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"dalek" writes:

Nate Silver, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, recently published an article about the decline of social media in driving traffic to external websites [natesilver.net]. Silver describes the impact of social media on traffic to FiveThirtyEight when it relaunched under new ownership from Disney in March 2014:

You will believe what happened next: it didn’t work. The whole period was like the Underwear Gnomes meme come to life [wikipedia.org]. Phase 1: Collect lots of low-quality traffic from Facebook. Phase 2: ???. Phase 3: Pivot to video [wikipedia.org].

It didn’t help that Facebook was constantly tinkering with News Feed [theguardian.com], and grossly exaggerating metrics [wsj.com] like average time spent watching videos. But more fundamentally, it was locked into a zero-sum, adversarial relationship with publishers. Facebook wanted readers to stay within its walled garden [theatlantic.com], to spend as much time as possible on Facebook. Publishers, meanwhile, regarded Facebook as the equivalent of the Port Authority Bus Terminal: a miserable, liminal space where you’d hopefully spend as little time as possible before booking a one-way ticket out of town.

Although Silver reports that FiveThirtyEight received more traffic from posting on Twitter at the time, it also declined within a few years. Silver's analysis of the content currently receiving the most engagement on Twitter shows that it is dominated by low-quality and highly partisan accounts. As he writes in regard to a chart in his article:

It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning. But I’d argue there’s an equally important trend: the top accounts are of incredibly low quality. Elon, with the algorithmic boost [theguardian.com] he built in for himself, is at the eye of the storm, of course. But “Catturd” literally gets far more engagement than the New York Times, for instance.

Without really wanting to comment on individual accounts — there are some exceptions — the liberal-leaning accounts that remain prominent on Twitter aren’t much better. They’re partisan and combative, sometimes peddling misinformation [people.com]. They’re almost like a dark-mirror-world, Waluigi [lesswrong.com] version of the conservative “influencers”, crafted in Elon’s jaded image of what liberals are like. It’s no coincidence that one of the most successful ones is the Gavin Newsom Press Office account [x.com], which literally mimics President Trump’s style in a sometimes funny, sometimes cringeworthy way.

Silver's analysis describes Twitter as prioritizing low-quality rage bait designed to maximize engagement and sell ads rather than showing users links to higher-quality articles outside the walled garden:

And “siloed” is on a good day: at other times, Twitter feels like a ghost town. It’s still useful for some topics: the AI discourse on the platform is often relatively robust, for instance. But for something like the war in Iran, it’s next to useless. Links to external websites are substantially punished [buffer.com], and none of the workarounds are particularly helpful. So the tangible rewards from still having 3 million followers can be surprisingly marginal. However, my account is hardly alone in this regard. The New York Times has 53 million followers, and yet its tweets often produce only a few hundred likes [x.com], retweets, and replies even when they reveal urgent, breaking news.

After reading Silver's article, I believe there are three important questions and comments:

1. When social media platforms actively penalize content that links to external sites, that pressures content creators to stay within the confines of the walled garden. This looks a lot like a potential violation of antitrust laws.
2. Social media prioritizes engagement to sell ads, and engagement appears to be maximized by increasing viewership of clickbait and rage bait over insightful content. This certainly lowers the quality of political discourse and helps to drive polarization.
3. If you're a content creator looking to grow an audience with thoughtful content, there is no longer much value in promoting it on most of the largest social media outlets.

Perhaps there are two paths forward. One option is that independent blogs providing in-depth content decline in traffic and go dark due an inability to draw revenue while low-quality rage bait continues to drive discourse. The other option is that we accept that social media has become nearly useless for many types of thoughtful discussion and move back to blogs and other platforms that reward quality over engagement.

Original Submission