebook" and get no results, either no one on the platform has ever mentioned Facebook, or the search is useless. Which is more likely? And if you can't find anyone else using the search, it's a logical conclusion that no one else can find you.
Meanwhile, the status element social media has introduced into online discourse is shameful.
Terms such as “Reply Guy” - pejoratively describing ordinary people whose only way to communicate on the platform is via the Reply function - show us how far Twitter has shifted away from its original purpose and immersed itself in classism.
Some people might question the use of a word as strong as “classism”, but in the past few years we've seen people with substantial Twitter audiences referring to obscure users as “peasants”, “plebs” or “begs”. I'm not saying these terms are typically coined without provocation, but they're facets of a highly elitist language which had all but vanished from everyday culture until the power dynamics of so-called social media came into play.
And the terms are not coming from the upper class. This language doesn't signify the return of the “toff”. It signifies the arrival of a new system of social judgement, in which individual people require a personal brand just to communicate without stigma.
At some point, this bubble is going to burst. It can't not.
And I don't just mean more people are going to delete Facebook and quit Twitter. I mean the whole concept of social media as we currently know it is going to crash. The whole thing is suffering from an inversion of imposter syndrome. It thinks it's entitled to its enormous success. But it's not.
I recently did a personal branding course. And do you know what one of the primary recommendations was, for the average person?… Protect your personal account.
I'll say it again… In fact I might even shout it… PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL ACCOUNT. As advised by a reputable (shout alert 2.0) PERSONAL BRANDING course. The value of social media's reach, to the average individual, is now so low that it's outweighed by the risk of reputational damage.
I stress, this is not branding for corporations we're talking about. It's individual, personal branding. But we've already reached the stage where we're officially being told, by renowned educational bodies, not to let unvetted parties see our social media profiles. And one has to ask: if we're not going to let the general public see our social profiles, and all we're really getting from the social platform is snippeted news, what is the point in having a social media profile at all? How big a step will it be, for education to stop saying “protect your social media”, and start saying “don't use social media”?
If the current trajectory of evolution continues, there is going to come a point where the value of social media, to the average person, is demonstrably lower than nil. We then arrive in the dreaded era of “attention-span zero”. A time in which we cease zipping our eyes across a bombardment of news strewn with irrelevant ads, and simply log out. Some would say we're nearly there. But what the public don't have at the moment is a replacement. And since old habits die hard, people are still using social networks even when they're getting less back than they put in. One new concept, that focuses away from publishers and back towards people, could destroy social media as we know it.
For business, there is already an alternative: content marketing. If your business is small or modestly-sized, the likelihood of social media being the best marketing solution is remote indeed. Social media requires daily attention, and you have to invest a horrendous amount of continuous effort just to stand still. And when, or should I say, if, you do finally build a following? The likes of Twitter will put it on display for any and all of your rivals to come along and poach. So do yourself a favour. Climb off the treadmill, and onto the elevator of content marketing. It's so, so much less stressful, and it channels your energy, rather than wasting it.