Twitter Troubles

My previous post on the future of twitter under Elon Musk was lost in the great migration. Short version: It was going to be chaotic and while he might not target kink and sex workers directly, there was a good chance they’d get caught up in the general chaos.

In hindsight that seems a decent bit of prognostication, although if I’m honest I did not expect the chaos to be quite as crazy as it is. His naïve views on content moderation  causing issues was predictable, but I didn’t expect him to be such a terrible CEO, technical leader and human being. There’s no ideal way to lay off a significant number of employees, but most people seem to manage it without coming across as incompetent emotionally unstable narcists. Not Elon. The story of Haraldur Thorleifsson, an ex-employee he mocked online encapsulates everything about Twitter 2.0. Incompetently handled, needlessly cruel, publicly embarrassing and potentially costly.

As for the actual product itself, changes to the curated timeline appear to be very sex and sex work negative. Twitter has always had a curated vs chronological option for browsing tweets. Under the old regime they tended to be different, but not wildly so. The curated version (called ‘For you’ in the current UI) had more popular tweets that got engagement over past days, but it was more a reshuffling of tweets than a radically different user experience. From my experience, that no longer seems  to be true. I can instantly tell when I’m on the ‘For you’ vs ‘Following’ view, as the content is so different.

Because I’m a bit of a nerd, I decided to try and measure the difference. I follow almost 500 people on twitter and only 20 of those accounts are not kink or sex related. With that kind of 95+ percentage skew, you’d expect my timeline to be full of awesome kinky goodness and that’s true for one of the options. Here’s what I measured for the ‘Following’ view when I categorized ~200 tweets the other night.

That lines up with what I expect given who I follow. Now here’s the breakdown I for a similar number of tweets on the ‘For You’ view.

You can see that the kinky material is massively down and the non-kinky stuff is way up. I even had to add a new category for clickbait tweets – the sort of deliberately rage inducing viral stuff that’s frequently incorrect and used to be a trademark of Facebook. Now I get more of those than I do from the actual people I’ve chosen to follow. That never used to be the case.

If someone was a huge baseball fan, and 95% of the accounts they followed were baseball related, I think it’d be seen as a massive product failure if 70% of the tweets they were shown were nothing to do with baseball. Yet that seems to be the current situation with the curated feed for twitter and kink/sex right now.

I’ll close the post with exactly the kind of content that Twitter now seems to be steering me away from. This is the incomparable Mistress Iris, as featured on her twitter feed.

You can see more of her amazing work at her Mindful Surrender site and via her OnlyFans.