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# Social(?) Media
Twitter is no longer allowing you to link to your Mastodon profile? Let's bypass that!
A quick and dirty, err, I mean, fast and furious url forwarding service.
So, why is it so bad to teach Google/Twitter/Facebook… which things interests you, when they use that data to find you more of those things?
Think about it this way: when you see something that enrages you, you are pretty likely to check it out. Click on it and the system learns that this is of interest to you. So in order to keep you engaged (make you see one more ad), you get more and more of the things you hate. The door you just heard slamming shut? That’s your mental health, leaving the building.
This whole “privacy does not matter, just pay with your data” nonsense is pretty much the reason why corporate social media platforms turned into the shitholes, they are.
I just had a revolutionary idea for a new social media site: no accounts, no moderation, everyone can just write what he wants, when he wants, but nobody can read anything. No bubbles, no drama, no fake news. I call it Shreddit.
Funny how people are seriously suggesting now that Twitter should offer a whole rainbow of colored checkmarks with different payment tiers (including a free one) and meanings to better categorize people of public interest.
How stupid can you be to not understand simple business plans? The whole point of Twitter Blue is not to be fair to anyone or to better identify people, but to sell a vanity trophy. That only works when it is a) hard to get and b) comes as a package deal. You cannot have a grey checkmark for “verified” user and a blue one for “verified and paying” customer, because there’s no incentive to show off the fact that you are throwing money at Elon Musk for no added benefit.
For someone who earns money through his publicity, $8/month is just a (tax deductible) cost of business. No person of public interest will think twice of it. Especially not if there’s a chance that the associated visibility boost leaves the competition in the dust.
I just had this horrible thought while showering.
What if Twitter did collapse and all the big brands wanted to know how that affects their sales? They run the numbers and find that the loss in revenue is smaller than their combined spending on a social media team, diversity hires and general wokeness.
Elon Musk might be the cure for (internet) cancer…
A marketeer tells me, “you have to have accounts on all social media platforms to drive traffic to your blog!” He even has screenshots of Google Analytics to “proof” his point.
It’s a half truth, of course. The other half is that social media traffic does not convert (at all). Visitors come to check out what everyone else in their bubble is talking about and immediately leave again to contribute their two cents to a discussion that happens off-site, where it will be dead and buried in three days. The only thing you get out of this are impressive numbers in your webserver statistics. Marketing agencies love those numbers. They promise their clients eyeballs and social media delivers. So, from their perspective, that’s a job well done. Only, it isn’t. It is just an increase in window shoppers, nothing else.