#slave to the algorithm

Normally I don’t see the point in such boycotts; it takes much more than one day for these corporations to see the slightest dent in their profits. But what worries me is just how *hooked* I am to the tweetstream. Even though their recent “ugrades” have made the interface all but unusable for me.

Instead of just showing me all of the tweets from all of the people I follow, in chronological order, it seems to be 1) hiding tweets from ‘less popular’ tweeters (this is based purely on number of followers, rather than something sensible, i.e. how often *I* interact with them - the two people I interact with most often on Twitter, one has about 30 followers, the other has... 8? These people are among my closest friends, and their tweets are highly important *to me*. But as far as Twitter is concerned, they don’t exist.) 2) adding extra tweets based on the tweets that “more popular” tweeters are LIKING.

The end result of this is, I’m not seeing important tweets from my actual friends (for example, when one of them publishes a blog post - something I am extremely interested in!) And my timeline is filling up with garbage, because someone who is indie-famous liked a tweet saying essentially “thanks Bob” and this is what shows up in my timeline instead.

The Tumblr app is basically useless in terms of actually viewing content, because it’s run under similar algorithms. These things, I think, are designed by people who follow 1000s of users. They are not designed for people like me, who follow maybe 100, but genuinely want to see everything each of them posts. So you get algorithms designed for and by these intense extroverts who collect followers like party favours. And reduce good signal to unusable noise for people who don’t use these platforms in those ways.

Algorithms are designed to serve those who are *like* the people building the algorithms. Hence Popular White Feminist got suspended, hence a different Iconic London WoC Tweeter has been suspended multiple times on Twitter over the past few months, to the point where she has simply made other accounts where people know to follow her when she gets rushed by nazis.

Csuri: Random War, 1968