Thread by @EricRWeinstein

1/ The War On Feedback

There’s lots of talk about getting rid of visible follower counts/up votes/likes & other measures to “improve conversational health” or to “promote authoritative sources” on social media.

Very well. But there‘s another explanation: it’s a war on feedback.

2/ One way of looking at the current era is that established institutions are suddenly unable to compete with nimble high energy individuals. As a result, feedback metrics for engagement with institutions vs individuals tell a story of ubiquitous weakening of institutional trust.

3/ These high energy individuals broadly come in 2 varieties: people less trustworthy than our institutions & those who may be more trustworthy. Yet it’s only the 2nd group that is terrifying to what I’ve called the “Gated Institutional Narrative” which talks only about the 1st.

4/ In the absence of feedback metrics we would be unable to see this exodus of trust from our no longer authoritative sources. So here‘s a thought experiment from a discussion with @RubinReport & @BretWeinstein: what if Twitter estimated & published the much feared RubinRatio?

5/ The RubinRatio is, abstractly, the level of average constructive engagement per tweet for the last 25 original tweets, divided by the total follower count. This manages to penalize low/bad engagement & inflated follower counts in one metric.

So, who is winning on the RR?

END/ Conjecture: most of the professional class of institutional journalists with 7 figure follower counts working for established authoritative sources will *consistently* lose badly on RubinRatios to all those alternative micro channels you now follow.

Thank you for your time.