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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Is this the same Scott Adams that claims to have been shadowbanned, without any proof?

Might his lower Twitter engagement have something to do with people getting sick of hearing from him about Trump?

How would anyone actually prove something like this, short of getting Twitter to admit it? What he has seen is:

> my tweets only go out to a subset of my followers. The rest don’t know I tweeted. My followers tell me this is the case. They have to visit my timeline to see my tweets.

What other proof could anyone realistically provide?

That is how twitter works - it doesn't show every tweet from everyone you follow in your timeline, it shows a subset based on what it considers most relevant.

It's a bigger problem in general with both Twitter/FB and how they filter the order content is displayed (sometimes called "the filter bubble") in order to drive up engagement and revenue.

The average person doesn't care about federated social networks and the average dev or admin doesn't have the time outside of work to setup and maintain one for his or herself.

That's why I almost never use the Twitter web site or their app. Too confusing. I stick with Tweetbot which still only shows the complete timeline in reversed chronological order.

I was not aware the app did that. I'm a little disappointed in the service to learn about this.

Go to Settings > Timeline and uncheck "Show me the best tweets first"

Thank you. I hate the web interface because of this, and don't know it was an option.

Only if you have "Show me the best tweets first" enabled. (It's on by default)

And it would be convenient if Scott Adams' political tweets were considered "irrelevant" more often than others, wouldn't it?

There were also reports that followers would be automatically unfollowed. They wouldn't hear from Scott for a while, so they'd check and realize he was no longer followed. Maybe they slipped and accidentally hit "Unfollow" while scrolling through their feed one day. Maybe it was a one-time glitch. Or maybe it wasn't.

While it's true that such things could easily be imaginary, it's also true that they easily could not be. The idea behind these pseudo-bans is to discourage undesirable users from using the platform, and they do happen on many platforms (can't speak definitively for Twitter).

For example, my HN account was intentionally slowed by YC for years. Each page load would take several seconds. When I asked politely if they could lift it after putting up with it for a couple of years, they confirmed it had been intentionally slowed, but couldn't tell why, and graciously agreed to lift the punishment, which I'm still grateful for. :)

It's interesting to me that you probably don't care that this isn't true, nor is it true that Twitter ever decides to not show your tweets to a subset of your followers through a "shadowban". You just say whatever. Doesn't affect you whether it's true or not and if other people believe you, hey that's pretty funny that people just believe things you make up or misunderstood.

Pardon?

> That is how twitter works - it doesn't show every tweet from everyone you follow in your timeline, it shows a subset based on what it considers most relevant.

If this is true, this is the same as Facebook does.

And for this reason I can't bother checking Facebook any more. Can't see what's in that for twitter?

Facebook is not showing me the posts from people I know, but instead advertisement and "reactions" it thinks I may like. Which I give a utter fuck about.

It's just another one of those things which just makes me stop caring.

If twitter knows what best for them, they should definitely not copy this UX anti-pattern of overruling the users explicit choice (about whose posts they want to follow).

Considered whether it was algorithmic timeline?

I unfollowed him around this time as he was tweeting what felt like hundreds of times a day with tweets that felt very repetitive

He's talking about trump? Ye gods, in election season everyone plays politician.

Seriously though, why does he think anyone wants to hear his political spew? It's almost as irrelevant as hearing an update from Sam Altman.

He made a post last summer saying that he has to pretend to support Clinton otherwise when he goes out he'll probably be shot by a Clinton supporter... He's gone a bit off the deep end.

"Might his lower Twitter engagement have something to do with people getting sick of hearing from him about Trump?"

Do you really think the attention he gets on Twitter DROPPED because of him talking about Trump?

I've stopped reading Dilbert let alone Twitter.

Seeing him post pictures of himself acting in the role of sugar daddy to a petulant child-woman is well beyond my initial scope of interest in him.

My interest was Dilbert. It was all about making fun of the disconnect between management and employees. Ironically, his public persona is now at odds with the general theme of his work.

I suspect his original material is just the byproduct of his initial position and people emailing anecdotes to him.

So you reject the art because of the views of the artist? Have a fun time being able to enjoy anything.

If you go to dilbert.com the cartoon comes part and parcel with his blog. This dissuades me from visiting the site.

I like Wagner too. But if I had to read an anti-Semitic pamphlet every time I listened to him, I wouldn't put him in my playlist.

I think that's reasonable, no?

"If you go to dilbert.com the cartoon comes part and parcel with his blog."

You can see blog titles from his blog if you scroll down and read them.

Is seeing blog titles (if you choose to scroll down and then read them) like "outrage dilution" and "Should twitter and Facebook be regulated as entities" comparable to having to read an anti-Semitic pamphlet?

Chill out. Wagner is just the go to example for divorcing art and the artist.

When I go to dilbert.com, I see a mixture of full blog entries, cartoons, and blog titles. I'm simply not entertained in his attempts at blogging.

Adams has probably gotten a bit bored pushing the same cartoon out and now conflates the value of his blog with his cartoon.

EDIT: Also compare the UX between http://dilbert.com and http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/. With CtrlAltDel, the blog is there, but you don't have to scroll by it and you can completely ignore it. With Dilbert, the blog shows up before the cartoon. It's pushed down your throat.

I will admit, only listening to GG Allin all day has been getting a little stale.

Yeah, but such expressiveness, and subtlety.

Anything?

No, just the work of the people I'd rather not support. Some artists and I have the same views and interests.

Personally I adblocked the Dilbert blog posts so I could just enjoy the comics. I'd have done the same if he were posting any other flavor of political rant. If I did not have the ability to block the posts I'd have stopped reading.

I have this problem with a lot of engineers I follow on twitter. I followed to see tweets about technology not your armchair political views.

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