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.

No Choice For Twitter: It's Paywalls or Bust

In mid 2016, when OnlyFans set up as a simple, paywalled Twitter clone and invited its handful of initial entertainers to "earn money doing what you do already", it was really saying: "come and monetise what Twitter is too stupid to realise has value". Six and a half years later, Twitter still hasn't joined those dots...

If you haven't been riveted to Twitter this week, you've been missing the greatest real-life soap opera in Internet history. Barely has there been time to digest one plot climax, before the next one dropped onto the timelines in a pyre of flames. And at the centre of the story, one Elon Musk - the new owner whose leadership has been so breathtakingly abominable that there's now a conspiracy theory claiming he deliberately set out to destroy the company.

We have to remind ourselves that this is probably the first time in Musk's life when the people upon whom he relies for survival have been in a position to flick him the vees. His core mistake, it seems, has been a failure to realise that the millions of people who provide his site's real product - the entertainment - are not on his payroll and don't care a jot about his needs or desires. The obvious solution is to put them on the payroll. Make them care. Make Twitter mean something to them. Make it into their job.

Musk's Twitter Crisis Deepens, But There's Still Hope

If Twitter began a smooth but rapid evolution towards customisable paywalling, with drastic improvements to the search interface, it could absolutely batter Google as an ecosystem.

When Elon Musk declared, on 28th October, that "Comedy is now legal on Twitter", he evidently meant the "now" very literally indeed. Less than a week later his moderation nervecentre would embark on a run of suspensions, banning verified Twitter users for what can only be described as "assaults on a billionaire's ego".

Over the past few days, a parody trend has seen blue-tickers with large-to-huge fanbases changing their screen names to Elon Musk, replacing their profile pictures with Musk portraits, and then (mostly) posting satirical Tweets that mocked the new boss, his private life and his calamitous platform purchase. Here's an example from the now suspended comic artist Jeph Jacques...

The Benny Test: The Value of Twitter Laid Bare

As Elon persists with his mission to persuade Twitter that $96 per annum is a good deal, research suggests he's lucky to be getting $0...

How much is Twitter worth? I don't mean to its owners. I mean to us, the general public who feed it. Why do I ask? Well, because in the wake of Elon Musk's $8 saga, we're seeing committed subscribers calling for their hero to roll out a charge across the entire platform. That is, to directly monetise the unverified users, as well as the verified.

Can Twitter Survive Elon Musk?

Few people appear to have recognised that Musk's intention to "prioritise paying users in replies, mentions and search" would equate to a soft shadowban for everyone else.

Who would have imagined, this time last year, that the latest global crisis in autumn 2022 would be a bitter bleating match over who gets to have a ball-bearing-sized blue badge next to their name on an Internet forum? The row, to which I'm colloquially referring as blue-tickgate, has been sparked within the first week of Elon Musk's tenure as Twitter boss, after the multi-billionaire mogul Tweeted this...

Apply a Custom Light Mode To All of Nitter - No Cookies or Extensions

"There's a neat hack in Firefox and other Firefox-based browsers, which allows you to re-skin all Nitter instances with a light mode in one go. No cookies, no extensions, no dependency on specific instances."

We all love browsing and searching Twitter without having to submit to the platform's scourge of JavaScript and microtracking, right? Well, if you do, and you're already using Nitter for that purpose, I've got a quick and simple DIY hack which can help make Nitter look a little more inviting to fans of Twitter's default light mode.

WHAT IS NITTER?

Nitter is a decentralised front end for Twitter, which delivers all available logged-out Twitter content through a proxy, providing an escape from Twitter's increasingly oppressive monitoring tools.

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.

Twitter Thread or Blog Post: Which is Best?

"Many Twitter users believe the Tweets in a Twitter thread will get more views than a blog article, because people don't like hitting external links. But is this true?"

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

If someone had said back in 2009 that the social commentators of 2021 would be stringing together entire blog posts from individual, character-limited Tweets, they'd surely have been categorised as insane. But that's exactly where we are. For many users of Jack Dorsey's maverick-platform-gone-mainstream, there's no longer a need to find an external blogging service. If you want to post 800 words or even more, you just open that Twitter Compose box, and keep adding Tweets until you've kit-form assembled your "article".

It's technically a monumental mess. Still fraught with issues. But it's caught on, and dedicated blogging services like Blogger and WordPress must surely envy the amount of public engagement some Twitter threads now draw in.

So which is the best option for you? A trad blog post, or a Twitter thread? The first consideration would be whether or not you have an existing audience on Twitter. If not, and your sole goal is to write long-term, long-form content, forget about Twitter threads and start a blog. But if you do have an existing Twitter audience, and you mix short form and long-form content, you may find Twitter threads serve you better. The decision is far from simple, though. Let's start at the beginning…

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…

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.

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.

How To Create Twitter Follow Feeds Without Logging In

"This is the option that's a bit like reading the contents of people's notifications inbox."

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Just below, there's a Feed-Builder app, which enables you to create Twitter feeds without logging in or having an account.

So that the app is easily accessible near the top of the page, I've placed the full details beneath it. Here's the quick guide. Please see below the app for more...

TWITTER FEED BUILDER

To compile a feed, enter a username of your choice. Hit "Add Another" each time you want to enter an additional account. You can enter up to 12 usernames. Once you have your username list, move down to the "FEED TYPE" section, and hit the button of your choice. You can then bookmark the feed to see updates anytime you wish.

Will Google Cancel Search Engine Optimisation?

It should not be possible, in the 2020s, for PR companies who have nothing to do with writing content, to increase the visibility of that content in the web search results. SEO, has to go.

Never does a day go by without some privileged and entitled soul on social media bitterly complaining about being “cancelled”. Stripped of their vast priority status and dumped into the mosh pit of desperate attention-begging with everyone else. After years of being idolised, they issue a monumentally bigoted comment, and the public suddenly wonders why this horrible, self-serving manipulator ever gained such affection in the first place.

Through the window left by the de-throned “influencer”, the public now sees better people, and thinks: why couldn’t we find this altogether more pleasant and giving world before?

The answer? It’s human nature to take whatever first appears in view. We’re lazy. We’re not going to spend time looking harder when we think we’ve already found the best of what’s available.

And it’s the same with search engines. We assume that the top results in a web search are going to be the best results, and we accept them, because why bother to go any deeper if the best comes up at the top?

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...

The “Emptyvist”: Why Twitter’s Hate Speech Rules Are Not Enough

Acrimony has been normalised on Twitter. Here’s the REAL route to reversing the tide.

The “emptyvist”. An activist with a lack of things to rebel against. One who pursues activism as a means of gaining attention, approval and online status rather than a means of achieving a positive result for society. Sound familiar? It will if you use Twitter, I’m sure. The short-form conversation platform is now so overrun with wildly overexaggerated “emptyvist” hate, that ToS updates just seem futile. Where does Twitter go from here?

In recent times we’ve seen the major social media platforms introducing new clauses to their Terms of Service, in a bid to stem hate speech. And nowhere has this process been more alive than on Twitter. But to date, it hasn’t worked. Although extremists are more limited in what they can and can’t say, hate has remained a pseudo-currency on Twitter. The recognition that hate is a psuedo-currency, is growing. And as more people recognise hate as a form of currency, so too grows hate itself.

How To Find Out WHEN Someone Followed You on Twitter

Special Twitter forensics can reveal the exact day a Twitter follow action took place.

Image by Bob Leggitt - @PlanetBotch

According to ye wondrous interwebz, this can’t be done. But that’s never stopped me in the past. In yet another advanced Twitter forensics first, I’m going to show you, here and now, how to extract actual follow date information from a Twitter follow list. In other words, when your followers followed you. Or when you followed your followers. Or when someone else’s followers followed them.

[UPDATE:2021… In December 2020, Twitter shut down the Legacy Mobile environment, taking the method described in this post with it. If I can find a new method I will update the post, but for now, everything below this paragraph remains for retrospective interest only.]

The app you'll be using is just below, for ease of future access. But if you haven't used it before you'll need to read the rest of the post first…

ID Number:

Calculate Date

Before we get started, I should stress that Twitter does not make this easy. There are multiple steps to the process, and it is an advanced level technique. However, you don't need to be Einstein to do this. There are pictures in the tutorial, and I've made a converter app so you don't have to do any 'workings out'. Once you've learned the process, it's something you'll probably want to keep using, as it's a completely new world of exploration which puts so much previously unseen info at your fingertips. The method is well worth learning in my opinion.

#TwitterPhilanthropy and the Danger of the Next-Level 'Cash-Messiah'

How Twitter’s seemingly unstoppable wave of 'pop-up social engineering' could create the platform’s biggest ever scandal.

Image by Bob Leggitt - @PlanetBotch

If you look up 'Criticism of Facebook' on your favourite search engine, you’ll find a 34,000-word Wikipedia page crammed solid with breathtaking instances of misconduct. Twitter, conversely, has no Wiki crit page at all. But Twitter’s moment in the spotlight of public scandal may be coming. And we may not have to wait very long.

So let’s talk, Twitter. Let’s talk about the burgeoning trend of pop-up social engineering, which is awarding almighty power and reach to people who’ve done nothing at all to warrant it, other than repetitively offer cash prizes – which may or may not exist. A level of power and reach which, if it were used for political influence, could change an election result. Could start wars. Could blow up the frickin’ world. So yes, Twitter, let’s talk about it…