In other words, the blog post was objectively vira

Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org · 7mo

Maybe I’ll just go back to posting here. It’s lonelier, yes, but it’s realer.

On X.com, I now have 66,509 followers, which is 28K more than I had at the beginning of February. Also, somebody kindly paid for my X subscription. Still, my engagement is only marginally higher than before. I’m willing to consider seriously the possibility that I’m just not interesting enough to get engagement on X, or not anymore.

I hate to say it, though, but I just don’t think so. My argument is the same as it was before: for several years on Twitter, I *did* have a lot more engagement than I do now. What changed? Not me, I don’t think. But even if it’s true that I have become more boring and irrelevant, in the eyes of the X crowd, it seems to me that’s a good reason to focus my attention on people who I am very sure are (a) human (not bots) and (b) actually interested in interacting.

Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org · 7mo

That said, I get the distinct sense that I am mostly surrounded by bots on X. It’s a lot of little things. I’m not sure, but that’s my suspicion.

If it’s true, then I’m being jerked around. I had a blog post about my conversion story, and it went mega-viral; it was the most popular blog post I’ve ever had. Note also that Christian X is not small; there are a lot of Christians there. If there was one tweet that was primed to go viral on X, it was this one:

x.com/lsanger/status/18…

Now, if you look at it, you’ll say, “That’s respectable. 122 RTs, 509 likes.” Here’s the thing. I don’t think it *was* viral. It went up over a period of weeks. It tracked with the attention my X.com account could be expected to get from external sources. Still, lots of friends RT’d my post. Most of those were ignored and low-traffic.

But when big Christian account Megan Basham independently posted the news, even though it had a link to the blog on the first page, it got five times as much traffic.

Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org · 7mo

Replying to @lsanger@sangerfeed.org

In other words, the blog post was objectively viral, period. That translated into HARDLY ANY proportional engagement with my corresponding (pinned!) post. Basham, who is not throttled, got instant virality out of the story. So the story itself was not the thing that was throttled. It was my account.

By contrast, not that much later, when I said something that X might’ve wanted to promote (due to my background and the fact that I was addressing Elon Musk—it was red meat for them), X seems to have opened the floodgates, and the tweet went mega-viral, meaning this one:

x.com/lsanger/status/18…

My biggest tweet ever. It was a sight to behold. Never was there such an outlier. And this wasn’t even the tweet that Elon quote-retweeted; the latter was a slightly later, closely related one, addressed to Pres. Trump. It also went viral. I got the blue check AFTER the first big tweet went mega-viral, but BEFORE Elon retweeted me. That was interesting timing, n’est-ce pas?

Larry Sanger @lsanger@sangerfeed.org · 7mo

Replying to @lsanger@sangerfeed.org

What that establishes, to my satisfaction anyway, is that I was on the radar of the X team. They pushed my account for about a week after Feb. 26, the date of the original, bigger viral tweet. I had a post with 128 RTs on March 5, unrelated to Wikipedia—the only one over 100 that wasn’t. There was a post with 141 RTs in mid-March: “Once, Wikipedia was the encyclopedia anybody could edit. Now it is the encyclopedia that a few approved accounts might be able to edit, if they kowtow to the influential and carefully toe the line. And woe betide you should you touch certain articles.” And another, with 59, also on Wikipedia.

Beyond those, I had only a few tweets to get much over 10 RTs. No, it’s neither obvious that I was throttled nor that I still am. Yes, of course, Twitter could have throttled me (of that I’m very sure, as it began to happen just after 1/6; it was very noticeable at the time), followed by new X algos that are unfavorable to me. Yes, possible.