Introduction
On the 31st of March, the Twitter algorithm went open and got analyzed.
Twitter revealed its algorithm to the world.
— Aakash Gupta 🚀 Product Growth Guy (@aakashg0) April 1, 2023
But what does it mean for you?
I spent the evening analyzing it.
Here’s what you need to know:
This analysis confirmed what many suspected, and added a few wrinkles on top of that. In short, what we see here is how Twitter actually works.
The Thread
I will collect the rest of the thread below.
1. Likes, then retweets, then replies.
Here’s the ranking parameters:
- Each like gets a 30x boost
- Each retweet a 20x
- Each reply only 1x
It’s much more impactful to earn likes and retweets than replies.
2. Images & videos help.
Both images and videos lead to a nice 2x boost.
3. Links hurt, unless you have enough engagement.
Generally external links get you marked as spam.
Unless you have enough engagement.
4. Mutes & unfollows hurt.
All of the following hurt your engagement:
- Mutes
- Blocks
- Unfollows
- Spam reports
- Abuse reports
5. Blue extends reach
Paying the monthly fee gets you a healthy boost.
6. Misinformation is highly down-ranked.
Anything that is categorized as misinformation gets the rug pulled out from under it.
Surprisingly, so are posts about Ukraine.
7. You are clustered into a group.
The algorithm puts you into a grouping of similar profiles.
It uses that to extend tweet reach beyond your followers to similar people.
8. Posting outside your cluster hurts.
If you do “out of network” content, it’s not going to do as well.
That’s why hammering home points about your niche works.
9. Making up words or misspelling hurts.
Words that are identified as “unknown language” are given 0.01, which is a huge penalty.
Anything under 1 is bad.
This is really bad.
10. Followers, engagement & user data are the three data points.
If you take away anything, remember this - the models take in 3 inputs:
- Likes, retweets, replies: engagement data
- Mutes, unfollows, spam reports: user data
- Who follows you: the follower graph
Now we have something to work with.
Commentary
Twitter gurus who proclaim that they know how to make 10K US Dollars a month just on Twitter are not bullshitting.
What they did was either figure this out themselves, or (more likely) got some inside information explaining this and put it to use. Through the power differential acquired by their disparate knowledge of the platform's operation, they became able to effectively target an audience and market to them.
Dissidents that care about winning need to accept two facts to be effective on social media.
- This is a marketing campaign environment.
- The enemy controls the platform.
What the gurus that can back up their claims do, like Eddy Quan or Joshua Lisec, is to use Twitter to establish a Brand Persona through which they seek out their targetted customer demographic. See that "cluster" function above? See how choosing your cluster--your ghetto, to be blunt--and hammering that niche good and hard serves to drive people to your brand, which you can then upsell in a seperate Tweet to an off-site communications channel.
The gurus use Gumroad for this. Dissidents would be wise to avoid that (also enemy-controlled, though for now under the radar) in favor of a purpose-built alternative site that they own and control. This also means using either in-house or allied payment processing (e.g. GabPay), and the same for hosting.
Twitter is purpose-built to sift, segregate, and filter populations into ghettos. Exploit this fact.
Use multiple accounts, and try to keep them adjacent to each other in terms of whom they reach. You want to use the most Normie-friendly one as an intact filter, and then push them down a pipeline towards your core brand account.
This is an adaptation of a product funnel approach that is already used by legit businesses worldwide; attract attention, get them interested, sell them solutions at varying mixtures of user time and money expenditure (the more money they spend, the less time they spend)- only you're selling epistemic solutions to existential crisis.
We know that this works. Our enemies, in their usual manner of inversion, confess it: "The Alt-Right Pipeline". They do it to our children also via the school system.
What dissident groups need to do is to recruit for, and cultivate acumen with, social media to make this effective. In short, recruit for salesmen to be the faces.
Like it or not, that's what this is within the political realm: a battle of Rhetoric and Charisma. It's a show. Leave those that can't perform on stage in the back writing the scripts, directing the shows, and handling the logistics. The enemy knows this, and that's one of the reasons they went for the culture when they went for their total takeover of the West; they know it's the point where ideas are put into practice first- the ideas being the realm of Religion.
The path forward is clear: develop a marketing campaign to draw prospective supporters to a platform that your dissident group controls. At the very least, move to one controlled by an ally or run out of a place where your enemies can't shut you down.
If you've read the last few weeks' posts, you'll see why this is difficult despite being necessary, and even then there are real limits.
A serious dissident movement has to acknowledge how the game is played and work with what they have in order to build what they want. You can't do that on media that is under enemy control, but I have yet to see a dissident movement even try to do this other than Andrew Torba with Gab or Vox Day with Social Galactic. I have yet to see any of them do so much as spin up a Fediverse instance.
This needs to be remedied; like it or not, social media is both the prize and the battlefield- it is no more viable to quit it than it is to quit the telephone.
As for being on enemy media, knowing how to game the system will go a long way towards working around the constraints imposed. There's a reason why very edgy shitposters can still break out while open dissident actors either get sidelined or have to do the way Sargon did to get anywhere.
The Western dissidents need to learn how to sell, among many other things they need to do, if they plan on getting anything useful or lasting done. They just got handed a big tool; they would be fucking retarded to not make full use of it- but that would not be the first time either.
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