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https://stratechery.com/2023/threads-and-the-social-communications-map/
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“the most important new social networks of the last few years have been notable for not really being social networks at all”
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“It’s ultimately a math question: are you more likely to find compelling content from the few hundred people in your social network, or from the millions of people posting on the service? The answer is obviously the latter, but that answer is only achievable if you have the means of discovering that compelling content, and, to be fair to both Facebook and Twitter, the sort of computational power necessary to pull off a TikTok-style network didn’t exist when those companies got started.”
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“Perhaps the starkest change that Musk has made to Twitter, meanwhile, has been a headlong rush into the upper right: the “For You” tab is far more aggressive about promoting tweets from people you don’t follow, and it’s increasingly impossible to escape; the app always defaults to “For You”, and there are no more 3rd-party app alternatives. Eugene Wei argues this has blown up the timeline and ruined the Twitter experience”
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Eugene Wei: “By pushing everyone towards paid subscriptions and kneecapping distribution for accounts who don’t pay, by switching a TikTok style algorithm, new Twitter has redrawn the once stable “borders” of Twitter’s communities. This new pay-to-play scheme may not have altered the lattice of the Twitter graph, but it has changed how the graph is interpreted.”
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Eugene Wei (cont.) “I’ve never cared much about the presence or not of a blue check by a user’s name, but I do notice when tweets from people I follow make up a smaller and smaller percentage of my feed. It’s as if neighbors of years moved out from my block overnight, replaced by strangers who all came knocking on my front door carrying not a casserole but a tweetstorm about how to tune my ChatGPT and MidJourney prompts.”
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“Many of those knots are tied to that lower left quadrant: a predominantly time-based feed makes sense if a service is predominantly about “What is happening?”, to use Twitter’s long-time prompt; a graph based on who you choose to follow doesn’t just show what you want to see, it also controls what you don’t (Wei notes that this is a particularly hard problem for algorithmically generated feeds). Both qualities seem particularly pertinent for a medium (text) that is information dense and favored by people interested in harvesting information, a very different goal than looking to pass the time with an entertaining video or ten.”
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“It follows, then, that Twitter’s best defense against Threads may be to retreat to that lower left corner: focus on what is happening now, from people you chose to follow. The problem, though, is that while this might win the battle against Threads, it means that Musk will have lost the war when it comes to ever making a return on his $44 billion. In truth, though, that war is already lost: Musk’s lurch for the upper right was probably the best path to reigniting user growth, but if that is the corner that matters then Threads will win.”
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“Users may say they want a chronological feed, but their revealed preference is the opposite”
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