Rage against the machine

You get what you pay for

Back in the 1990s, when “social media” largely meant “Usenet newsgroups”, the subscribers of uk.misc used to hold an annual trolling¹ contest. The rules were very simple: you could make one post with no follow-ups, cross-posted to a careful selection of groups, and the post which generated the most replies won. One year, the winner was something to the effect of “I see that Margaret Thatcher is in hospital. Fingers crossed, eh”, cross-posted to the main Conservative and Labour groups. Simple, but highly effective.

The contest was kind of a joke, and it ran for one week in the year so most of the rest of the time life went on as normal. However, fast-forward 25 years, and the contest has gone international, runs every single hour of every single day, and now has big cash prizes.

It’s always been somewhat implicit in the model of Twitter that everyone was competing for attention. But previously, when the main published metric was follower count, it was clear that you couldn’t build an audience with a single post (however viral), but rather had to sustain an interesting series of posts, whether funny, informative, cynical, artistic or whatever. And of course, the “prize” was laughable: just a bigger follower count (as I described here, this was paid in Disney dollars).

Whereas now, as part of New Twitter’s attempt to stave off its interest payments, there is a new game in town. The announcement that people with blue ticks whose posts generate sufficiently high numbers of ad views will receive a share of those payments sounds great! Finally, content creators will be rewarded!

Except .. of course, there’s a catch. To receive any money at all, you need to generate 5 million page impressions in 3 months. That’s a pretty big number for New Twitter - in June-July 2021 at the peak of the delta wave I think I managed 30 million impressions in a month, but I’d be surprised if I’m anywhere close to a million per month now.

And of course, the way to generate impressions is going to be the uk.misc trolling contest taken to the max: if you can post something stupid enough to get dunked on and go viral, then you are well on the way to earning money. Hate clicks earn the same as love clicks, but hate clicks are much much easier to generate in bulk. So, my fear is that the Twitter ad payments are simply going to incentivise all kinds of bad behaviour, it’s going to take things even closer to the lowest common denominator, and the people who are going to receive money are going to be some of the worst posters on the site.

Sigh. If only there was a way to build an audience, and perhaps earn money, without relying on this economy of hate clicks! Well, perhaps there is, and perhaps you’re looking at it. I’ve been on Substack for about eight months now, and while my audience is still only a fraction of my Twitter followers, I’m perfectly happy with that. The interactions seem much more pleasant, Notes doesn’t seem to incentivise angry dunking, and the audience is formed of people who want to read longer pieces not just hot takes. And while I have no plans to move to paid subscriptions, it’s kind of nice to know that I could if I wanted to, and to see interesting people being paid by Substack for words, not for just propagating anger. After all, there’s more to life than followers, likes and RTs.

1. At the risk of sounding like an old person who can’t cope with the idea that language evolves, this was “trolling” in the original sense of the word, not “flaming” as it’s come to be seen now.