View Count Hell: Twitter Users Slam the Platform's New Weapon of Psychological Abuse

They're calling it cruel, evil, cancerous, offensive, violent, humiliation, torture, psychologcal warfare, an assault on mental health... Never seen a public view count referenced with this kind of language before? That'll be anatomical censorship at work.

As a multi-instrumentalist and producer with a home studio and a lifelong love of creating music, I recently found myself wondering why it's been over seven years since I last uploaded one of my devastatingly catchy works of pop genius to ye Interwebz. Then I logged into Soundcloud and was instantly reminded of the answer: mandatory public view counts.

Okay, so Soundcloud is an archetypcal audience-leech, which exploits scripting within its streams to hijack your content, on your site, and plug other people's presence on its own platform. Standard Web 2.0. But I would still use Soundcloud were it not for the site's most abusive practise of all - the reduction of creative art to a series of evaluative numbers, and the forcible parading of those evaluative numbers as a representation of the art's worth. Ultimately, its creator's worth.

For the same reason, I will not publish to YouTube. And unless Musky-boy spins a 180 on last week's view count update, I won't be hitting the Tweet button again either.

For the benefit of anyone who doesn't use Twitter, last week the platform placed an irremovable view counter onto every new Tweet. And ever since, public complaints have been continuously and consistently flooding the timelines at a rate of thousands per day.

How Long Can Mastodon Resist Centralisation?

The "legacy" Mastodon network is unsafe and overly restrictive, and the mainstream will not force itself to unsee this in the way that the FOSS community has. If Eugen Rochko won't accommodate a centralised and consumer-focused mindset, he will ultimately be usurped as primary steward of the project.

It's the doorstep of summer, you wanna get fit for hols, and the media are recommending a new gymnasium chain. Everyone seems to be signing up. A couple of million people have joined in the past few weeks. So you follow suit. You go to the brand website and it gives you a few gym addresses to choose from. You select the nearest, fill in the signup form, then set off for your first workout.

But when you arrive, there's no reception, no staff, and the "workout area" is just a damp basement with a few weights strewn around. Said basement is actually the main living space for a renowned local creep known as Weird Willy, and it belongs, as I'm sure all creative writers will already be aware, to his mother. That's right, the intention here was that Weird Willy would sit watching while you did exercises in his mother's basement. You run. Obviously.

But what happens when you don't realise you're in Weird Willy's mother's basement? When you can't realise? When there are no visual triggers to prompt you to run? Enter Mastodon, an approximate virtualisation of the above. The decentralised concept of Mastodon allows your local neighbourhood creep to set up a server in his mother's basement, then promote it using the protocol's trusted brand.

How Will Section 230 and 512 Safe Harbour Reform Affect User Generated Content?

"The public tolerance for Big Tech as an unelected, global government has all but worn through. Big Tech is NOT the government and it needs to be restrained with laws. In the fullness of time, no one will stop those laws from being made, so it's time for us to lobby for our own interests - not the interests of psychopaths who regard us as 'dumb fucks'."

It's coming. Change is in the air. In the works: a new digital world in which large distributors of online content can no longer rely on naive, 1990s laws to absolve them of responsibility for the content's effects.

We can't yet feel its presence, but we can see the embryo of reform emerging. Instances of massive tech platforms self-serving on the back of third-parties' misbehaviour have been way too relentless to write off as some prolonged blip. There's a crisis of public tolerance, and far from cooling off, it's hotting up. Politicians are showing more determination than ever before to tackle Big Tech's systemic abuse of safe harbours like US Section 230 and the DMCA OCILLA Section 512.

Why Social Media Should Shadowban All Gated Content Links

"If 'activism' disappears behind a paywall and you still think it's activism, never submit to the temptation to take an IQ test."

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash

“Annoying”, “infuriating”, “irate”… Just some of the language that's regularly used with regard to the discovery of gated content at the dark end of a social media link. Links to content that the vast majority of people can't access have now reached spam-wave volume on social platforms, as money-focused publishers line up to cash in on the lucrative new craze.

The practice has generally slipped through the spam net so far, but an ever-rising proliferation of what to most people are dead links, makes for an extremely poor user-experience on the Social Web. And worse, the inaccessibility of the content is promoting the spread of misinformation, as wildly exaggerated, trickbait titles become “reference works” in themselves, without the tempering effect of body text.

Is the Internet Heading for a “Punk” Revolution?

"Wikipedia is building its content on other people's first-gen research and investigative work. It publicly links to the source, but then back-door says to Google's search ranking system: 'Consider this source page to have no relevance or value'. It's been doing that for nearly a decade and a half."

Some dodgy-looking late 'eighties punk. Wouldn't be surprised if he ended up writing blogs with names like Popzazzle and Planet Botch. Nice semi-acoustic tho.

We're being digitally lobotomised. Force-fed. Used. The Internet has reached a truly sorry state, in which we're all told what to say, what to think, and what to like. We're imprisoned in an increasingly elitist system of content-delivery, which is calculatedly status-driven, and far more heavily based on real-life status than most of us realise. And outside of the fevered surveillance quest, online tech has innovated no genuinely new concepts since the 2000s. The Internet has become a stupefying Colossus of cultural stagnation.

Just over 45 years ago, the British music scene had fallen into a similar pit of mind-numbing misery. The music business thought its idle, elitist gravy train was safe. It was wrong.

The British punk movement of 1976 demolished the slobbish elitism of the mid 'seventies music scene, and turned a fat, platitudinous gravy train into a ground zero of fresh ideas and novelty, almost overnight. So is history about to repeat itself? Are we about to see the Internet's equivalent of punk sweep aside the repetitive boredom of Web 2.0, giving a voice to disenfranchised creative genius? And if so, how will it happen?

The Irremovable Badge: How Tech Platforms Use Humiliation For Coercive Control

"But remember what the original Reddit team revealed back in 2005 about the purpose of downvotes, and remember that forcibly-displayed popularity totals are a form of branding. Like hot-ironed grades on the backs of livestock."

Their goal is to play us off against each other, for their ultimate benefit. The butter-wouldn't-melt authoritarians behind Web 2.0 strive to create in us a level of status-anxiety which will drive us to serve their needs.

They force us into a giant league table, in which we're constantly compared, and comparing ourselves, to others. We're devalued as people; reduced to scores. And the only way we can improve as “a score”, is to help Zuck, Dorsey, or any of the other tech moguls, increase their imcomprehensible wealth. The system was designed that way.

How The Internet Destroyed Your Attention Span

"It explicitly trained us not to click links. Not to investigate. Not to stray from the short-form consumption mechanism we have in front of us."

Photo by Tine Ivanič on Unsplash (image modified)

It's hardly news these days, but our attention spans have been in drastic decline, and there are stats to prove it. Masses of them. The Internet PLC tells us we're looking at more stuff, for less time per item, and certainly on social media, it's pretty easy to see that's true.

But is this a problem with us, as people? I mean, did human evolution suddenly, around the start of the 2010s, enter some bizarre phase of plummeting natural attention capacity? Or was there something that the Internet PLC did to rewire our brains?

Publisher vs Platform: Where's the Line, and Does it Matter?

"If Twitter or Facebook's publishing is deemed to be libellous, defamatory or discriminatory, they can be sued. That's the basic, theoretical goal."

Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels (image modified).

One of the hot debating topics of early 2021 centred around the rights and immunities afforded to social media platforms. In particular, whether these vast monoliths of info-dissemination have mutated into publishers, and thus, whether they should be subject to the stricter rules that apply to publishing.

So what defines a publisher? What defines a platform? And what difference does it make? Let's find out…

Doctored and Forged Screenshots: The New Weapon of Online Warfare

"Sparring Internet warriors have more recently taken to using doctored screenshots as a means to get their opponents' social profiles shut down... And in this twilight zone of low scrutiny, things can get very, very ugly."

Tweet doctored by Bob Leggitt.

It's perhaps a stretch to say that doctoring a screenshot is the easiest thing in the world, but it takes less than a minute in Firefox or Chrome, with no additional software.

I'm deliberately not using the word “Photoshopped” in this post, because despite this being a common reference for edited screenshots, simple text-modification does not require anything as elaborate as a market-leading image editor. I'm using words like fake, forged and doctored, because most modified screenshots have not been anywhere near Photoshop. They've most likely been Chromed or Firefoxed. It's that easy.

And yet the result can convince a huge number of people that a completely fictitious statement or conversation was typed by the person to whom it's attributed. Let's face it, half the Internet will believe that Einstein's dating bio said “Genius. Swipe right” - if you put it on a suitably reverent background with a monochrome of his wizened face in the corner. And that's presenting someone's words secondhand. When you're presenting their words firsthand, the credibility rises further. And the stakes can be exceptionally high…

How To Tell if Ideological Influencers Really Care About Disadvantage

"...And do black lives still matter? Or are we now supposed to dump that and concentrate on the 'Not all men but most men and we don't know which men so we have to fear all men and we'd better not say the actual words but that includes black men' campaign?"

Photo by Bob Leggitt.

Judging someone's character and motivations is sometimes more a matter of what you don't see than what you do. Ideological influencers claim to stand for the disadvantaged, but I've discovered a quick way to get a sense of whether they're really there to do that, or merely to use the concept of victimhood for personal gain.

The method entails searching for two keywords, relating to groups that have a very high incidence of disadvantage, and so should, theoretically, figure in the campaigning of someone who claims to be fighting disadvantage. The two keywords are:

Big Tech's Secret Fear: The Disappearing Web

"Why would both Facebook and Twitter ignore 99.99% of successful startup ideas, but suddenly jump aboard with newsletters? On closer inspection, the answer is obvious..."

Photo by zhang xiaoyu on Unsplash (image modified).

The World Wide Web is slowly disappearing. No, really. It is! I mean, obviously, it's all still around somewhere. It's just that with every week that goes by, a little more of it closes off unconditional access. And the conditions are getting more demanding as the hourglass runs down.

Hidden Twitter: Suspensions and the Ideological U-Turn

"We're evidently seeing a new level of pretence somewhere along the line. It's a personality flatpack."

Photo by Akshar Dave on Unsplash.

Would you change who you are in order to win digital applause on Twitter? I don't mean be a bit more like this, or a bit more like that. I mean completely U-turn on your core self-definition, and effectively become the person you've been passionately opposing for the past five years.

Some people do. And it might be a lot more people than you think.

Why We Should Celebrate Cancel Culture

"They'd never come to your aid if the roles were reversed. They'd be the first to dance the dance of self-righteousness, on the grave of your career."

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash.

We're becoming very familiar with the spectacle of celebrities popping up in media interviews with complaints about “cancel culture”, like it's the most catastrophic problem we face in the modern world. To them, in their bubbles of privilege, it probably is.

We're talking about people who have everything they want. People who can earn a year's luxury living expenses by making a 90 second TV commercial. And when given an opportunity to talk about current problems, they don't use it to express their disgust that they can't walk through their nearest city at night without finding people literally trying to sleep on the icy cold pavement. They use it to express their disgust that the huge privilege they enjoy could risk being reduced, if they are stupid enough to say something people find grossly offensive.

The Very Alternative Guide to Quitting Social Media

If the easiest way to quit is to destroy the desire, here comes the sledgehammer...

Photo by Yan on Pexels (image modified).

It's always the same. When people become disillusioned with a social networking platform, they start looking at alternative social networks. Gripes with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have driven a huge rise in alt social memberships, resulting in accelerated sign-ups to the likes of MeWe and Parler.

Further disgruntlement has pushed an increasing volume of people towards the Fediverse, which incorporates alternatives to Twitter (Mastodon / diaspora* / Pleroma), Facebook (Friendica), and Instagram (Pixelfed). And whilst it would be ridiculous to compare these modestly-inhabited backwaters with the bustle of the major platforms, they do show just how heavily we've been brainwashed into believing we have to use some form of social media. We will accept worse and worse deals, just to avoid dropping out of the social networking sphere altogether…

Art of the Invisible: 13 Ways Social Media Influencers Make Money

"If this is done well, most of the audience probably won't realise they're seeing paid ads."

Photo by William Rouse on Unsplash (image modified).

Have you ever wondered how social influencers make money? If so, you're not alone.

One of the most important elements in the success of an influencer is persuading the public that it's not about the money. And that means making money is not quite as straightforward for an influencer, as it is for your average vendor or service provider. Bagging that revenue normally has to be a low-key element in the influencer's overall activity. But that doesn't mean they're not raking in pots of cash…

Maximum Community Management: Celebritising The Brand

“Any brand can be celebritised. But how do you celebritise a brand?...”

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash (image modified).

If you thought community management was little more than diverting a brand's negative social media feedback into the dark depths of the private messaging system, we really need to talk. In fairness, most mid to large sized businesses do have a broader vision of community management than that, but even at the upper end, not always by much.

They might, for example, equate community management with hopping onto forums and review sites with an “I'm sorry you feel you didn't get good service”, and a polite but subliminally sulky defence of the company's reputation. And maybe they also equate community management with trying to sliver-tongue or basically bribe bloggers whose less-than-glowing assessments of their offerings are rapidly creeping towards Google's front page… They're covering the defensive bases. But if you know your old sayings, you'll be aware that defence, is not the best form of defence…

Attention-Span Zero - Lower Than Nil: The Future Value of Social Media

"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."

Photo by Ochir-Erdene Oyunmedeg on Unsplash (image modified).

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.

The One Check You Should Make Before Unfollowing Inactive Twitter Users

Adding one extra step into your Twitter unfollow process will allow you to see which "inactives" really are inactive.

Did you know that most of the users Twitter unfollow apps report as "inactive" have definitely accessed their Twitter account within the past few days, and probably log in every single day? Well, you do now.

But how did I know that? Or perhaps more intriguingly, why don't the apps know that?

Having checked the Likes pages of everyone on the app's "inactives" list, I was astounded with the results.

I'm going to explain how I found out in the course of this post, but the reason the apps don't know, is that app developers always use the date of the most recent tweet or retweet as an indicator of when an account holder was last on Twitter. The problem is, most people don't tweet or retweet every single time they log into Twitter. Which means the date of the last tweet/RT is near useless as a guide to an account holder's most recent activity.

How “Decentralised Twitter” Will Actually Work

Exploring the detail of Jack Dorsey's cunning plan for the Twitter of the future

Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash. [image modified]

On 11th December 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced in a thread of tweets, that he had plans for at least a partial integration of Twitter into a new, decentralised social networking protocol. There were previous hints that he was thinking along these lines, but the full announcement still hit the web as quite a bombshell.

We can be pretty sure that the protocol @Jack has in mind does not yet exist, because if he had any interest in existing decentralised protocols, such as Mastodon, he’d have explored those avenues before setting up a dev team recruitment drive.

It all sounds very vague. So let’s get specific. What, exactly is @Jack planning to do? And what would it mean for us, the Twitter users?

The Twitter Scam Detector Tool

Cut to the chase and find out what the real deal is with suspected Twitter scammers.

It’s very difficult to warn people about Twitter scams in a generalised manner. Different scammers have different methods, and no warning can cover them all. I get frustrated when I see just how many people do get duped on Twitter. It’s one of the easiest platforms on the internet to use for nefarious purposes. So I’m taking a ‘route one’ approach to the problem: a scam detector tool. Here it is, but before you get started, bookmark this page. You will want to use the tool again...