 Nowadays, it seems as though Big Social’s value is tied to impressions. There’s numerous problems with this: 1. What counts as an impression? And why is this measurement trustworthy? 2. Why are so much impressions passive? On Twitter, why — despite millions of views — are so few people willing to like, comment or retweet? 3. If lurkers are Big Social’s most treasured audience, to what end and for what purpose? Much of social media analytics is bullshit, but impressions are even more so. 37 comments
On Big Social, it's getting to the point that content creators are expected to pay for the privilege of gaining an audience. But who is this audience? What assurance does anyone have that this is a human audience, and not bots? Or even worse, something entirely made up? Maybe I don’t want to talk to a hypothetical audience that does not talk back. Maybe I want to have a conversation in a public online space. Impressions mean nothing to me. A crazy thought: maybe content creators gave Big Social access to an audience, and not the other way around. What would YouTube be without videos? Or Instagram without photos? Or Twitter without tweets? Who at Big Social makes anything that people actually want to see? Big Social is simply a means of distribution. They should never forget that — but they have. This convenient amnesia is why I give Big Social nothing except contempt.  My contempt is from the fact that they have: 1. rigged the distribution with false metrics. It would be like a trucking company documenting that they distributed a product to 1,000,000 different stores--on the front shelves. When, in truth, they dumped the entire product in the middle of the floor of maybe 500 stores. It's a scam. 2. purposefully built their scam systems to be addictive. Addicting others for profit--and ignoring the harms that result from it. I already know that when Big Social presents analytics to you, it’s to their benefit — not yours! Did your post only have 30 impressions? Well, that’s because Big Social wants you to open your wallet — if you want to be seen, you’re going to have to pay! But if Big Social is artificially throttling my reach, why wouldn’t I just go elsewhere — preferably to my own server? At least on my own server, I know that my audience comes honestly. I don’t think that I’m entitled to an audience on social media. But if someone has created a relationship with me, opted into receiving my messages, and gives me positive feedback about my creations — why is Big Social deliberating hiding my presence from their timeline? By the way, this is why I’m running my own Fediverse servers: no company should insert itself as a middleman in *my* relationships. Friendship should not be “pay to play”. It's maddening how media is trained to be skeptical about so much information, yet takes Big Social’s analytics at face value. “Twitter is where the audience is,” journalists say. But how do you actually know that? What is an audience? Who (or what) counts as an audience? Why are “big numbers” of anonymous impressions better than one reader who gives a damn about what you write? When will you realize Emperor Elon’s metrics have no clothes?  People desperately want to believe those metrics ... even when faced with repeated, unequivocal proof that those metrics are falsified in huge quantities. A big part of this is the fault of the platforms, but sadly, a non-inconsequential part of this is the fault of human nature and the desperate, egocentric desire for "popularity" (so much so that the falsified *appearance* of popularity is enough to satiate them). @atomicpoet it's where journalists hang out. Their own little echo chamber. It is still a pretty small platform (even before space Karen) in comparison to others. @atomicpoet And Elon has told so many lies, who would believe him now?  @atomicpoet LOL, they have thousands of followers that will never see their posts. @atomicpoet If I had a nickle for every time a journalist tweeted about how Musk is a threat to free speech, I’d be able to buy Twitter. The awfulness of Musk, I’ve always known but the spinelessness and cynicism of the “ideas people” I used to admire but still on Twitter - that has been the most surprising and disappointing. It’s as if acting on one’s principles is only for us little, non-blue checkmarked people.
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 @atomicpoet You're right. If nobody can independently verify whether numbers are accurate, that does make them heavily suspect. I could produce some really nice looking graphs of anything, too. If I refuse to provide a verifiable data source, they would get ignored though. And that's the right response. Ad platform providers are notorious liars when it comes to metrics. They shouldn't be getting more leeway than me.  @atomicpoet this right here is why I’ve always hated algorithms and shadowbans. That shit is patronizing and defeats the whole purpose of social media which is that we should be able choose what we fill our feeds with.  @atomicpoet Definitely maddening that they are standing in the was of reaching our connections. Also puzzling why we toleratef itbfor so long. @atomicpoet Can’t agree more with that statement. We are clearly ready for a paradigm shift, away from Big Social to something new, the Fediverse. Where we take control back and where human interactions matter again. Is it perfect as it is now? Most certainly not. At least here we have the control to make it better, as community.  @atomicpoet  I think this is "half-true". What really happens is that artists give other artists exposure by drawing an audience to a platform/channel/network/etc. The reason you wanted your show on network television was because people were watching network television; the reason they were watching was because of the other shows on that network. And no one watched it for the ads, but the ads were why you got paid (exposure doesn't pay your rent). @atomicpoet As a digital marketer, I agree on the uselessness of counting impressions. Whenever I get stuck on a project with another marketer who keeps saying, “Look at the impressions this ad received!” I know my work is going to be harder. Facebook, for example, counts a cursor passing over an ad as an engagement. The fact that the ad was even on a page they were on is an “impression,” whether the user noticed it or not. If you click, “don’t show me this ad again” on Instagram - engagement! 🤨  @atomicpoet And I guess for "neurotypical" people. it is important to be "validated" by a large number of people. @atomicpoet @atomicpoet I got my twit account 15+ years ago, at the recommendation of my artists' marketing mentoring program to sell my art & to meet like artists. That flopped so I moved on to FB, Insta & Pintrest. After retirement I have more time & when I went back to the twit it was filled w journalists & pundits. I felt they were talking from a podium. Here at :mastodon: it feels more like community. I'm being talked to, not down to. @atomicpoet same end and purpose as eyeballs watching TV. Impressions are passive because not everyone cares to engage/comment. I don't think this is anything new. Think how few ever bothered to write a letter to the local paper - most just read it. Doesn't mean it wasn't valuable.  @atomicpoet there's a reason this post is one of our most popular of all time: https://www.techdirt.com/2016/09/26/traffic-is-fake-audience-numbers-are-garbage-nobody-knows-how-many-people-see-anything/ @atomicpoet |
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@atomicpoet And let’s not forget when Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and all other social media platforms enabled autoplay on their timelines so that they could massively inflate video view counts