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.

ChatGPT and the Onset of Late-Stage Anti-Humanism

If that's true, we're now unavoidably heading for a full-on AI wipeout, in which there is no incentive for humans to provide any non-commercial information or valuable imagery, and everything henceforth is just a rehash of pre-existing material.

As the Disgruntled Souls of Twitter were stressing enthusiastically over which scroll-zombified, digital-credit-scoring, transactional labour-mill they'd allow to waste their lives next, a neighbouring Silicon Villain was releasing a new toy. And oh, did the public want to play with it!

The product? ChatGPT. A chatbot whose friendly verbal spewings have already become internet-famous.

Actually, this flagship release from OpenAI is considerably more than a toy. Conceptually, the supercharged chatbot is really just the prodigy lovechild of Wolfram Alpha and Mitsuku. But it's phenomenally sophisticated, and the number of people its legacy could render workless is truly frightening.

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.

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...