I hate this graph. How fucking hard is it to put time on the X axis. This is just a normal line graph but put on its side for some fucking reason, why do this???
NY Times fired a bunch of their data scientists this summer.
I believe some reporters have been tasked with making their own graphs now.
If I gave a graph like that to my PI I think she’d start questioning my health. How the hell can you publish something like this in the most famous paper on earth?
Does NYT really have no one in the room to go “Hey that looks like shit actually”
This graph makes it look like followers are being slotted by a Plinko board. Look at those people being slotted by the algorithm. It's fun! Like Plinko!
Not surprising, right? As right wing people get unbanned they are refollowong their people, and there has been a huge shift of left wing warrenites (probably also follow Bernie, etc) leaving twitter for ideological purposes.
They're also just getting banned more and more for popping off I think.
My secondary account got locked until I give them a phone number. Can't give them my phone number because I already used it for my older account, which got banned for telling a TERF to choke. They know that account is left wing and didn't unban it during the "amnesty"
These days most "phone verification" services have "a real phone" requirement added.
Imagine being on Twitter or Reddit and not getting banned instantly
Tons of proper leftists are bailing, and they would have contributed more follows to Dems than Reps, at least.
Leftists should be leaving too. The abuse against trans people on that site post-Musk is obscene and none of you should be giving advertisers any more reason to stick around.
The noisy and controversial edgy people are more entertaining to the majority of alienated and insulated people. They drive more engagement. It's the same chud magnetism that makes fascism so hard to not get recommended on Youtube.
I've been thinking about this a lot, but it really irks me that the narrative is probably going to be that Musk ruined Twitter when it was always a shitdick site made by evil assholes.
Ah, yes. Elizabeth Warren on one end, Marjorie Taylor Green on the other. The Far-Left and the Far-Right.
I only follow leftists (and some libs) on my burner account, but Twitter's algorithm constantly pushes conservative and fash tweets to the top of my home page.
It doesn't seem to be based on engagement either because these tweets have less than 10k likes/1000's of comments, while the lefty and lib tweets have way more than that but get pushed to the bottom. I barely see any tweets from people I actually follow unless I go directly to their pages.
It's absolutely based on engagement. Controversy is engagement. Popular things aren't. Engagement is money, so you see things you hate instead of things you like. Now your eyes are on the platform for a few seconds longer. Good thing there are no negative consequences involved here at all.
I can't begin to tell you how little of a shit I give about the Twitter discourse. Again, cities in the US without drinkable water, massive poverty, BuT dId YoU sEe ThE tHiNg ElOn TwEeTeD aBoUt?!
