Jay RosenNov 12, 2022

I did a little comparison: reach and reaction on Twitter and Mastodon.

I picked a subject typical of my feed and reworded it to be more native to Mastodon. Same link, issue, people, tone.

With 309 K followers on Twitter it got 81 shares and 179 likes

With 8.5 K followers on Mastodon: 123 shares and 195 likes.

Here are the two posts:

https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/1591147769229557761 [305K followers, 81 shares, 179 likes]

https://mastodon.social/@jayrosen_nyu/109326807884220104 [8.5K followers, 123 RT, 195 likes]

Jay Rosen on Twitter

“"He asked: Do you really think we haven’t done enough coverage of the threats to democracy? "I responded emphatically that yes, I certainly did think that." @froomkin's dialogue with @blakehounshell of the New York Times is not to be missed. https://t.co/D1qnw0MkZv”

Twitter
Show threadNicholas MamoNov 12, 2022
@jayrosen_nyu That's very interesting. Why did that happen, do you think?
Show threadJay Rosen
@memonick I don't know. Yet.
Nov 12, 2022 at 3:09pmWeb
Show threadMarkus WagnerNov 12, 2022
@jayrosen_nyu @memonick@mastodon. Apologies for barging into your conversation. My guess would be algorithms on twitter causing this difference at least partly, pushing content that is likely to keep people logged on at the expense of most other content. Hard to imagine that people over here are a hundred times more motivated to engage. Might be worth asking ex-Twitter staff or other experts.
Show threadLauraNov 12, 2022
@MarkusWagner @jayrosen_nyu Here’s my tuppence worth, the like button actively put off people liking anything ‘out of your lane’ as it showed content to your curated TL they might not want to see , so they’d mute or unfollow. Saw someone else mention same thing earlier too. I’m loving rewarding all sorts of thoughtful stuff here with a wee star. 👍️ ⭐️
Show threadMarkus WagnerNov 13, 2022
@lawilson @jayrosen_nyu
Didn't think of that, but you're right that could play a role. I occasionally 'liked' posts cropping up in my timeline from people I did not follow if I liked the post but simultaneously marked the tweet as 'not interesting', hoping to cancel the like in an effort to see less content in the future from accounts I did not follow. I wonder what the algorithm made of that. Agree with you about how much nicer it is to once again just genuinely 'like' a post.