Thread by @AlexandraErin

I'm not going to argue with anybody who is making the best decision they see available for their needs and their survival and their business, but I will continue to say that even aside from the danger of getting #BlockTheBlue'd, I mistrust the "advantages" of a blue check.

Most people on Twitter who think they're being shadowbanned aren't.

Most of the things that people take as evidence of shadowbanning aren't shadowbanning.

Most of the sites that purport to tell you if you're shadowbanned are trying to sell you services to boost your account.

Every time I see a screenshot somebody posted of a site that told them they are being blocked from search results, I go to Twitter search and search for them.

I've done this dozens, probably upwards of a hundred, times.

Only one person was actually suppressed.

I do know that adult material is more likely to actually be suppressed by Twitter than most tweets. It's certainly more likely to get an account zapped without explanation, tangible violation of terms, or hope of appeal than anything else. And that sucks. For them, for everyone.

But I don't think a blue check protects against that. The Landlord of Mars is perfectly happy to take people's money for a service and then explicitly deny that service to them, as the schmucks who tried to buy gold check status recently learned.

And the advantages of a blue check... Elon talks a lot about "prioritization", but the only actual distinct advantage is replies being sorted to the top underneath someone else's tweets, which only helps content creators if they are spamming links in other people's tweets.

I know people are seeing their own numbers and their click-throughs and conversions/sales going down. I know that's real. But it happening doesn't mean your account in particular is being suppressed.

Twitter is being broken, in a lot of ways, many of which are tiny, but add up.

The people who ran Twitter before were constantly analyzing results and fine-tuning everything from presentation to how failures are handled in order to try to maximize the time people spent engaged with this site and its content.

The guy who runs Twitter now is very into the idea of that kind of thing but lacks the patience, curiosity, and trust of expertise and the experiences of others to actually do it.

He changes things at random, on impulse, at whim.

He plans to make changes or announces them and then kludges through something that's not quite that, but is superficially similar and within the scope of his actual ability to implement.

I *deeply* suspect that version control is a thing of the past at Twitter and that some changes get made and then accidentally rolled back with the next change, or when something else that got broken gets patched.

Which is to say that even if Elon's intention is to make sure blue accounts get more exposure and get more noticed in ways that go beyond creating Obnoxious Reply Guy Fish In A Barrel comment sections.. that doesn't mean he's delivered it, or will deliver it. Or can deliver it.

Everybody's numbers are down. Elon's numbers are down. His most favored blue check accounts, the ones *he* will Reply Guy for, are down, to the point that he's had to keep alive conspiracy theories that an "Old Twitter" Deep State is operating under his nose to undermine them.

Buying a blue check cannot save you from the Twitter Death Slump, which comes not from account suppression but from organic network effects that were carefully cultivated and refined over the years suddenly being casually disrupted and destroyed.

https://twitter.com/MosquitoCapital/status/1650830660318162946

This man tried to launch a rocket whose success he thinks is the real-world equivalent of defeating Thanos, knowing that it wasn't ready to launch, knowing that the launchpad was insufficient, because he thought seeing what would happen would be more valuable than doing it right.

He's not being any more careful with trying to launch Twitter Blue Verified accounts to the forefront of visibility, especially when his simps constantly teach him the lesson that it doesn't matter if it works or not, they'll buy it anyway.

I'm not running any scripts to block all blue accounts. I don't encourage anyone else to do so. I block hundreds of them a day, but with targeted methods: going down the line on filtered searches, Reply Guys on his tweets, etc.

I don't judge anyone who buys one for survival.

But I fear they are spending their money on a lucky feather in hopes that it will stop the plummet they can plainly see and feel when the truth is we are all onboard an aircraft that is losing altitude.

I'm not going to argue with individual choices in the face of this massive disaster affecting a site we all use and many of us depend on.

But I will encourage compassion and understanding for people making a different choice than you.

If there are teams or sides here, it's Elon vs. everybody with a stake in Twitter's usability and survival (which yes, means it's also Elon vs. Elon... it may be a tie with many other individuals, but he's among his own worst enemies).

The impulse to see someone else making a different decision as an attack on your decision and a refutation of the reasons for your decision, which must then be answered by convincing (browbeating, berating) the other person that their decision is wrong so yours can be right...

That's reactionary. When you give into that, you are being reactionary. It's the path that leads people on downward spirals into fascism. Particularly when it joins up with other reactionary impulses, like the demonization of sex work, or mistrust of marginalized people and money

I said I'm not going to argue with individuals and I'm sticking to it.

But I respectfully ask that if you take a different path than me (i.e., you do run a script or block all blues on sight), please resist the urge to tell me about it, or why.

Let it just be your choice.

If you feel an overwhelming need to justify or defend it... reflect on why that is, maybe.

Sex workers who have bought the blue have spoken out about how these things harm and hurt them. That matters to me. I think it should matter to everyone.

I'm working to be less vitriolic about all of this -- like not using the phrase "Eight Buck Schmuck" as often -- because I do not like being in the vitriolic mindset. It doesn't feel good. It doesn't help me do the things I need to do to survive this slow-motion plane crash.

It doesn't mean I don't think the phrase is apt for the biggest class of blue subscribers. My motive here is not "Oh, won't someone please think of the blue checks?"

Among the many reasons I avoid giving financial support to Twitter is that I don't think it's ethical to pay money into Elon Musk's coffers. But that's a personal choice. And this particular coffer has a big ol' hole in the bottom that subscriptions won't fill.

And the thing is... I see people who I am sure think of themselves as progressive and sympathetic to the plight of the worker under capitalism deride this as "paying tribute to an apartheid emerald heir so they can more easily sell pictures of their asshole".

And this thing where progressive politics and leftist principles go out the window as soon as a socially acceptable target is presented... as a trans person, as a disabled person, as a gay person... seeing people succumb to this on any axis makes my blood run cold.

This is how they get us. This is how the least popular policies of the least popular major party keep getting traction. This is how the extreme fringe of the right keeps gaining ground in mainstream discourse, while what counts as "fringe" on the left keeps expanding.

Somebody else selling pictures of their asshole on the internet is only your business if you're in the business of buying asshole pictures. Period. Full stop.

We're all doing what we can to get by. For me, that means experimenting with different ways of organically enhancing the visibility of a link or tweet.

That's what this was about, yesterday.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1650897627846701057

And the thing is, if I take the outcome of that thread as an experiment with meaningful data... well, it didn't really work. Not a ton of retweets, not a ton of views, no influx of Ko-Fis.

Buuut it's not a proper experiment. There could be a lot of reasons it didn't "work", including the fact that I was blessed enough to get a bunch of Ko-Fi tips over the weekend for groceries, which might have left the well overdrawn. It's hard to say.

As the thread I linked to above points out, social media sites are precision engineered with large scale A/B testing over millions of accounts and their posts. One person posting different ways at different times doesn't have the data to know what actually changes the results.

We don't know what works and what doesn't, or if what works today will work tomorrow. We're all just trying things.

I would counsel anyone who wants my advice:

- Don't get hung up one thing as the fix.

- Don't get hung up on what other people are trying as a fix.

The mass of people who rely on Twitter for anything, from survival to information to idle entertainment, are all in this together. Even the people who pay $8 to have their tweet literally begging Elon to notice them pushed to among the other people doing that in his replies.

I block those people when I see them. I go into the replies on his tweet specifically to do so. They are contributing to the decline of Twitter, the thing I use, and my sympathy for their loss when it dies is essentially theoretical.

But I know they're losing, too.

Anyway. I've reached what I thought of as my final summation for this thread multiple times. 16 years on this site and I still don't really know how to end a thread. My biggest weakness as a writer, really. I don't like conclusions. Punchlines are fine, but not always appropriate

The one trick I know is putting a tip jar at the end, because then my brain knows we're done, so I guess I'll do that?

If you found something interesting or useful here, feel free to throw something in. Thank you.

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