TLDR: "The problem... was that their tweets were no good."
This, 100%. Twitter was in many ways the least bad social media platform. If you were selective in your follows, your feed could be (mostly) interesting and worthy of (some of) your time.
Not any more, because of the torrent of dross 🤦🏼♀️
Yes indeed. I only follow a handful of accounts and my timeline was 90% okay.
Until I had tons of unrelated blue ticks pop up for no obvious reason. It got less again somehow or some of those I followed felt forced to go blue as well.
I was gonna make a goof about Euro-English calling them "blue ticks" instead of "blue checks" but tbh likening those people to tiny disease-spreading insects is perfect
love when an app gets taken over by someone who never really used the app normally who then accumulates and highlights users who also don’t use the app in any normal way
100% this. Maybe I'm just cranky, old, and cynical, but Bluesky is the first social media platform where I just don't care about followers or likes or reskeets or whatever. Instead, I get to enjoy some great jokes, interesting content, and occasionally post (but even that is more for me).
Arguably one of the worst ideas to put blue tick responses at the top. Now you need to scroll down beyond a sea of blue to get to the good tweets. Not many news articles or topics are worth that effort.
For a while my timeline was also all blue tick but that got less luckily.
"Perfect?" I'm no fan of this Twitter, but I do know a few things about it, and I'm not even sure what they're trying to say, or what qualifications they have to say it. What's the source of this?
This seems quite comprehensible - people who pay for checks tend to be people whose content is otherwise not popular, but now it’s pushed to the top of “for you” and comment sections
That's pure conjecture. Show me a single datapoint that confirms that that is who is buying checkmarks, and that that is their motive. I know plenty of quality accounts who subscribed, and just figured they may as well get back their check since it cost nothing (but also means nothing).
I know @karaswisher.bsky.social and @mattyglesias.bsky.social have both complained about this. That they didn't pay for or want check marks, but can't get rid of them.
I mean I do consider The Nation mediocre but I imagine they’ve always had a blue check. The point you are studiously avoiding getting is about *new* paid checks
I’m on Twitter way less because I just keep seeing tweets/retweets from the same 5 blue checkmarks (who I don’t follow because their content either sucks or just isn’t for me) and Ads
There are still a over a billion tweets a day. It took me exactly 10 seconds to find two accounts in succession that contradict your assertion (and the author of that contrived "insight"), and document my desire to see any kind of science around such assertions. I loathe twitter. But also bullshit.
No one is saying there aren't "verified" accounts that are good, honest people. The point is 95% of "verified" accounts are people I would consider paying to not see in my timeline lol That's how you destroy a social media site
And even those deplorable assholes are miserable about it lol At the top of every thread is an echo chamber of people that would never hang out together. What a brilliant profit model!
This started well before the $8/mo. It started when Twitter didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t stop fake viraling & then created a tab for funny accounts that were all fake virals. Not that Musk hasn’t accelerated the inherited bullshit
"a heavy user tweets on average three times per week" LMAO WHAT. What world does this person live in? I don't disagree with the rest of it but that's a wild world where thinking someone posts a lot is 3 times a *week*
I think it's probably built on something like: you're probably in the top 25% if you tweet nearly AT ALL, the next 20% barely tweet, and 5% of users do most of the tweeting. So maybe the top 25% does average 3 tweets a week but that's because they aren't looking at median use of a coherent group.
Essentially, I think Twitter is 300M users a month but around 15 million of those (excluding bots) do nearly all of the tweeting and about 1% of really active tweeters were legacy blue checks.
So Twitter's classic model was essentially a legacy blue check starts a thread, gets 100 replies.
Fair enough. Tell you what, I have a bunch of Twitter moots I want to get on the lifeboat, I will bite the bullet and redirect any scientist invites their way 😆
Comments
Oh... It would appear I have a problem...
It's always about value for the reader. Crappy content gets little attention.
Just arrived! Thanks!
This, 100%. Twitter was in many ways the least bad social media platform. If you were selective in your follows, your feed could be (mostly) interesting and worthy of (some of) your time.
Not any more, because of the torrent of dross 🤦🏼♀️
Until I had tons of unrelated blue ticks pop up for no obvious reason. It got less again somehow or some of those I followed felt forced to go blue as well.
(Spoken in my best Elon voice)
My skeets suck and I have no followers here either, yet it's a BLAST here. What a mystery. What could be the difference
For a while my timeline was also all blue tick but that got less luckily.
Excuse me while I delete the 50 tweets I made today
So Twitter's classic model was essentially a legacy blue check starts a thread, gets 100 replies.
Nope, just the most toxic, uninteresting people on the site.
*chefs kiss*
People are certainly talking about it again now since the rate limit exceeded fiasco 🫠