So the #birdsite lost less money in 1Q 2017 than expected, and therefore the stock went up. And they added users (how many are bots? we'll never know).
I wonder how many people have left or gone silent b/c they don't want to support the POTUS mouthpiece. Just me? I doubt it.
@sunita It's less the potus thing than the hypersaturation with high pitch American politics; I can block/ignore one idiot. But when everyone is constantly discussing and amplifying that idiot, it becomes... tiresome.
But more, it's feeling like conversation between people has declined. It feels like being in a crowd of people on soapboxes all hawking their book/brand/politics. Now it's like, 'time to get on birdsite and do my part as a cog in the mechanical turk amplifying celebrity voices.'
@frankiesaxx @sunita I've not used birbsite until quite recently so not seen or even expected any better conversation on a social network with short form content, but get impression *everyone is an advertiser* on there.
not always bad publicising animal rescue & community groups , a faith you believe in/cause you passionately support but interaction rare these days.
Even good people rarely reply due to "pressure of time" (i.e finding more "louder" content to compete w/others 4 attention)
@vfrmedia @frankiesaxx When I first joined, back in 2010, it felt like a rolling cocktail party. I had a group I talked to about books, another about politics (w/out screaming or RTing all the time), and I kept up with varied news sources.
Now it's promo, yelling, and RTing every political tweet someone agrees with, without checking veracity at all. The party is over. 😠
@sunita @vfrmedia Yeah exactly the same. I fought the good fight for a long time, but the number of idiotic "why you need to promote your #brand on Twitter" #digitalmarketing #guru posts made it useless. Half the people I "know" who are on Twitter don't even log in. They just autopost links to their content & products. "Self promotion" in the way everyone standing in a street market shouting about their wares is "self promoting."
@vfrmedia @sunita That's because they follow randomly, often using bots, on the principle people will follow back (many do) then they may or may not unfollow you (twitter implemented a follow proportion limit because people would just autofollow hundreds of thousands of accounts to boost their followers number.) You can tell who's doing this also because they have a lot of followers but they're following 20-30K people also. You know they don't even look at their timeline.
@frankiesaxx @sunita it looks like "SEO/Digtial marketing" companies are doing this for the actual organisations involved (as none of them are tech related) whats worse is that it doesn't appear all of them are totally random, they have latched on to some topic that I have tweeted about (I pick some quite obscure ones, and don't always use English) and/or someone I follow, so there is at some intelligence (gathered by "stalking") being deployed!
@frankiesaxx @vfrmedia There are also bots triggered by keywords. I was once talking to a friend about a novel with rake in the title (rake as in cad or rogue) and we were promptly followed by a garden rake bot. Who even knew there were such things?
@sunita @frankiesaxx even more bizzare as unless there is some kind of new "hipster appeal" design being marketed garden rakes are €25 max, bulky and hardly the sort of things that would warrant international online marketing.
it does worry me that otherwise legit but non tech aware small local businesses might be being conned out of money they pay for "online advertising" that ends up with crap like this, doesn't bring them new business and creates more social divisions..
@frankiesaxx @vfrmedia That's a good point. most of the keyword bots are funny but I'd hate to think people were paying for the (non) service.
@frankiesaxx @sunita and even stranger is that I've never been followed by a tech related bot, or any company that sells bicycles or cycling accessories.I guess folk in these industries might be smart enough not to use "viral marketing" methods..
@frankiesaxx @sunita some of the "follows" I get make no sense. Not bad/threatening but often totally random (especially from outside Europe). For instance I got followed by some site about garage floors in Canada, and another about performance cars. Also another business selling wooden crafts.
I do tweet about roads, safety and transport from perspective of cyclists but I've never owned a car!
There is a street market in town, but thats 3km away rather than set up in my garden..