Threads and Twitter Tales
I'm spending more time on LeoFinance Threads lately than I am on Twitter. There, I said it. Thanks Khal! But let's see where we started and how I got here...
Ages ago, lost in the mists of time, I opened my account on Twitter. As with Hive, it was slow going at first, while I figured out this new medium known as social media. I sent out my first tweet, and nothing. In fact, it would be an entire week before I got my first response, but after that, it was off to the races!
The Journey Begins...
It took a lot of interaction to become known on the platform, and it must have been FOREVER, before I hit my first hundred followers. I can recall being stuck in the 90's for what seemed like an eternity, and then crossing that milestone only to drop back. Eventually, enough of a follower cushion built up that I could reliably stay above that much-vaunted number.
However, as I began to learn how to optimize my content and make real connections, my engagement began purring right along. There was a logjam leading up to 1,000 followers, where we treaded water for most of a month before moving past that barrier.
Then things really started kicking in all the way to 5,000 followers until hitting the next wall at 10,000. One joke about Oprah Winfrey blocking out the Sun, set me back 100 followers, before we finally broke through (lesson learned: Don't joke about Oprah). :)
Getting The Hang Of It
So we're flowing along, 11,000, heading towards 12K when the shadow-banning started on Twitter. What triggered it? 1 tweet in 2016 supporting a candidate during the primaries that differed from the establishment pick. Mine had enthusiastic crowds, tons of small-dollar donations, and represented the struggles of the working class.
Week after week the huge crowds in attendance were never reflected in mainstream news coverage. Local reporters covered the attendance, but not the national outlets. Somehow, the cameras were never panned in order to fully show the size of the turnout.
Watching live, I could see how packed the events were, yet national media coverage (when there was any), tended to show tight shots of the stage and the speaker. This prompted Trump to demand that the media pan their cameras around to show how packed his events were. He wasn't having any of it, and they finally did.
Yet the "anointed" candidate spoke to smaller, unenthusiastic groups. Rumors of primaries being stolen from the person I supported abounded, and led to a convention where he was marginalized.
I tweeted throughout it all, and wondered why my years of steady growth had suddenly halted, before it was suggested I was being shadow-banned.
Others who were in the same position as I reported the same thing. Followers dropping away bit by bit. Suddenly missing followers. Tweets showing up to some people and not others, and numerous people reporting that I was no longer showing up as following them even though there'd been no action on my part.
There was some funny business going on over at Twitter headquarters.
Velocity Engine
That fall, I watched in astonishment as Clinton and her polite, sleepy supporters, was reported to be 6 points ahead of Trump and his huge boisterous crowds. The enthusiasm gap was real.
A few weeks before the election, I told people that the polls had to be wrong, and that I felt Trump might actually win. As the election season drew to a close, the daily drop of the follower count led to the first annual drop in numbers since I had joined Twitter years earlier.
In an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast years later, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey explained how shadow-banning worked. It turns out that they accelerate the velocity of your tweets so that they fall down everyone's timeline so fast, that most people never get to see them. Somebody at Twitter was making my tweets slide by so quickly, that they weren't being seen, which led to a loss of followers who likely thought I'd stopped tweeting altogether.
This was one reason why his apperance on The Joe Rogan Podcast was one way for the un-anointed candidate to get around the mainstream media blackout.
Things started changing a bit on Twitter as the firm began losing members to other services, and amid the rumors of Elon Musk's purchase of the social media company. But right on time Khal at LeoFinance gave us threads.
Threads: A New Beginning
Lately, I find myself spending more time engaging in Threads that I do on Twitter. Here we don't have to worry about shadow-banning, and my messages (we need a name for them like "tweets") are actually being seen. On top of that, sometimes I get an upvote which means I'm even earning crypto when I comment in Threads.
So as the service gets better and better and attracts more users, the day may come when Twitter is used simply to promote my Hive content. Now that we have a decentralized, crypto-powered option to Twitter, let's use the hell out of it. That old saying: "Build it and they will come" couldn't be more true. Threads is social. Let's enjoy this new wing in the house of Hive!
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