Archive for Threads

Social Media Better than Meta

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , , , on November 16, 2024 by telescoper

You may or may not know that these blog posts appear automatically on various social media platforms.

I have been posting content automatically on Meta platforms, Facebook and Threads. Recently, however, Meta’s AI algorithm has been randomly blocking posts. A couple of weeks ago it blocked this post (about the Edgeworth family) on the grounds that it violated rules concerning “sexually explicit content”. Today it blocked this post (the weekly update for OJAp) on the grounds that it was identified as spam. I can see the need for an automatic screening given the huge volume of posts, but the problem is that my facebook feed is full of actual spam that gets through these filters while innocent posts get blocked. In other words the algorithm is crap. If you ask for a review of the decision, all Meta does is run the algorithm again – with the same results, which is a waste of time.

I haven’t got time to waste on such stupidity so I will shortly be deactivating automatic posts to Facebook and Threads; these generate very little traffic for me anyway.

There are, however, plenty of alternative ways of following this blog. You can subscribe by email or by RSS feed for a start. On other social media platforms I recommend the federated version on Mastodon here:

https://telescoper.blog/@telescoper.blog

They also appear on my personal Mastodon account here:

https://mastodon.social/@telescoper

Posts also appear on LinkedIn here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-coles-911912216/

and on my BlueSky account:

https://bsky.app/profile/telescoper.bsky.social

WordPress has just set up an automatic integration with BlueSky, on which I now have over 3000 followers, which is nice, but any one of these is better than Meta!

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In the Dark on Social Media

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , , , , , on August 12, 2024 by telescoper

It’s almost a year since I deactivated my Twitter account. Or should I call it X? Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I don’t use it any more. Over the past few weeks it seems quite a few more – especially in the UK – have had enough of the antics of Elon Musk (aka Space Karen), especially with his attempts to fan the flames of the recent Farage riots by spreading misinformation. The first thing I noticed was that my BlueSky account was suddenly getting quite a lot of new followers. I now have about 850, still a long way short of the over 7000 I used to have on Twitter, but the level of engagement is far higher. That’s because the algorithm Space Karen introduced on X makes it difficult for your own followers. let alone anyone else, to see your tweets. The one disadvantage of BlueSky is that it doesn’t have an API that allows me to post directly from this blog when I publish a post, so I have to copy the URL by hand.

I also have an account on Mastodon where I have over 1200 followers and similarly good engagement. When I first started there a couple of years ago it didn’t have a WordPress API but it does now, so everything I write here gets posted automatically on my feed. Not only that, this blog is now also now fully federated which means that there is an autonomous feed for the blog posts. Not just a link to each post, as the API produces, but the whole post. This is a nice feature because if I change a post on this WordPress platform it automatically gets changed on the Mastodon feed.

I also have a Facebook Page on which these

And now there’s Threads, which is like a version of Twitter bolted onto Instagram. When this first came out last year it wasn’t available in the EU for data protection issues so I didn’t bother with it. I only just found out at the weekend that has been available since December 2023 but I wasn’t paying much attention to social media then so didn’t catch the news. Anyway, since I already have a (very quiet) Instagram account so I set up a Threads account which you can find here if you like that sort of thing. My first impressions of Threads are not very favourable, but let’s see how it goes. At least it’s not as bad as Twitter. I still think it is indefensible that my employer, along with most other universities, has decided to maintain a presence on that site.

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Social Media and Academia

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , on July 11, 2023 by telescoper

I saw the post attached below and thought I’d share it here. I don’t have as many followers on social media as the author of the post and I’ve never thought of confining this blog to purely research topics. In terms of academic matters I never thought Twitter was useful for anything other than sharing web links. I’m glad that I stuck to the longer form of blogging represented by this site.

Nevertheless I do have similar experiences of Twitter to those described in the article. It has indeed turned to shit. Since Elon Musk took over, you are basically silenced unless you pay for a blue tick, the social media equivalent of buying a megaphone for use in a library. Add the constant stream of promoted tweets and other ads and it really is a bad experience all round. I locked my Twitter account some time ago.

While I still post on Twitter, I now much prefer Mastodon. I have about 1/8 the number followers there, but much higher levels of engagement and it’s far more civilized. WordPress has now introduced an autopost to Mastodon, incidentally. The autopost to Twitter is no longer supported. If anyone wants to follow me on social media I’d recommend finding me on Mastodon.

(I’ve also joined BlueSky, but so far that is rather slow. I won’t be joining Threads, as that isn’t available in the civilized world (i.e. the European Union) owing to data protection issues.)

The enshittification of academic social media

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