I don't really go to Twitter, so I don't know, but am curious: Is this an established fact? A quick search did not show anything official confirming this.

> Prioritized rankings in conversations and search: Tweets that you interact with will receive a small boost in their ranking. Additionally, your replies will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top. Twitter Blue subscribers will appear in the Verified tab within other users’ notifications tab which highlights replies, mentions, and engagement from Blue subscribers.

The rationale was that paying $8/month is the best way to filter out bots, but...

At least it is somewhat honest and not, oh, we didn't meant to do this, in our effort to convince more people into paying.

Important things will still probably reach me in embedded shape or quote on other sites, but currently I cannot remember a single tweet at all, that not reading it, would have changed my life for the worse.

So no doubt good content is hidden underneath, but all this drama makes it not worth it for me.

But if this is what is happening to the prioritisation of replies it might actually be a useful change.

Any ideas?

>A notorious Russian "troll factory" had a $1.25 million [monthly] budget in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election to interfere in the US political system, according to charges filed by the Department of Justice.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troll-farm-spent-mil...

And the official site also mostly just says, that mainly you have to pay and have a phone number. No sentence that they actually verify you are a living human being.

"Only accounts actively subscribed to Twitter Blue are eligible to receive the blue checkmark.

Our team uses an eligibility criteria on when the checkmark is given to ensure we maintain the integrity of the platform. Your account must meet the following criteria to receive or retain the blue checkmark:

    Complete: Your account must have a display name and profile photo

    Active use: Your account must be active in the past 30 days to subscribe to Twitter Blue

    Security: Your account must be older than 30 days upon subscription and have a confirmed phone number

    Non-Deceptive:

        Your account must have no recent changes to your profile photo, display name, or username (@handle)

        Your account must have no signs of being misleading or deceptive

        Your account must have no signs of engaging in platform manipulation and spam

https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...

It's not like a fuzzy statistical boost, it's literally just all Blue replies come above all non-Blue replies. The only exception is that a non-Blue reply can sometimes get boosted in order to be able to show a blue 2nd-level reply.

If you scroll through replies you'll often find a bunch of zero-like replies like "lol" and "me too" from Blue users, then below that a handful of insightful replies with dozens of likes, from non-Blue users. You can see why the latter are not gonna keep posting those replies much longer.

Even before Musk took over twitter was a very specific, very tiny, slice of the English speaking world.

There was a film theory a few months ago which looked at movies and trending on twitter, and dug a little deeper. Twitter for exmaple completely ignored major cultural phenomenon like Yellowstone, but really bigged up stuff the vast majority of the world doesn't care about ("the Snyder cut")

Presumably this applies to pretty much any subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTazviRabg

https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTazviRa...