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Twitter & The Attention Economy
3 years ago
Hi All,
To those of you who never left FA, and for all those who are eagerly (or reluctantly) rushing back here to refresh your accounts, reactivate your activity, and upload allllll that amazing content you've made, this is the conversation for you.
Twitter
As many of you know, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter have many believing it is in its End Times, due to collapse and disappear, crash and burn, at any moment. All those tweets, all those years of uploading content and curating your feed and followers, either gone or fleeing to different websites (and never any website that anyone is really excited about). For artists or creators that depend on an audience to make a living, this is not fascinating or funny. Creators who depend on commissions to make a living, depend on sales of their work or recruiting people into becoming patrons on Patreon, view Twitter as an important platform to get seen.
This brings us to the topic of The Attention Economy.
The Attention Economy represents the collective capacity of all people to perceive and engage with their environment, including digital environments as well as imagined insanities created by any given brain. Some people have more capacity than others to seek out and engage with the world around them; some people are more willing or able to invest not just their attention but also their emotional power and/or financial power into what they pay attention to. Content creators literally create realities, ideas and environments for people to engage with, and put that content on platforms like FA or Twitter for anyone to perceive and choose to pay attention to.
Many people disagree on whether or not Twitter, as a platform vying for attention, was or was not effective for content creators in the Attention Economy. For content creators, this largely meant Twitter's ability to attract new people's attention, hold existing people's attention on your content, and convert that attention into engagement - likes, retweets, clicks on links, and either commissions from customers or subscriptions/patrons on donation platforms. For big brands and advertisers, the data was never really there to support the idea that Twitter was all that good at this. Oh, for sure, Twitter and Musk (the latter being a verified fucking idiot and sociopathic narcissist) were eager to sell people on the idea that Twitter was somehow super good at converting attention into dollars, but much like Twitch streaming or most businesses, this preys on Success Bias / Survivorship Bias which is the logical error of only perceiving those who were successful and overlooking the vastly greater number of those who were not.
For ourselves, as Echoen & Balros & Skilea, we only used Twitter in two ways;
A) To convert and corrupt people perceiving our produced content and hopefully directing them to our massive FA gallery full of free fap material (with the end result ideally being they are inspired to create more content that we can then also enjoy; thus an eternally escalating positive feedback loop that further infects the internet);
or
B) Expend our excess supply of attention during those moments when we can't or shouldn't focus on something deeper or more profound. Timewasting with a slight chance of perceiving someone or something interesting.
The Death of Twitter is something we are quite excited for and hopeful of, because it is our belief that while Twitter was frankly terrible for content creators and advertisers alike, it was extremely effective at building addictive behaviors and disseminating disinformation. In terms of The Attention Economy, Twitter demonstrated that a lot of people are susceptible to having their attention grabbed, held, and spun in circles much like a gambling addiction. It was piss poor at actually getting people to do much more than get lost in bubbles, and with it gone, a good chunk of the Furry Subculture (we're too big and too many people to merely be a 'fandom' anymore) is anxiously seeking where the next 'Twitter' is going to be. These are people holding up their attention like Fry and a fistful of dollars, saying "Shout loudest and take my attention!"
What's going to happen and what do we do about it?
Never forget this tidbit of information: 90% of Twitter's content comes from only 10% of its users: https://www.reuters.com/technology/.....al-2022-10-25/
Twitter is not likely to actually permanently die. In either a week or two weeks it may experience catastrophic service disruptions and become unusable for a time, perhaps enough that a plurality of furries using it migrate elsewhere. Furry Twitter is not actually all that large or active, just extremely loud making it seem like there's lots of furs there or this is where Furry is. Again, Twitter is just really good at eating attention.
Should Twitter die or Furries make an exodus from the platform, where will most people go? This is not known. For all the folks posting "Find me here, here, here and here!", the list is never the same for all folks. We have not seen one single website or platform be pointed to more commonly than any other, not even FurAffinity. We have seen Itaku, Patreon, discord and telegram servers, Mastodon, e621, pixiv, pillowfort, picarto, trello, Weasyl, SoFurry, Tumblr, Deviantart, Newgrounds, Instagram, Ko-Fi, VK, and personal websites. The only trend we've really noticed is that Reddit is not listed as a place to be found or for content to be shared. It would be fascinating for someone to analyze a couple thousand "Find me" posts on Twitter and count the number of times each and any platform is listed, see if there is any site that is poised to become the new home for furry attention, the new shopping center for the Attention Economy of furry.
If you are a content creator, our advice is to prepare for when a plurality of people choose the next platform. Maybe you think you know where it's going to be - like here, FurAffinity - and can start flooding that place with all your content and creations. Developing or re-developing your community, carving out space for their attention to be held by you and what you make, instead of being devoured by a platform that wants folk to be addicted to it instead of addicted to you. We already know that FA is our place and our content is debilitatingly delicious and drives folk mad with unceasing orgasms the moment they perceive it; happy to give you advice if you want to inflict the same on your followers.
If you are a content consumer, know that your attention is desired. Desired by Twitter just as its desired by Facebook; to make money for capitalist oligarchs and fascist control freaks who would burn the world before extracting the last dollar's worth of your attention from you. Desired by artists and writers and musicians and comedians who have truly beautiful things to share with the world and hope for a slice of your attention to spread joy and earn an honest living. Desired by deviants who have their own agenda, such as cognitohazards like us who grow and change your brain each time you engage.
Your every click, your every response, your every second that you spend on anything in the world around you, is fuel for the Attention Economy. Will you spend it on Twitter, on Reddit, or on the people and communities you cherish and value?
To those of you who never left FA, and for all those who are eagerly (or reluctantly) rushing back here to refresh your accounts, reactivate your activity, and upload allllll that amazing content you've made, this is the conversation for you.
As many of you know, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter have many believing it is in its End Times, due to collapse and disappear, crash and burn, at any moment. All those tweets, all those years of uploading content and curating your feed and followers, either gone or fleeing to different websites (and never any website that anyone is really excited about). For artists or creators that depend on an audience to make a living, this is not fascinating or funny. Creators who depend on commissions to make a living, depend on sales of their work or recruiting people into becoming patrons on Patreon, view Twitter as an important platform to get seen.
This brings us to the topic of The Attention Economy.
The Attention Economy represents the collective capacity of all people to perceive and engage with their environment, including digital environments as well as imagined insanities created by any given brain. Some people have more capacity than others to seek out and engage with the world around them; some people are more willing or able to invest not just their attention but also their emotional power and/or financial power into what they pay attention to. Content creators literally create realities, ideas and environments for people to engage with, and put that content on platforms like FA or Twitter for anyone to perceive and choose to pay attention to.
Many people disagree on whether or not Twitter, as a platform vying for attention, was or was not effective for content creators in the Attention Economy. For content creators, this largely meant Twitter's ability to attract new people's attention, hold existing people's attention on your content, and convert that attention into engagement - likes, retweets, clicks on links, and either commissions from customers or subscriptions/patrons on donation platforms. For big brands and advertisers, the data was never really there to support the idea that Twitter was all that good at this. Oh, for sure, Twitter and Musk (the latter being a verified fucking idiot and sociopathic narcissist) were eager to sell people on the idea that Twitter was somehow super good at converting attention into dollars, but much like Twitch streaming or most businesses, this preys on Success Bias / Survivorship Bias which is the logical error of only perceiving those who were successful and overlooking the vastly greater number of those who were not.
For ourselves, as Echoen & Balros & Skilea, we only used Twitter in two ways;
A) To convert and corrupt people perceiving our produced content and hopefully directing them to our massive FA gallery full of free fap material (with the end result ideally being they are inspired to create more content that we can then also enjoy; thus an eternally escalating positive feedback loop that further infects the internet);
or
B) Expend our excess supply of attention during those moments when we can't or shouldn't focus on something deeper or more profound. Timewasting with a slight chance of perceiving someone or something interesting.
The Death of Twitter is something we are quite excited for and hopeful of, because it is our belief that while Twitter was frankly terrible for content creators and advertisers alike, it was extremely effective at building addictive behaviors and disseminating disinformation. In terms of The Attention Economy, Twitter demonstrated that a lot of people are susceptible to having their attention grabbed, held, and spun in circles much like a gambling addiction. It was piss poor at actually getting people to do much more than get lost in bubbles, and with it gone, a good chunk of the Furry Subculture (we're too big and too many people to merely be a 'fandom' anymore) is anxiously seeking where the next 'Twitter' is going to be. These are people holding up their attention like Fry and a fistful of dollars, saying "Shout loudest and take my attention!"
What's going to happen and what do we do about it?
Never forget this tidbit of information: 90% of Twitter's content comes from only 10% of its users: https://www.reuters.com/technology/.....al-2022-10-25/
Twitter is not likely to actually permanently die. In either a week or two weeks it may experience catastrophic service disruptions and become unusable for a time, perhaps enough that a plurality of furries using it migrate elsewhere. Furry Twitter is not actually all that large or active, just extremely loud making it seem like there's lots of furs there or this is where Furry is. Again, Twitter is just really good at eating attention.
Should Twitter die or Furries make an exodus from the platform, where will most people go? This is not known. For all the folks posting "Find me here, here, here and here!", the list is never the same for all folks. We have not seen one single website or platform be pointed to more commonly than any other, not even FurAffinity. We have seen Itaku, Patreon, discord and telegram servers, Mastodon, e621, pixiv, pillowfort, picarto, trello, Weasyl, SoFurry, Tumblr, Deviantart, Newgrounds, Instagram, Ko-Fi, VK, and personal websites. The only trend we've really noticed is that Reddit is not listed as a place to be found or for content to be shared. It would be fascinating for someone to analyze a couple thousand "Find me" posts on Twitter and count the number of times each and any platform is listed, see if there is any site that is poised to become the new home for furry attention, the new shopping center for the Attention Economy of furry.
If you are a content creator, our advice is to prepare for when a plurality of people choose the next platform. Maybe you think you know where it's going to be - like here, FurAffinity - and can start flooding that place with all your content and creations. Developing or re-developing your community, carving out space for their attention to be held by you and what you make, instead of being devoured by a platform that wants folk to be addicted to it instead of addicted to you. We already know that FA is our place and our content is debilitatingly delicious and drives folk mad with unceasing orgasms the moment they perceive it; happy to give you advice if you want to inflict the same on your followers.
If you are a content consumer, know that your attention is desired. Desired by Twitter just as its desired by Facebook; to make money for capitalist oligarchs and fascist control freaks who would burn the world before extracting the last dollar's worth of your attention from you. Desired by artists and writers and musicians and comedians who have truly beautiful things to share with the world and hope for a slice of your attention to spread joy and earn an honest living. Desired by deviants who have their own agenda, such as cognitohazards like us who grow and change your brain each time you engage.
Your every click, your every response, your every second that you spend on anything in the world around you, is fuel for the Attention Economy. Will you spend it on Twitter, on Reddit, or on the people and communities you cherish and value?
In short, does not affect me directly and I am relishing in the chaos.
I miss what the "Attention economy" was back in 2004 or so. :/
This of course isn't just limited to our little furry world of artists. If it's not people making complete asses of themselves on the site (people I henceforth refer to as "Twits"), it's news outlets peddling whatever nonsense any of these twits post as reliable source material with the journalistic integrity of a tabloid. If it's not the news outlets, it's politicians basing important social and economic decisions on whatever tweet happens to be trending, regardless of its veracity.
The list goes on.
Granted, one can only dream that the implosion itself will solve everything wrong with social media, knowing full well that it will only disperse problems rather than putting an end to them - even those created by the well-intentioned.
im pretty sure twitter will be chugging for a while, for the most part a lot of twitter's functions run automatically....maintenance and upkeep on the other hand.
i'll give it a couple of months :<
People bitched about 'free speech' when really, they just wanted to use the N-word on Twitter and now, everyone must pay that price. Big companies suffered and continue to flee from impersonators, Elon bans all those who make fun of him, and the few content creators left try to eke out a living. I...just don't have the words anymore. The public have become my senile grandma; it doesn't matter how many times you told them so, they just want to get their fucking way no matter the cost. Was it all worth it? Fuck no, but here we are.
This community literally saved my life, and I feel all I can do is help support it back, whether through paying a subscription to support the site, or helping to support others.
Twitter is none of that, and has instilled none of the same. I see too many people becoming severely depressed and burned out on that platform. It's unhealthy, and needs to sink into the internet abyss.
I can imagine a Mastodon fork slowly evolving into the next micro-posting hub; nothing is going to be the new Twitter anytime soon, assuming Twitter does what most people thinks it does and suffers a catastrophic to fatal collapse.