Hmm. I'd say Scott is the only vaguely political account I follow. Next up would be one BBC News and a local newspaper account. Apart from that I follow mainly sports teams (my main use for it is scores and fantasy football) and some selected ones for tv shows. Less than 40 accounts in total.
If anyone can explain how Twitter uses that information to decide to hide Scott Adams from my timeline, I'd love to know. It seems to me that there's one obvious explanation.
In short, because they think you'd engage less with Scott Adams' content.
Filter bubbles are an algorithmic attempt to give you the content that you want the most. For example, Twitter might have identified at some level that you like and retweet sports related content more often than political content. Or even further, that you like left-leaning content more than right. So, they'll do everything they can to serve you what they think you want. If it keeps you scrolling, then they make more ad dollars.
All of these nuanced inputs impact what you see on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
The problem is, there IS a difference between what you want to see and what you should see. Just because you love cat photos, doesn't mean that the NY Times should be filled with them.
I've seen that and I'm sorry, but I really don't accept your explanation. I've never retweeted/liked/replied or tweeted, ever. I'm a passive consumer. I don't follow political accounts, or search out political views there. If anything, I reckon I was clicking a lot on his blog links via tweets, so (presumably) he should have been showing up more... rather than not at all.
I don't mean to sound like I'm holding you accountable for this! It's just, well this kinda thing is well dodgy and I want to assure people I'm not just cribbing about this without a basis.
Just a thought, but even of clicking his blog links means you're engaging more, perhaps twitter is guiding their users to engagement in the form of scrolling through their feeds, since that's what twitter makes their money from. Thinking about it that way, maybe it makes sense to filter out tweets that are more likely to take you away from the site
The entire point of Twitter was that there was no such filter, it would just show the tweets of everybody you followed in a chronological order. That's why we are all pissed.
I don't know if that was the "entire point" of Twitter. I am certainly glad that there is a bit of filtering. I recall the old days where most of my feed consisted of noise, today I actually get some value out of it.
Sure. But my Twitter feed is not important enough for me to do something about that. As it is, it's somewhat entertaining (I check it perhaps once a week) whereas if it was unfiltered I never would. So I am at least one person for whom it makes business sense for Twitter to filter in order to keep me engaged.
That changed a long time ago, I'm surprised people are only noticing now. The change was not borne out of malice: like Facebook, they try to filter out accounts with too much noise or which you don't really interact with, to show you only stuff you're really interested in. In the past you'd see all @-replies and a single noisy account could basically flood your timeline, that's hardly the case nowadays.
In the case of Scott Adams mentioned above, it happens to me regularly with tons of people who are absolutely unthreatening. There is certainly real censorship going on inside all these centralized platforms (like deleting content), but Occam suggests this is just Twitter trying too hard.
The shadowbanning and bubbling only started like two years ago. That thing about seeing all replies was changed... I don't know, eight years ago? And that made all the sense in the world and it's in no way censoring or anything... My friends talking to people I don't know is not something I care about. But my friends talking to me and me not seeing it because they are shadowbanned? That's a new low.
If anyone can explain how Twitter uses that information to decide to hide Scott Adams from my timeline, I'd love to know. It seems to me that there's one obvious explanation.