> the company announced today that creators are instead going to be paid based on “engagement with your content from Premium users.”<p>Circling the drain.<p>The incentives only point one way now. If Twitter/X ever was a forum for genuine conversation or debate, they just killed it.
I think they are doing it to match threads, see <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/tech/metas-threads-paying-creators-thousands-055858673.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.yahoo.com/tech/metas-threads-paying-creators-tho...</a> .
Seems like it ought to be possible to link your identity on another platform (e.g. Blue Sky or Threads) with your Twitter identity through some sort of specific post (similar to a DNS proof) and just transplant entire swaths of the network graph to another social network.
i don't think i'm making a controversial statement by saying that "premium user tweets are, on average, the lowest quality content on twitter right now." i'm kind of astounded by how bad the top replies to any viral tweet are - it's not even that they're offensive (though they often are) or that i disagree with them - they're just useless. they're inane. they're pointless. they're uninteresting. i left twitter functionally long ago, but occasionally get sent a tweet and i'll try and read the replies to see what other people are saying and rarely do i ever reach a point where i see <i>anything</i> useful.<p>it feels like the last major shift in quality occurred around the time twitter started doing revenue sharing. the algorithm incentivizes provocative or "relatable" content so many people who were given that opportunity shifted to an "engagement bait" strategy, which doesn't lead to high-quality content, it just leads to stuff that provokes a reaction. alongside that there seemed to be a huge flood of "me too" content in replies. i can't imagine the majority of the people responding to everything and anything with the most inane nonsense are benefitting from this program, but that was really the time i felt the first profound shift in quality on the platform. people's relationship to what they were posting changed meaningfully, and the overall quality of content suffered as a result.<p>this shift moves the motivation to exhibit engagement-bait behaviors from implicit (when people see ads near my content, i make money, therefore i should game the algorithm to be seen by as many people as possible) to explicit (engagement is how i make my money.) i cannot imagine this improving the situation with regards to what's being posted. it kind of seems like a recipe for more of the worst parts of twitter to blossom - accounts that just rush to swipe and repost viral hits from other platforms first to gain traction, explicit incitement through saying increasingly controversial things (to both juice the people who agree and coerce argument from people who don't) and so on.<p>realistically, couldn't this potentially directly add up to rewarding people who post misinformation? if someone with a lot of visibility posts a false claim, people rush to correct and provide context, juicing engagement numbers, leading to them making more money lying than they would telling the truth. it's kind of perverse.<p>if i was more conspiracy minded i feel like i would suggest this was explicitly designed to <i>promote</i> the creation and dissemination of misinformation but i really don't think there's anyone thinking that strategically at twitter.
So a company internally consuming it’s own product is dogfooding. In this case, Twitter is intentionally consuming the waste of it’s own product, and so I think it is wholly appropriate to call this process “dogshitting.”