X Addendum

It has been about two weeks now since I decided to stop playing Stalin’s Chicken with Elon Musk’s Algorithm over at “X” – whatever that is supposed to signify. (At least when it was Twitter it signified a chirping little birdie, nicely conveying the intellectual level of the joint.)

I still post links to my articles and radio spots but I stopped posting comments/replying to things other people post because of the way the algorithm would intermittently prevent most people from seeing what I’d posted, a deliberate (as I view it) attempt to demoralize posters via essentially the same technique as randomly punishing a dog for no apparent reason that would make any sense to the dog. Of course, part of the reason for this is to get people to pay X a monthly fee that ends up amounting to hundreds of dollars if you kept on paying it for several years. X used to characterize this as getting “verified,” as if it were necessary (legitimately necessary) to do that more than once. Lately, it touts getting “boosted,” an interesting word choice given the times. Apparently, getting “boosted” means the algorithm lets people see what you’ve posted.

But it doesn’t. I know a number of people who are “boosted” and still end up talking to the hand, so to speak. They know it. I know it. X knows we know it. And that’s why I am done with it.

No surprise, I know get almost no replies to the links to my articles and radio spots I post every day. More finely, there is no longer any great disparity in the replies I no longer get. Previously, when I was still posting comments and replying to other people’s posts, I’d sometimes get 15 or more replies in return – until the algorithm decided it was time to play Stalin’s Chicken again and shut that down to none.

Now – since I  ceased actively participating in what is vacuously styled “the conversation” (how does one have a conversation when it is limited to a handful of characters, deliberately stifling conversation by reducing it to clipped, back-and-forth eructations?) my notifications have stabilized to 1-3 every day or so, all of them just people reposting the links to articles and radio spots I posted earlier.

This suggests to me that all or most of the notifications I got before – when the algorithm allowed them – came from bots. It is the only explanation that makes sense. People don’t just stop responding – and then respond repeatedly. But bots do. Bots that are designed to keep the conversation going. To keep X users – the real people – doggedly posting and replying, by causing them to believe they are conversing with people. All the while, the bots are mining the data, for financial and political reasons.

Trump talked up the Fake News thing, about which he was right. Social Media is arguably even faker, though – and more dangerous, arguably. It is a metastasizing cancer on society and ought to be treated accordingly. What was it the Hippies used to say about tuning out?

Just so.

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