In other other news, Twitter continues to live down to my expectations. For those who aren’t up on it, a little while back they formally switched away from chronologically displaying your timeline to algorithmically-driven, based on what they ‘think you’ll like’ (assuming that what you like is actually paid content of course). This is always, in my experience, a sign that the platform is aiming to double down on their focus on ad revenue.
Being the magnanimous sorts they are, they included a setting where you could switch back to latest tweets first. If you clicked it, it was good for maybe a couple of weeks before you had to reset it again.
As of the last week or so, though, that’s changed. You have to select ‘latest tweets’ every time you open Twitter. I wonder how long it’ll be before they either bury the option or remove it entirely.
It’s really become–and I say this compared to old Twitter, which was never a jewel of restraint to begin with–an aggressive and painful platform to use, with little ability to control your exposure to content you don’t like, or indeed to control the exposure of your own content to people who might be hostile. Oh sure, they have blocking and muting, but all the new ‘recommended by Twitter’ and ‘did you see THIS?’ stuff is excepted from the content controls.
Every time I’ve been forced back to Twitter recently I have been diligently reporting and blocking every single paid Tweet in my timeline.
I know it does nothing, really, in the long run, but… it makes me feel better. 😛
I try to ignore them, but every now and then they throw one at me that’s so obnoxious or even downright offensive that I can’t not report and block it. Twitter was bombarding me with awful shots from some horror movie not that long ago…and then there’s anything from Trump or the Republicans.