Some Observations on Social Media

Some brief thoughts on social media.  I finally managed to set up that feature on Jetpack that allows new stories on The Sleaze to appear on my Mastodon feed.  (Yes, I'm on Mastodon, but the problem is that I don't know anyone else there, so have barely used the account).  Interestingly, it got more interaction and likes than stories I've posted to Twitter ever have.  Despite not actually knowing anyone there.  Which tells us something, I'm sure.  Probably that postings from even insignificant non-entities like me get more visibility than they can on the current, emasculated, version of Twitter, where you don't exist unless you pay Elon Musk to get 'verified' and get a meaningless blue tick.  If you pay presumably the visibility of your Tweets will increase. Apparently, another factor is that I've blocked and muted a lot of conspiracy cranks and Nazis which, in Elon-world is a very bad thing which will reduce your visibility on the platform.  That said, it seems that Musk's aim right now is to reduce the whole platform's visibilty web wide.  The reason why I connected up my Mastodon account in this way was because Twitter no longer allows Jetpack to make automatic posts on my behalf, (I have to do it manually, if I remember or can be arsed, as nobody sees such posts anyway).  Which seems a bizarre business decision which will inevitably reduce the volume of content being posted to Twitter - instead it will all be extremist bile, crypto currency scams, pro-Putin propaganda and conspiracy crap.

Not that it will be Twitter much longer if Musk gets his way - the logo has already changed to the more than slightly sinister and utterly meaningless 'X'.  But hey, he's a business genius, so must know what he's doing, mustn't he?  I'm sure that over-paying for a globally recognised brand, reducing its value by two thirds by filling it full of Nazis, then changing the name and identity of said global brand is all part of his genius business strategy. We ordinary folks are just too stupid to understand.  In the long-term, it seems that Musk wants to transform Twitter/X into an 'everything' app, along the lines of a Chinese state-sposored app that he is emamoured of.  The problem being that the Chinese app is so widely used precisely because it is backed by an authoritarian state, giving citizens no choice but to use it, whereas Elon's 'X-App' will simply be yet another rich man's play thing dedicated to data harvesting in a crowded market.  The fact is that, thus far, users in the free world have been remarkably resistant to the idea of putting their eggs all in one basket.  Remember all the attempts to create 'walled gardens' of curated content that web surfers would never want to leave?  Anybody remember AOL?  Plus, the rich man behind this proposed new app is Elon Musk who, apart from those weirdo cultists who sycophantically drool over his every idiocy on Twitter, is simply not liked by anyone sane.  A fact which constantly seems to surprise the man himself, but the reality is that the majority of us see him for the entitled spoiled rich brat that he is, desperate for attention and desperate to be liked, but failing at both because he doesn't seem to actually understand real people.  But, because he has more money than sense, we have to put up with him constantly wrecking stuff on a whim.  Hell, making Mastodon a preferable place to publicise your work than Twitter in just a few months is one heck of an achievement.