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Do you really want to be friends with 8 billion people? Let's say you want to be friends with only 500 of them. How should those 500 be selected out of people who see your tweets? It has become a norm in social media, only real-life friends follow you on social media if you are not a famous person, otherwise its a suspicious behaviour. People can have a transient meaningful conversation in the comments section, never to see each other again.

My school teacher jokingly gave a small scenario, he said "Imagine you know everyone in the city, you have to say hi or atleast nod to everyone. Not doing it would be to acknowledge you don't care for them."

> I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc. It was like shouting in an empty room.

Same. I've run my own experiment by paying for a couple months, then letting the subscription lapse, and repeating. I've been through 3 cycles. My conclusion is that if you don't pay, you don't exist. I'm currently not paying, and I don't see doing so any more. Even if I do pay, I have no desire -- and nothing particular to leverage -- to build a serious "presence," so I will always be just another nobody spitting in the wind.

The comment quality standards required for people to reply and/or follow you are higher now. Tweeting often is useless if you have nothing really substantial to say. There are millions of accounts that do that, and they’re mostly noise disguised as signal, but most of the Twitter community has caught on and now auto-filters it out. You’ve gotta get through that auto-filter now with information or insights of substance, and those simply take longer and more effort to generate, there’s no silver bullet.

I’ve found the opposite to be the case myself. When I was only posting substantive Tweets with new info, they wouldn’t be seen 99% of the time. But every so often a Tweet would get seen, gain some traction, be retweeted, people would say it was amazing. And I’d get zero new followers. Like I said, I did find ways to get new followers - but it was through gaming the system.

And this is something I see a lot. There are a ton of accounts that have less than 100 followers that only do substantive Tweets. And the people who keep rehashing the same clickbait have huge followings. Even most of the relatively substantive large accounts spend a ton of time rephrasing Tweets they’ve made before. A high volume mediocre account that games the system somewhat is going to be a lot bigger than an account that only Tweets/comments when they have something substantive to say, at least in my experience.

So what you're saying is Twitter/X works the same way as every other human communication medium, i.e. provocative statements get more attention.

On the other hand, if zero people retweet your "substantive Tweet", maybe it's just not that interesting to anybody but you?

> comment quality standards required for people to reply and/or follow you are higher now

I really do not find this to be true. The high ones are from blue checks and overwhelming majority of them has no meaning. I do not even mean insulting or something I disagree with, they just don't say anything.

There are very few real responses now and majority of what I see excluding the above are knee jerks super short responses.

Same has happened on HN. Organic submissions don’t necessarily get the attention they did 10 years ago, based on just content.

Also keep in mind that the more informative the submission, the longer people spend on the site, the less upvotes it gets because by the time they return it would have likely scrolled off the screen. Short, punchy things dominate

Just goes to show how good the twitter bots were at making you think people cared to keep you engaged with the platform.

Remember all those people who saw follower counts plummet as soon as Musk started doing his due diligence and looking into the bot situation?

What's that thing called? Is it The empty internet phenomenon? Where its all bots and you're the only human.

I think it may have a lot to do with the Twitter subcultures and communities you are following. I made a new Twitter account last month and feel extremely welcomed with conversation and followers. I'm not using it as a generalized social media account where I post random things, only interesting topics within a tighter community.

What communities and subcultures are you following for example?

Pirate bay, software downloads, that sort of thing I reckon. Given the username.

Pirate Bay? The kids straight up be #stealing merchandise from stores and posting videos of them doing it.

>I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got me just about zero attention. I got zero followers from comments, posts I made, following others, etc.

Not sure if that's because of some recent change.

Many people had the same experience also back a decade ago (and in between). Just because they adviced to "tweet often, comment often, follow accounts" it didn't mean this guaranteed followers, it was just the bare minimum required to be able to get any.

On platforms with much less users (like some "federated" replacements) this is often not the case - connections are more easily made there, but I'd say that's always the case when a social network is much smaller and people try to "build up" their circles (as opposed to when they're spoilled for choice).

It's the difference between optimizing for the sum of followers squared and optimizing for the sum of squared followers.

You want lots of people having a few followers rather than one person having millions.

Which social media app was that?

It sounds like Mastodon. Or at least, that was my experience with it. People do find you quite easily via the Local Timeline, and engagement tends to be much higher and more authentic even with lower numbers. Just be sure to stay away from the drama.