John Dean wants to sue
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So how much should they ask for in compensation for their free platform that he doesn't like anymore?
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I wish something could come of this.
These platforms can't sustain themselves without providing their products, which are their users. They know this, so early on, they offered every incentive to get as many on the platform as possible.
Many freelancers, independent contractors and small businesses also got onto these platforms as a way to reach new and prospective customers—which was also part of the marketing for each platform. So, these individuals spent many years developing an audience base, maintaining relationships through these platforms, keeping their follower count healthy, posting regularly, using the features that were developed, etc.
For years, they put in the work, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them. On Facebook and Instagram, there's literally no way to reach the audience you spent years cultivating. Impressions are way, way down for everyone. Like 10% of what they once were down. YouTube no longer shows you new videos from your subscribed-to channels—not primarily. It favors algorithm suggestions now, and work has to be put in to find your favorite channels. This has resulted in large reductions in views and engagement for all but the largest channels out there—no one's growing like they used to. And because everyone's chasing the TikTok model, followers no longer mean anything, which is a huge blow to anyone trying to use social media for their business.
It's not just whiny liberals with too much time on their hands being affected by wild platform changes.
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I wish something could come of this.
These platforms can't sustain themselves without providing their products, which are their users. They know this, so early on, they offered every incentive to get as many on the platform as possible.
Many freelancers, independent contractors and small businesses also got onto these platforms as a way to reach new and prospective customers—which was also part of the marketing for each platform. So, these individuals spent many years developing an audience base, maintaining relationships through these platforms, keeping their follower count healthy, posting regularly, using the features that were developed, etc.
For years, they put in the work, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them. On Facebook and Instagram, there's literally no way to reach the audience you spent years cultivating. Impressions are way, way down for everyone. Like 10% of what they once were down. YouTube no longer shows you new videos from your subscribed-to channels—not primarily. It favors algorithm suggestions now, and work has to be put in to find your favorite channels. This has resulted in large reductions in views and engagement for all but the largest channels out there—no one's growing like they used to. And because everyone's chasing the TikTok model, followers no longer mean anything, which is a huge blow to anyone trying to use social media for their business.
It's not just whiny liberals with too much time on their hands being affected by wild platform changes.
@Aqua-Letifer said in John Dean wants to sue:
For years, they put in the work, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them. On Facebook and Instagram, there's literally no way to reach the audience you spent years cultivating. Impressions are way, way down for everyone.
How is the rug being pulled out? Are followers prevented from following creators? Were the "followers", in large proportion, bots?
Like 10% of what they once were down. And because everyone's chasing the TikTok model, followers no longer mean anything, which is a huge blow to anyone trying to use social media for their business.
I fail to see how "following the TikTok model" has anything to do with what Twitter and Musk have done. It's really not very different from the death of MySpace at the hands of Facebook, is it?
It's not just whiny liberals with too much time on their hands being affected by wild platform changes.
Again, what specific platform changes are you referring to? What's different, other than, allegedly, censorship?
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@Aqua-Letifer said in John Dean wants to sue:
For years, they put in the work, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them. On Facebook and Instagram, there's literally no way to reach the audience you spent years cultivating. Impressions are way, way down for everyone.
How is the rug being pulled out? Are followers prevented from following creators? Were the "followers", in large proportion, bots?
Like 10% of what they once were down. And because everyone's chasing the TikTok model, followers no longer mean anything, which is a huge blow to anyone trying to use social media for their business.
I fail to see how "following the TikTok model" has anything to do with what Twitter and Musk have done. It's really not very different from the death of MySpace at the hands of Facebook, is it?
It's not just whiny liberals with too much time on their hands being affected by wild platform changes.
Again, what specific platform changes are you referring to? What's different, other than, allegedly, censorship?
@George-K said in John Dean wants to sue:
@Aqua-Letifer said in John Dean wants to sue:
For years, they put in the work, and now the rug has been pulled out from under them. On Facebook and Instagram, there's literally no way to reach the audience you spent years cultivating. Impressions are way, way down for everyone.
How is the rug being pulled out? Are followers prevented from following creators? Were the "followers", in large proportion, bots?
Just to be clear about this: I am not talking about how bad Elon Musk is. I'm not talking about Elon Musk at all. I'm talking about the ethics of social media changes and their effects beyond making liberals mad. Not Elon Musk.
So, no, you can still follow anyone you want. But for starters, Twitter's home feed is no longer reverse chronological—not by default, anyway. Yeah sure, they still provide you with the option (for now), but they make it inconvenient, so of course, most people don't.
This is a huge damn deal. How the Twitter algo works now is roughly: when you post, it sends your post into a little benchmark test. If it gets higher than a set number of likes, retweets and comments, it'll then push it out to your wider follower base—but only if it reaches those numbers. If it doesn't, your post gets buried and your own followers will never see it unless they spend the time to find you, click on your profile, go to your Tweets, and then sort by recent. Which no one does, ever.
So for small businesses it's drive engagement or die on the platform. What's an easy way to gin up engagement? "Fuck Donald Trump and buy my cookies. #FuckTrump #DoubleChocolate"
I know a small publisher in Virginia who ran into this problem. The (republican) owner didn't want to talk about Donald Trump. The (left-leaning libertarian) editor didn't want to talk about Donald Trump. The three main (conservative, independent and liberal) writers didn't want to talk about Donald Trump. But Twitter was a big source of traffic for them, and traffic leads to sales, so they would gin up stories that barely had anything to do with Donald Trump just to get the traffic. It wasn't news, it was completely ridiculous, everyone knew it, but they had to do it to keep the business afloat.
Because the feed changed.
Like 10% of what they once were down. And because everyone's chasing the TikTok model, followers no longer mean anything, which is a huge blow to anyone trying to use social media for their business.
I fail to see how "following the TikTok model" has anything to do with what Twitter and Musk have done. It's really not very different from the death of MySpace at the hands of Facebook, is it?
I'm not talking about how bad Elon Musk is. I'm talking about the fact that changing a social media platform on its users is a big damn problem. Ask anyone who's actually used it for a living for the past, oh, 10 years. (And I mean actually used, not Kramer's Locksmith Services from Boise who's posted a dozen times in the past six years and all about January 6.)
It's not just whiny liberals with too much time on their hands being affected by wild platform changes.
Again, what specific platform changes are you referring to? What's different, other than, allegedly, censorship?
See above for starters.
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Sometimes I wonder if we should just do away with the internet.
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Sometimes I wonder if we should just do away with the internet.
@Doctor-Phibes said in John Dean wants to sue:
Sometimes I wonder if we should just do away with the internet.
I definitely do.
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Aqua, you have just explained what's going on better than anything I've heard. Your explanation makes sense to me, seeing as how my SEO people have been stumbling all over themselves trying to explain what has changed. And, I pay them a lot each month, to (supposedly) keep ahead of the herd. They keep trying to pound the square peg into the round hole, and pretend that it fits.
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Aqua, you have just explained what's going on better than anything I've heard. Your explanation makes sense to me, seeing as how my SEO people have been stumbling all over themselves trying to explain what has changed. And, I pay them a lot each month, to (supposedly) keep ahead of the herd. They keep trying to pound the square peg into the round hole, and pretend that it fits.
@Rainman said in John Dean wants to sue:
Aqua, you have just explained what's going on better than anything I've heard. Your explanation makes sense to me, seeing as how my SEO people have been stumbling all over themselves trying to explain what has changed. And, I pay them a lot each month, to (supposedly) keep ahead of the herd. They keep trying to pound the square peg into the round hole, and pretend that it fits.
Yeah, SEO is a total arms race. It's basically professional rules lawyering, except the rules of the game keep changing on them. It's a slog.
Not to worry, though. Chat GPT and Lambda are going to turn their worlds completely upside down in the coming year (years if we're lucky), whether they know it or not. The downside is, no one knows what that technology is going to do to the very concept of online business as we know it.
