If a tweet falls into a forest of tweets, does anyone see it?
Plus the podcast series you really should listen to
When you’re writing a book, you do a lot of reading. Often of books, which raises the question of whether one is filtering lots and lots of books down into one book, or whether a few books inspire a much bigger branch of books—rather like the question of how, if it takes eight great-grandparents to produce you, how is the population increasing?
Which means that I don’t precisely recall where or when, while researching Social Warming, I first came across Ben Grosser and his idea—the Demetricator.
The Demetricator does one thing: kills all the numbers that social networks show you. Grosser has written a version for Facebook, and another for Twitter. Use it, and you won’t be troubled by how many retweets something has had, or how many quote tweets, or basically how much interaction it’s had.
Here’s how Grosser describes the Twitter version:
The Twitter interface is filled with numbers. These numbers, or metrics, measure and present our social value and activity online, enumerating followers, likes, retweets, and more. But what are the effects of these numbers on who we follow, what we post, or how we feel when we use the site? Inviting us to consider these questions through our own experience, Twitter Demetricator is a web browser extension that hides the metrics. Follower, like, and notification counts disappear. “29.2K Tweets” under a trending hashtag becomes, simply, “Tweets”. Through changes like these, Demetricator lets us try out Twitter without the numbers, to see what happens when we can no longer judge ourselves and others in metric terms. With this work, I aim to disrupt our obsession with social media metrics, to reveal how they guide our behavior, and to ask who most benefits from a system that quantifies our public interactions online.
Well, the new owner of Twitter has a completely different idea. In the past week, Elon Musk has introduced a system which will show you, Twitter user, precisely how many views any tweet of your has had.
Turns out, as with many of these ideas, that it’s not new, and in fact Twitter had done some tests back in 2015 to see how things might work. And the answer already was: badly.
These are the three pictures included in his post, showing the mocked-up stats and various ways they could be shown on a tweet. Notice how low the Interactions-to-Views ratio is. This is the brutal reality of social networks: most people have very few followers, and most tweets get very low engagement.
As implemented now, you have to click on the “graphs” icon to see what any particular tweet’s numbers are. Here are a couple of mine:
“Engagements” are, apparently, “Total number of times a user has interacted with a Tweet. This includes all clicks anywhere on the Tweet (including hashtags, links, avatar, username, and Tweet expansion), retweets, replies, follows, and likes.” Basically, even tweets that get people a bit riled up don’t really generate much in the way of “engagement”.
In fact, a large part of the reason why social networks introduced algorithmic timelines is that most users are unremarkable, and if you were to show them just the tweets they produced and those of their followers, they’d quickly lose interest. This is why Twitter, and more recently Instagram, exhibit such thirst in showing you that someone you know Liked a tweet, or show you a picture because you looked at something vaguely similar. That desperation is them trying to keep you interested, pulling the lever on the one-armed bandit in the hope that something that turns up will grab your attention and keep you scrolling. Often we do this anyway: doomscrolling is the search for that tweet (or Facebook post or Instagram post, but most often tweet) which will at last, finally, satisfy our search for The Tweet.
But the introduction of Views is about something else too. When I spoke to Grosser for the book, he pointed out how such a system is going to game us:
What happens when you see numbers on Twitter—and it’s a little bit different I think whether it’s your numbers, or someone else’s numbers—but when you see your numbers, you very much use the numerical reaction to what you’ve posted as a guide for what to do next. We’ve learned from a young age to do well numerically. We’re taught that you need to score highly, and get more, and this is the message we have from day one. So when you post a status about some esoteric topic that really matters to you, that you’ve spent a lot of time composing and thinking about, and it’s really well crafted, and it gets 3 likes, you’re dissatisfied. And then you post a funny cat video and it gets 100 likes? The system teaches you post more cat videos.
One way this plays out is in the way in which Twitter is often talked about as a very divisive space, where polarisation of opinion is intensely present and foregrounded, because the kinds of posts that can get great metric reaction are those that are highly charged, highly polarising, highly inflammatory.
We can see what adding Views to the detail that anyone can see about their tweets is going to do. It’s going to encourage people to produce tweets that will give them bigger numbers. It’s going to drive them to focus on polarising, inflammatory, infuriating, divisive tweets that will delight or annoy those who see them—scissor statements, most likely. Yes, it’s very simple: adding Views means more social warming—more people trying to rile each other, performing for reaction through the medium of social networks.
Rather like the premiership of Liz Truss, which only lasted 44 days yet managed to fit in 10 days of national mourning for the Queen, the resignation/sacking of a senior minister, an insane budget and a series of press conferences where each was more gruesome than the last, the short-so-far tenure of Elon Musk at Twitter, which began only on October 28 and has lasted 64 days (at time of publication on Friday December 30) seems to be running at 10x speed.
Quick recap: lots of staff fired, ex-staff file lawsuits, content moderation council coming!, content moderators fired, “comedy is legal”, Kanye is back, everyone who was banned can come back, free speech is back!, Kanye is banned for being rather too free with speech, Twitter Blue is back and on steroids!, Twitter Blue is off again, forget about the content moderation council, advertisers do a “Homer into the hedge” move, hardcore staff only!, Trump reinstated, Trump… completely ignores Musk and Twitter, old Twitter schwag found in cupboard, selective leaking of old files to journalists makes ripples, jet tweets banned, journalists banned, content links banned, “assassination coordinates” banned, content links unbanned, banned journalists unbanned if they delete tweets referring to banned jet tweets, poll to stay as CEO!… oh dear, and, deep breath, Views on tweets. (Tell me what I missed in the comments.)
Of all of those, two are pretty much calculated to increase the social warming effects of Twitter: bringing back accounts that were previously banned (under the former administration), and adding Views. Although, hilariously, one of the accounts that was brought back is that of Andrew Tate, whose attempt to rile Greta Thunberg flopped so catastrophically that her dunking of him is already in the top 20 most-liked-ever tweets), and his flailing video trying to get back at her gave away his location to Romanian police, who have arrested him and his brother as part of a human trafficking probe.
Which only goes to show that bringing back banned accounts could have unintended side effects for those accounts that could have wider societal benefits. Here’s hoping that Views somehow manages the same thing.
And as a postscript, perhaps the best comment on the above episode:
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• Unsurprisingly this has been a thin week. But there’s this SMBC strip about, well, what’s left for us to do once the machines do everything? And that seems like it polishes the whole lot off.
• Not to do with AI in any way, but I highly recommend listening to Helen Lewis’s The New Gurus podcast series, available from the BBC or on the podcast platform of your choice. She’s got a wonderful facility with interviewees, even those she disagrees with, and huge willingness to listen to people. Enjoy! (And of course she has a Substack, The Bluestocking. It’s weekly, and excellent.)
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy. It’s back on January 9.