Are You Still Shadowbanned?

Disqus has been tweaking things that didn't need tweaking, recently, also. I should have seen notification of this comment when I opened Disqus and saw that other people had posted comments on other blogs. The commenter is a Real Twit, a real blogger, and a real Zazzler.

Poster: Cactus in Mission Garden, San Luis Obispo Poster

by barbsbooks


In theory I get a few pennies if you use that specific link to buy that specific poster. Who knows? Zazzle has been tweaking and "innovating" and messing everything up too. If you browse the whole Barb's California store and like other things better, no problem. If you're not able to follow the link, find Barb's California, or buy stuff, I wouldn't be surprised; almost everything at Zazzle is currently malfunctioning for sellers.

Anyway, here's the comment:

"

Got here by way of the Twitter link you sent me. Not sure still that I completely understand your tweet to me (@)barbsloco) -- You sent a tweet I'd posted on May 2 and said I'd been shadowbanned. Does that mean you and others are not seeing my tweets on my profile the way they look to me? Or do you mean they get lost in all the ads that are inserted?

I'm as careful as I know how to be to check every profile before following anyone to avoid fake followers. I'm not sure I understand this whole shadowbanning thing. (I don't use chemicals in my garden, either, just so you know.) How would I know if I'm shadowbanned? Does that mean those empty black tweets I sometimes see in my stream are from shadowbanned people temporarily on restriction. I work hard on Twitter to try to show followers what I think they will enjoy. I send different tweets to accounts focused on different subjects. If no one is listening, I may as well spend that scheduling time blogging. Feel free to notify me if you answer this comment. I'm not finding a box to check.

"

Valid questions. The thing about Twitter's infamous "shadowbanning" is that it's hard to know when or whether it's happening to you. Your profile page looks the same way it always does. People who take the trouble to visit your profile page still see your tweets there. People who are following you, however, and looking for your tweets in their stream, don't see them.

I keep opening Twitter and checking, and although I've taken the trouble to turn off all the evil, anti-free-account "filtering" and to tag several hundred people, and to keep resetting my stream to "Latest" rather than what greedheads are paying to call "Top" (which are generally around my bottom rating), I'm still not seeing any tweets from Real Twits like @barbsloco in my stream where they ought to be. So yes, BarbRad, you're still shadowbanned.

If someone is being "timed out" today but someone has retweeted one of their previous tweets, and/or you've blocked them or they've blocked you but someone you follow has retweeted their tweet, or if they've chosen to delete a tweet that was attracting a lot of unfavorable attention, what you'll see (at least in Google Chrome) is a white box with a note like "This tweet is not available."

I've not seen the black boxes--yet. I suspect they would be tweets from people who've chosen to turn on "Dark Mode," which would be the innovation cravers, which would not include any of my Tweeps. (I follow people on all sides of issues, but I try to pick intelligent ones.) "Dark Mode" displays your words in white-on-black rather than black-on-white. White-on-black is hard for many people to read, but on different devices the code for white-on-black might show up as deep-purple-on-black. (Live Journal has offered "Dark Mode" for a long time, and on any random day browsing there is likely to pull up a complaint from people who "can't read some people's 'exciting' all-black Journals.")

Currently, even the tweets that aren't being blocked and that do belong in my stream, from the newspapers and the superstar writers, are still being crowded out by nasty irrelevant ads. I'm working on this. Block! Block! Block! About all I do when I check my own feed is block the advertising garbage.

I don't like blocking people. I don't like blocking even corporations, because I still think of Twitter as the place where real people can have real conversations with corporations that might help them improve their products and services such that we might actually buy their stuff. That is, I now realize, an old, outdated position to take. Greedhead corporations wanted to turn Twitter into another channel on commercial television where they blare deliberately obnoxious ads, on the principle that we might block the annoyance from our memory and remember the brand and buy the product when we're in a quieter place and thus in a friendlier mood. Twitter's given them what they wanted. The corporations aren't seeing and replying to my tweets. They're just screaming and not listening. So, until each corporation prevails upon a private person using a free account not linked to a phone to tweet to me, personally, "Please, @5PriscillaKing, This Corporation sincerely apologizes for Twitter's Rudeness Policy and humbly begs permission to follow your account without being blocked. This Corporation promises to read and interact with your account daily to retain access to your Twitter stream"...Block! Block! Block! If it's "promoted," even if it's from an account I might have wanted to follow on Original Twitter, it must be BLOCKED!

I'm no longer an "insider" at a web site whose idea of monetizing itself seems to be destroying itself. I don't want to be one. Should Twitter decide to stop sabotaging its sponsors by "filtering" private accounts in any way except by letting users block them, Twitter will need to publicize its return to sanity. Maybe the first "sponsored tweet" everyone sees, at the bottom of the first 25 tweets of interest to the Twit reading per stream, should display the words "Twitter isn't filtering anything any more. Twitter respects your ability to filter your Twitter stream for yourself."

Then the tutorial for those who don't know how to use the "block" button should feature, "Block all videos. Show thumbnail views of pictures only (100x100 pixels) until I click on them. Block all "promoted" tweets from people I'm not following," and nothing remotely resembling that awful "Block all accounts that haven't linked to a phone number I can use to annoy them with sales calls."

Unless and until that's done, Twitter is, by its own choice, just another "free" but basically hostile web site that needs to be replaced.

The Internet has been made "free" to the public at considerable expense to the corporations who've been subsidizing it. As those corporations realize that more access to private individuals' thoughts is not automatically going to generate profit for them, we can expect Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Zazzle, Instagram, Youtube, Paypal, and probably also Google and Amazon, to become increasingly less user-friendly as they claw and yowl for our money. All I can advise is: Don't give it to them. If cyberspace ceases to be a happy place for us, let's go back to real mail with real paper. The Internet can continue to be free and friendly to private people who have spent twenty or fifty or eighty years learning to ignore anything that resembles a corporate advertisement, or it can disappear--and we might all be better off if it disappears.

For posterity's sake, just in case any of the corporations begin to wonder where their audience went, here's a short list of what the corporations must do to keep the Internet alive. Non-negotiably:

1. Only newspapers and magazines that already have high subscribership and choose to offer their full content online, at a price well below the price for subscriptions to the printed edition, can afford to consider a paywall, or any form of discrimination against visitors who aren't paying them a penny.

2. As a general rule, web sites need to remain compatible with all browsers. People who rejected Windows 10 did so for a reason. Maybe when Microsoft recognizes its mistake and unrolls Windows CR (for Customer Respect), featuring an external, physical data storage system to which everything must be backed up before contact with the Internet can be made, a program that makes it impossible for anything that looks like a phone number or Social Security number to be transferred through the Internet, and an upgrade back to the version of Word that worked with Windows ME for everybody at no extra charge, maybe we'll change the browsers we have. Not before. Computers' memory is finite and people don't want to waste it on changing browsers.

If web sites are too shabby to be able to hire people who can keep them fully compatible with everything, they should be required to list the browsers with which they work, up front, ahead of any graphics, so those of us who are rejecting Windows 10 will know which sites aren't going to work for us, and not waste any time on them.

Which means advertisements must display quickly and smoothly in 1992 Google Opera, or they do the company more harm than good and should be removed.We click. We blink. If the command we just clicked into has not been executed, you're an inadequate web site...goodbye. Never imagine that looking at a white screen while a flashy ad loads, or seeing words jiggle up and down around big messy graphics, is going to build any kind of support for your brand. Get a computer that still has 1992 Opera and make sure your site works efficiently on that thing. If it doesn't, remove all graphics and start over.

3. Anticipate that a lot of us deliberately block audiovisual content. If you want your message to be reached, put it into printable words. Don't bother with podcasts for which the full text is not on the screen.

4. Free users, whose contact information YOU MUST NEVER TRY TO FIND, are your prospective customers. Many of us aren't going to buy anything online but, if you're very polite and respectful, if you show that you're good neighbor types whom we want to support, and if you make your product available through real-world Internet Portals, we might pay cash for it in the real world. Never, never, never put anything anywhere on the Internet that offends us, or even anything that openly makes sites friendlier to paid customers. Any benefits you offer to individual customers should be mentioned in private messages to them only. For-profit sites can only hope to become actually profitable if they market their brand to people who don't buy stuff online. The Internet could possibly be a great marketing tool, reducing the cost of all those annoying "traditional" ads we systematically ignore, if you don't get greedy.

5. If you can't make the Internet pay by keeping it friendly to those of us who don't buy things through it, the time may have come for the whole Internet fad to pass on.