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Aral Balkan

The difference between a closed, algorithmically-curated silo like Twitter and the fediverse.

Same post.

Twitter: ~43K “followers”, 8 boosts, 58 likes
Fediverse: ~8.43K followers, 57 boosts, 106 likes

Your thousands of “followers” on Twitter mean nothing because the algorithm (i.e., Twitter, Inc.) decides who gets to hear you.

5 comments
Attila Kinali

@aral Or it could be because on the fediverse there are more people who are critical of big tech companies than on twitter. Aka sampling bias.

Aral Balkan

@attilakinali You realise these are still my followers we’re talking about, right?

Attila Kinali

@aral Are you assuming that all your followers are the same? That none of them has a different personality? A different opinion?

Aral Balkan

@attilakinali Not at all. But I am implying that following me is a sampling bias that’s stronger and more relevant than that of the generic sampling bias difference between Twitter and the fediverse’s general audience.

Attila Kinali

@aral Look man. You write something that elicits a response from a specific type of people. You look at the reaction you get on different platforms from that one single post? Sample of one statistics? Not accounting for any biases at all? Really?
That's the kind of pseudo scientific behavior I detest. It's the kind of thing that deceives people. Or rather, it's how people deceive themselves. You think you understood something. But what you really did was feed a GIGO system. And lied to yourself.

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