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AD Revenue | Ticketed Spaces | Block Function #XTownHall
Recorded: Aug. 22, 2023 Duration: 2:05:02Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlighted concerns about transparency and consistency in social media algorithms, particularly regarding ad revenue distribution and shadow banning. There is a call for more transparency in the criteria used to determine content visibility and monetization, as well as concerns about the potential ideological influence on these decisions. The introduction of ticketed spaces and subscription services offers new monetization opportunities for content creators, but there is a need for clearer guidelines and support to ensure fair and consistent application of platform policies.
Full Transcription
Sully, can you hear?
Yeah, how's it going, bro?
Good, mate, good, John.
I hear you.
Hi, Richard.
How are you?
Good.
How are you?
Yeah, good.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
I'm sending out the advice.
All right, cool.
We're just bringing some people up.
So in the meantime, the space is going to be about all things X, X town halls.
So on a weekly basis, we'll be talking about all things related to X.
Now, today's space is about three distinct topics.
The first one is ad revenue.
People have now received their third ad revenue payments.
Some people are extremely happy because they've been getting big numbers.
Other people are not as happy because they've been getting extremely known numbers despite having significant engagement.
Oh my.
Bro, you got to stop.
You got to stop, man.
Are you happy with how much money you got?
Because I keep seeing your tweets.
Bro, I'll be honest with you.
I got scammed.
Yeah, man, you know how you sound like it, just a guy who's constantly complaining and using this platform to complain.
No, no, I'm not, I'm chill.
I got a low payment the last two times.
I wasn't bothered.
Like, it don't bother me, but because I'm the man of the people, so many people are DM in me.
You know, you can't say you're chill.
So I said, you know what?
Because I have such a large voice on Twitter, despite not getting paid, not getting paid the bag.
I'll talk about it.
Irrespective of Elon's your boy or our boy or, you know what I mean?
You've got to speak truth even to power.
It don't matter.
So I have to do it for the people.
Yeah, bro.
In other words, in other words, you're pretty pissed off.
You didn't get paid enough.
You're sitting there using this platform to complain about it.
No, no.
I'm told you I'm chill.
I'm chill about it.
Like $89, $189.
It's all the same, bro.
Cool, man.
Cool.
All right, so we've got...
I had the money...
I had...
I was really much better at the first two months.
Hold on, Salih.
Sali, can you hear...
Did you hear Richard speak?
Oh, no. I was just giving the audience
or overview of what we're going to talk about,
and then we'll get into it.
Do you know what about that?
Okay, well, no, it's not important.
I was just going to say my revenue's been pretty good,
but it's...
Because you deserve it, Richard.
Because the algorithm decides how much value you bring
and then they compensate your quarter of you.
How much did you get, Richard?
Now we get.
I posted the first one.
I got like two grand or something.
Bro, you got two bags.
I was your engagement.
I forget like 50, 100 million, I don't know, something like that.
All right, but it matters.
So, yeah, that's what it sounds about right for what you got.
Did Huffington Post writing a hit piece on you, give you more followers?
More followers, yes, more book sales, yes.
More donations, yes.
But no, not a lot of, not a lot of ad revenue.
Do you get a hit piece?
It's a long-term investment.
Did you get a hit piece, Richard?
Richard.
Oh yeah, I did.
Oh, shit.
Tell me more.
Okay, cool.
Tell me more.
Like, how does it come about?
What is it about?
I'm curious.
Like, very briefly, because I know it's not about it.
People could Google it.
I wrote some shit like 15 years ago.
Like, literally 15 years ago.
That was bad stuff.
I mean, I've written about why it's bad.
but like, you know, whatever.
It was like 10, 15 years ago under a pseudonym.
And that's it.
They tried to get my book canceled.
They tried to get me fired from the University of Texas.
They called every institution that I ever been affiliated with, like the...
Richard, how many times did that guy contact your book publisher?
Because I saw you tweet that and you, I went back and forth.
But like, how many times did he contact your book publisher to sit there?
I was called...
The day I tweeted that, it was maybe like five or six days after I was told that he'd been contacting them every day.
And is that, so is that the first time you get a hit piece on you? I'm curious.
No. I mean, like there's people who say this is a bad guy. This was the first serious like cancellation attempt. So yeah, this was at a different level.
And how did you deal with it? When you first got the call and you realized there's a piece being written about you? Because obviously they call you to check up and get you to, you know,
Well, yeah, he called me. I'm like, oh, you know, I'm like, you know, this is probably bad.
Some, and people start texting me because, like I said, he's reaching out to everybody.
And nobody talks to him. I mean, like you go look at that piece in the middle of it.
It's like paragraph to every paragraph. We called, you know, we talked to Mr. We tried to talk to Mr. X. We tried to talk to Mr. Y.
You know, nobody would say anything to them. I saw the guy on the podcast later and somebody was saying, I never seen a piece that was just like had so little cooperation.
Right.
And so, yeah, I was on vacation with my family, actually.
We were in San Diego.
It was like the only real vacation of the year.
And it was like something, you know, just to deal with while I was there.
And so yeah, it's, you know, I tried to like not like let my wife or kids know what's going
I just basically like acted like it was nothing.
And I was like just texting people the whole time and just try telling them, you know, don't say anything.
You know, it's going to be fine.
And did you, did you respond to it publicly?
Yes, I have a substack.
I wrote a substack piece that was republished in Colette here.
I can if I figure out how to put this in here.
here. By the way, the guy who wrote this, this is the weird thing. This is something that's
very weird. We now, we have, we have an American journalism. This reporter at Huffington Posts, he
covers, what is it? I think, right-wing extremism or conservative extremism. There are no
reporters who cover extremism. They all cover conservative extremism as if left-wing
extremism somehow it does not exist. You know, it's like, so that's kind of the tell.
Yeah, I mean, it's right?
Like, like, hiding manifestos and stuff like that.
But we don't want to talk about all that.
So I'm not going to talk about politics.
Yeah, we're going to get into X and shifted politics.
But I was just curious about a hit piece for obvious reasons.
But yeah, we'll talk about maybe in a separate space.
We'll do a space on the whole concept of journalism.
That'd be fascinating.
But look, I think we've got a pretty sick panel.
I'm curious as to, and I see Brian's on here as well, he's doing a lot of spaces on X.
Why all the, why is X?
Mario, you were supposed to go over the three things we're going to cover first, and then you got to...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was going to give the character to Sleman to give us the overview of what we're going to cover.
But like the question I wanted to ask, and certainly maybe you can give us an overview.
Why?
Like, why is this suddenly becoming a topic?
You're telling me about people tweeting and pissed off.
There's like two camps.
because we were writing a tweet on this a few days ago
and the teams like Mario there's two camps
as a camp is getting a lot of money from this
and they're really happy and there's another camp
that have a lot of impressions but they're not getting enough money
and maybe the question that maybe that will be the first point
the question I'd ask is what are the different theories out there
about this so did you want to kick it off
yeah sure I mean you've explained quite accurately
what the two camps are in terms of what the theories are
some people think it's
the pro-Trump people who are not getting ad revenue and then anti-Trump are getting significant amount of revenue.
Other people are positing that if it's Elon's boys, they're getting...
good amount of revenue.
If you're not part of Elon's boy crew,
you're not getting a good amount of revenue.
And other people are like,
nah,
it's just about engagement.
I mean,
sorry,
it's just about the comments or
it's just about whether you've got verified followers
and it's random and it's not.
Has anyone,
has anyone,
has anyone,
okay,
so has anyone backed this by,
Maybe Tio, we can go to you and Brian as well, because I know you've done a bunch of spaces on this.
Is there anyone that's analyzed the data on this?
Like any concrete proof of anything?
Anyone's looked at the algorithms, given explanations?
I probably should have got an NFT guard on here as well.
Anything at all?
I know a lot about how.
Sorry, you can go first.
You can go out of that.
Okay, so I've worked on ad platforms for the majority of my career, some amount.
I helped build the ad platform at Twitch and I've been involved a lot of other since.
Generally speaking, these systems work through CPS, which is the concept of how much money
is an advertiser willing to pay for a given space.
One of the things that makes a platform like Twitter so different from other platforms
is that traditionally ads are on something like YouTube or Twitch, ads are served directly
on your content.
So the monetization is relative directly to the content piece that is being advertised on.
So I can have one video that's about AI stuff and more companies want to advertise on that
than on another video that's about a more neat like camera topic, for example.
when an advertiser is trying to target a specific audience on a platform like Twitch or YouTube,
they can target specific videos that will have the intended audience.
The difference with a platform like Twitter is the ads aren't being served directly on your profile
or on your tweets. They're being served throughout the Twitter experience.
So instead of getting a percentage of the ads served on your piece of content,
you're getting a percentage of the amount of money your audience made the platform.
So if a
a given Twitter user through their experience on Twitter, scrolling through ads and whatnot,
theoretically made Twitter $5 in a month, and 25% of the tweets they saw were your tweets.
You should get 25% of whatever their disaffirmate revenue split is.
Let's say they go 50.
So $2.50 would go to creators.
Then your 25% of that would be what goes to you.
But it's all based on the amount of money that people who see your tweets made Twitter.
divided by whatever their split is, divided by what percentage of their impressions and experience on Twitter is your content.
Yes, so I was just going to add, so I think there's so many variables at play here.
So one of them is based on obviously the number of impressions of ads that show to other users who are blue checkmarks, right?
So when somebody clicks your tweet or clicks your profile and they see an ad and they're a blue checkmark, then revenue is going to go to that user.
It's going to be shared.
But one thing that with the discrepancies...
And yeah, there's a lot of people like arguing, okay, this person's making more than this person, this person's conservative, this person's liberal.
That's not what matters, I don't think.
I think what matters, and I'm sure there's going to be people that argue with this, is that Twitter has recently partnered with a company called Integral AdSciences.
And what they're doing with this company is...
This company is giving settings to advertisers, sensitivity settings, which enables advertisers to basically choose how suitable they want the ads to be.
So right now they can choose between moderate or conservative, but there's also another one, a very relaxed setting coming.
Now...
What they're basing this off of is actually machine learning.
And this is all actually in an ex-business blog post that was made about, I guess, two weeks ago.
And they're using machine learning to determine if a post is in any of these three sensitivity settings.
So relax, standard conservative.
Now, what they're basing this off of is actually something called GARM.
GARM Safety and Suitability Framework, and that stands for the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, is an organization.
And if you go to the GARM website, there's actually, they actually list, I think it's 15 different categories, content categories.
There's adult content. There's arms and ammunition, crime and hate and harmful acts, death injury, military conflict, online piracy, hate speech, obscenity and profanity, illegal drugs, spam, terrorism.
And finally, and this is an important one, debatable sensitive social issues.
So they list those 15 categories, but then they rank, they describe what high risk, medium risk, and low risk are.
And advertisers are basically allowed to choose what they want their content against, whether it's high risk, medium risk, or low risk.
And now it'll correspond, I'm guessing, to conservative, moderate, and relaxed.
And it just listed all.
So like, for example, the low risk for debatable, sensible social issues, which might be something like LGBTQ issues.
Brian, Brian, what are the debatable social issues?
Because that's where the kind of disagreement is probably going to be, isn't it?
Yeah, so I didn't dive deep enough to see what's defined as a debatable, sensible social issue.
I assume it's just social issues, right?
So I'm guessing trans issues, whether it's positive or negative against them, right?
But if the content is educational or informational and scientific-based,
then that is based that is considered low risk but if on the other hand it's dramatic depiction
of debatable social issues presented in the context of entertainment it's medium and high would
be depiction or discussion of debated social issues and relaxed and related acts in negative
or partisan context so like Brian can I ask you question so like for me okay I get that so
let's say that was the mechanism to decide it like
All good, all cool.
As long as there was transparency,
as long as we knew what the situation was, all good.
I do think there needs to be transparency.
The issue is the second aspect of it,
which is consistency.
So there are people who are part of like Elon's,
crew who basically Elon engages with who do basically write posts that cause significant racial
division in the United States to talk about black people and how they're criminals and how they
this and how they're that they write posts again against the LGBTQ community and so on and so
forth so which again some of us agree with but again it might be something that's debatable
So how are those people, for example, getting big numbers?
And then the question becomes, when they are, which is fine, like people can.
But when they are, then how does this, what are these debatable issues?
Is it issues that basically, if you agree with Elon's ideology, then you get paid and those are the debate eligible issues?
Or is it, what is it?
What are these debatable issues?
Well, since they're going through integral ad sciences, I mean, I would assume that it's not based on Elon, you know, based on what Elon's picking and choosing. I can't prove that, you know, like, is it possible that there's other things going on here? Yeah, I'm sure it is. And.
And there are other variables like just a person's reach.
Like if you're shadow band or if you're being de-boasted,
that's obviously going to cut down on your ad shows, ad displays.
But yeah, I mean, it's fair to ask like what some of these issues are.
I think we will probably get more transparency.
I think that they rolled this whole ad thing out like prematurely
just because obviously they were looking to kind of take the attention away from threads.
but I'm assuming that probably over the course
in the next couple of months
things there will be more clarity
at least I hope there is
Suleiman.
Sulemon, I just want to say something
like what you're bringing
what you're bringing up is the issue of
these sort of, you know, third-party rating systems and how transparent and how credible they are.
You know, and this is a constant theme.
Like, you know, when we had the economic meltdown in 2008, 2009, we found out is these rating systems for like Wall Street securities were just garbage.
And so I think that what you're bringing up is the fact is we need to take a look at these rating systems.
Right.
and they need to be transparent.
It's not necessarily about Twitter.
This is about these third-party rating systems that they're using to rate things.
And like no one knows like who they are.
Who's funding them?
Who's behind them?
That's what you're bringing up.
100%.
Like who who is.
I think Paul, you hit the nail on the head and that's my concern.
It's not about the money, right?
It's like who's deciding this kind of like social credit system.
What are the values of this?
Yeah.
company, who's funding this company.
And then what happens then is,
whatever their ideology is,
that's going to be the ideology of X,
because let's be clear,
a lot of people will then start
basically conforming that to that to get paid.
And so you then will this...
X will become an ideological machine
for a specific ideological perspective.
That's my,
that's what my concern is in the long run.
I know we're all excited at the moment
and we want to,
and for some people,
it's maybe they want to defend Elon or wherever it is,
but that's my concern.
But Brian, I'll let you jump in and go to offer.
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, so GARM is basically a creation of the World Federation of Advertisers. So who's running it? It's the World Federation of Advertisers. Whoever these companies are that actually make it up, I haven't delved into like exactly who makes it up. But they are basically making these guidelines. But what you understand is they are the ones, you know, spending money and buying ads. So yeah.
I don't know. I mean, I get that people are upset. Oh, maybe these guidelines are blocking certain people when they shouldn't be. But I feel that as advertisers, they should have the right to choose who they want to advertise against.
Yeah, sure.
And specifically which audiences they want to advertise too.
And I feel like this is the part.
One second here.
And I just want to be clear.
Like when we're right saying these concerns, like even then I want to preface this,
that like we all, I do anyway.
I still appreciate X compared to any other social media.
I just don't like this kind of like kissing ass like just because it's Elon.
We've got to suck up and, you know, he's my boy.
So I've got to lick.
You know, I'm not about that.
Like when I think he does brilliant, I'm going to point it out, which there is a lot of things.
And then similarly, where he does terrible, I'm going to point out where it is.
And remember, this is a new platform so it can improve a lot.
But Alpha, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Go ahead, bro.
Hey, Brian, do you have a list of information that, like, a post of something that has
info in it as far as the categories?
Let me actually...
Yeah, so it's at this. So if you go to the website, it's just WFA net.org. That's where you can read about GARM. And if you click through it, you can basically if you go to that site and scroll down just a little bit, you'll see the guidelines. I think it's on the third page. So just go to that, go to that website. And then.
All right, thanks.
What I was going to say is that I don't know if this is already discussed,
but I heard that essentially Twitter is aware of the issue as far as account-wide ad-be boosting.
I did something a few days ago.
I don't know what it was.
Now I don't have any of any.
Okay.
So apparently.
Your mic, Alpha, Alpha, your mic is, I'm not sure if you could fix it.
It's just really hard to hear you.
So maybe while you're fixing it, I'll give you about 30 seconds.
Now Richard, you were trying to add something to what Brian is saying.
So I'll let you add what you're saying, Richard, before we get Alpha to continue
and he's fixing his mic.
No, not Richard, sorry, Tio, Tio, you were adding something.
Yeah, I was just going to say I'm really fond of capitalism,
and I think that advertisers should have the right to choose which audiences they're trying to target.
The advertising market is a very competitive one,
and X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, is in like the,
it's a lower tier advertiser still compared to Facebook's ad network as well as Google's.
Both of those have such absurdly deep and thorough levels of targeting
that advertisers have grown to expect that, like,
in order for X to be a service that doesn't die
because it loses too much money,
they have to do whatever they have to do
in order to get advertisers on the platform
and get those advertisers to see returns
and see value in the money that they're spending.
And the reality is there are audiences on Twitter
that are more valuable than other audiences.
An audience that's on here to learn about technologies they might purchase at the workplace
is going to be fundamentally different than an audience that's just here to talk about politics
or social issues.
There might be people within that audience that are more valuable to other demographic
like distinctions about them, but in the end,
your value isn't determined based on your profile,
based on your number of impressions,
or based on who you are.
It's based on how valuable the people who see your tweets are
in terms of what the advertisers are willing to spend.
And I agree with pretty much everything Brian has said so far.
And that's very, it's all about the advertiser money spent.
Let me add one thing, and I'll just gotta have jump into a call and come back,
but let me add one thing and we'll go to Alpha,
is that we've purchased a lot of accounts in general
and on various social media platforms.
and we've worked with various accounts.
If you want to go and pay a Meme, a cat meme account on Twitter or YouTube, et cetera,
they'll charge pennies.
If you want to go and pay an AI account that has an AI audience or a finance audience,
they could have 10% of the audience and still charge significantly more.
So yeah, the quality of the audience is extremely important.
I just want to highlight that point that Tio says.
So if you're sitting there tweeting hateful shit or tweeting rubbish,
you're not going to probably get the same monetization as someone who's tweeting content for an AI audience.
No, but the flaw with that argument is I get that.
Like everyone got niches.
But like there's examples of people who Elon does engage with who do have, like you, what you just called shit, which is causing racial division in the United States of America, which is attacking certain communities on a regular basis.
And they're getting huge bag.
So it's not a simple.
I'm going to half agree with you on that.
Can I weigh in?
Yeah.
Can I go up to Brian too?
Like I said, like I feel like there's several variables here. One variable could in fact be like the circles of people you interact with. So if Elon's interacting with you, maybe the system believes that you're safer or more suitable than say somebody that he doesn't. So I mean, I can't rule that out. I'm not saying that's the case, but that's definitely a possibility, I think.
I've had the opposite effect from Elon interacting with me.
I'll be honest.
There are times he's engaged with the tweet of mine, or I'm sorry, post now, but in the past,
and immediately after my account was like flatlined.
I don't know if, you know, because it was so much, like so much of a heavy like amount of traffic or something, but it was like an insane drop off like my account went off a cliff immediately after. So I don't know. I think that it could be like a double edge sword.
as far as Elon engagement.
Like it's not always,
it might look really shiny and awesome.
And I love Elon and all he's trying to do.
But it's also sometimes a kiss of death on your account.
And it takes a while to recover.
Yeah.
Let me go to Dustin.
So let me go to Dustin.
So Dustin, what Theo is saying is like a fair point.
He's saying, look, at the end of the day, advertises are king, they're going to decide the content that they want to monetize.
And if you basically produce that content, then you're going to get paid.
This same misconception keeps coming.
Let me know when I can clear it up.
Yeah, yeah, you've jumped in quite a bit, so we will come back to you, Theo.
But Dustin, so, um, so, um, what I was saying was, so he's saying like, so in, in the end, advertisers are king, so they're going to decide.
And as long as you're making content that's basically, you know, provides for advertisers and depends on your audience and so, so forth, that'll be fine.
But then the other side of that is Dustin.
Why were people crying about YouTube?
Why were people crying about Instagram?
Why were people crying about Facebook and all these other social media platforms?
Because they were doing the same thing.
Advertiser was king.
Capitalism.
We live in a liberal leftist society.
And so therefore, deal with it.
X is going to become like it.
What's your thoughts on that distance?
Well, that's the danger.
So, like, a term I think we need to interject is, right, we've all heard of audience capture, but advertiser capture, which is what we're really talking about here is behavioral modification as far as what we're going to post and how we're going to post it.
And so the question becomes when you start dealing with these NGO type organizations like GARM and the World Federation of Advertisers is that their bias is going to be reflected back on what behavior people are being modified into, which is I don't want to see
Twitter or X become Facebook.
Don't Facebook my Twitter, right?
At the end of the day, we're starting to already see like kind of devolving into this was this was the platform where we could have deeper discussions.
It was more intellectual, right?
I don't mind to say it wasn't dumbed down the way the rest of the social media platforms were.
And that's what I appreciate about.
This was the place I could come.
I could file reporters.
I could interact with heads of companies, founders of projects, right?
That was the advantage.
That's why I prefer this platform over the others.
And by the advertisers becoming the central figure as far as driving content,
the danger becomes that this just becomes a dumbed down, watered down version,
like Facebook or like Instagram or like any of these other social media platforms.
And that really bugs me because we need a place where these discussions could happen.
And I thought...
Twitter was heading in the right direction under Elon.
Spaces had broadly raised the level of dialogue,
which is I felt like the dialogue was getting deeper
and more refined as a result of people having to like stand up
and face people in an audio sense that was really helpful.
I think this is a turn in the wrong direction.
Listen, I don't want to be out here showing my hairy titty.
Yeah, that's already happening.
Justin, can I ask you another question as well?
I want to carry on.
I'll be out here.
I'll post my tits in order to get likes and trying to get skimpy and like thirst trapping everybody.
But listen, I'll do it if I have to.
Bro, bra, please, please, keep to what you're good at.
Do not go down that road.
But Dustin, a question for you.
One of the common concerns people have had on Twitter,
which I have observed.
I want to follow that.
But one of the concerns I've had,
one of the concerns people have had, sorry, on Twitter,
Laura Luma is a prime example of this,
and she's been...
tweeting about this as well.
That is,
and she feels like
this is a targeted attack
against certain
ideological positions.
So basically Trump's
supporters have been
demonetized significantly.
You also have,
I just didn't drop there.
But basically, let me go to Brandon then,
because I think you are a Trump spot as well, Brandon.
So basically, you've got a scenario where Trump supporters are basically being demonetized.
They're not getting the revenue.
DeSanta supporters are getting significant revenue.
Liberals are getting significant revenue.
And so there's a huge concern about this.
So some of that Laura Luma who gets significant engagement.
I think she's got like 400, 400 million.
Like she's on par with like,
Brian and the big big guns.
So what's your thought about that one?
You know, I don't know if there's evidence to say that Trump supporters are more inhibited in any way than anybody else.
I honestly, I have no idea.
I can't.
speak to whether or not that's true.
I don't feel like I personally have evidence that that's true.
But I am, there's two things that I would like to contribute to the conversation that I consider
to be major concerns.
One is exactly what Dustin just said, and I would actually take it a step further, because
I think that that's already started to happen.
I'm seeing so many people who are already so concerned about making money and beating
the algorithm and getting it to be a part that...
I think it's going to be very, very, it's not going to be long before people are not here at all to tell the truth or to express their honest opinion, but to try to figure out exactly the words that they need to say to make money.
And I think that those words are oftentimes going to be, uh,
completely vapid or milk toast or not in any way reflective of how they actually feel about anything.
And look, I'll be honest with you.
I've been getting so frustrated about this over the last week.
It has nothing to do with my payout.
Let me first of all, like, set the table by saying,
I don't think that I'm ever going to make amazing money on X.
And I'm totally fine with that.
There's other things that I do.
It's not my life.
I don't tweet that much.
I don't spend that much time on here.
I'm like,
I'm never going to be a huge income earner on Twitter.
And I'm totally,
totally fine with that.
But I actually considered going and shutting off my monetization the other day because I already find myself starting to think those thoughts.
Like,
Should I not use this word or, you know, I really wanted to put the F word in this tweet.
Maybe I shouldn't put the F word in this tweet.
And I'm like, I stop.
I hate this.
Like I don't want advertisers getting in my head like that and driving my thoughts and how I'm going to engage with people on this platform.
I came here and I do everything I do because I want to tell the truth about what how I see the world, what I think is going on in the world.
And I don't want that to be determined by making money.
And I already see that starting to happen to other people.
and um go ahead yeah there was go ahead well yeah yeah i have another point to go ahead
No, no, I've got a question for you and then please continue on.
What about the concern that some people have,
and it's that obviously you've got some people who've made good payouts, right?
And remember, we never used to have payouts before.
So that is the other side.
Like, I just want to be clear.
This is not here, and it's just looking at it from a very balanced perspective
and looking at all sides.
So what about this concern?
So I'll give my own example.
I would always tweet because Twitter is a good medium to get over out your ideas and thoughts.
Right.
But whereas before I was thinking, I'm going to start doing video content a lot more.
I'm going to put it out on Twitter.
Now I'm thinking, is it worth it?
I'm not going to, it's not, why don't I put that video account out on Rumble?
Because Chris Polvowski is going to be completely supportive.
Why don't I put it on YouTube?
Because YouTube and Twitter seem to be similar.
And I can make money that way anyway.
And more on other, and I'll be able to engage with another audience.
So do you think people are now?
Some people may think they need to diversify or do you think it's not people are thinking,
you know what?
It's no big deal.
Well, I think that that could happen depending on...
So now I'm going to kind of go back on what I just said a tiny little bit.
I'm somebody who loves to make videos.
That's the way I love to express myself.
I would rather share my opinions through little hot takes and videos and stuff.
And if it gets to the point where the algorithm decides that it hates that,
and every video I make is not possibly going to get seen by more than maybe a couple hundred people or get a...
a few dozen retweets.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I'm going to reconsider.
Do I feel like putting all the time and effort it takes into making a video,
editing it, putting it together, and putting it out?
If I know for a fact that the algorithm's never going to allow people to see it,
that's definitely a consideration.
I don't know if that exactly addresses what you're saying,
but it does kind of, can I make my next point?
Because it does kind of lead...
For sure, yeah, go ahead, Brian.
Down that road a little bit.
I think a big point of frustration and anger for a lot of people on this platform is that
we were promised back in January that we were going to find out, that we were going to have
tools to find out if our accounts were shadow banned, if we had some sort of negative score
or some sort of toxicity on our account, and be given some method to appeal or address it.
If so, it's, I don't know.
I did see a few tweets the other day that kind of addressed that, which I was happy to see, let me say.
But for the most part, it seemed like that kind of went quiet.
We didn't get a lot of transparency or explanation about that.
Sorry, I just got a call. Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
And then the next thing that happened was a lot of people,
and I don't want to trigger Theo,
because I think he got upset with me yesterday,
but I did, like, look, there are a handful of people
that are very boosted by Elon Musk,
and it seemed like the majority of those people
were like getting these enormous paychecks,
and then suddenly they became like the authority
of how to do well on Twitter,
while never acknowledging that their relationship
with Elon Musk was any part of that.
But that aside, a lot of people are still experiencing legacy shadow bans,
tags on their accounts, a lot of negative things that have never been addressed.
And then it's like that's kind of just being rolled over.
And now it's like, well, if you want to make money on X, this is how you do it.
And it's like, well, no.
I mean, if...
If all of the people who are killing it right now are saying that they're just killing it because they're so good at using X,
well, let's hit the reset button.
Like, let's give everybody the same, like, let's lift the restrictions from people's accounts.
Let's lift the shadow bans.
And then let's see what happens.
And so what, Brandon, what you're saying is important.
And let me go to me, is because the.
There are people, even I was shadow band for a period of time.
I think Alpha has been shadow banned.
Kalisi was shadow banned for a significant period of time.
And so the concern is this.
Like, if you go all in on Twitter, right?
So you're like...
I'm going to do all my content on Twitter,
but then you could be shadow banned one day.
You don't know you've been shadow banned unless you go to an external website.
You don't know how to get it lifted.
You don't know what's happening.
Even YouTube who basically, you know, have this mad system.
They will ban someone or demonetize someone,
but they'll send them an email, although they don't tell them the reasons as well.
So I guess they're similar.
But, Ms.
How would people deal with that issue that basically...
And I just to preface that...
Musk did say that he's going to sort it out
and we are hoping that gets sorted out.
We just saw recently that was it like some kind of system
where a social credit system,
like if you were engaging with toxic accounts,
you would degrade,
you were basically your account was degraded
and your engagement was degraded.
So he is making certain moves to improve the place.
But then at the same time,
Shadowbans is a huge thing.
Like that is very, very big.
Like what does he do about that?
Go ahead.
So I would say the first thing that comes to mind are clear parameters around what would limit reach.
Because I think, you know, he made it clear that there will be free speech, however, not freedom of reach.
And, you know, that's still very ambiguous because a lot of people are not really aware what it was.
Many of the people that I talked to that had their accounts, shadow banned, weren't sure.
Whoa.
They weren't sure what it was, which tweet or which post it was that got them shadow ban.
And that kind of brings up, I think, the legacy system that Brandon was talking about.
Elon just posted something the other day, or was it yesterday, where he talked about this
social credit of sorts that, you know, that will be deleted.
So meaning it's still at play.
And he did acknowledge that there was a time where it was very politically driven.
There were a lot of, I would say, on the left, those were amplified and things and
folks that were on the right were kind of de-boasted.
And I know that he's working to get all of that out.
However...
whatever is in the system now.
And I guess maybe Theo would probably be able to answer that.
Because when we're talking about advertising,
it's like if you're not even in the basket,
right?
of people for them to choose from because you're not making the impressions.
And it doesn't even really matter about what they're, I mean, you know, I understand that aspect of it,
them kind of facilitating or dictating what people are tweeting about.
But at the same time, some people will never even make it in the basket because they don't know exactly what it is.
that has them de-boasted.
And so I don't know if that's a legacy thing or not.
But I was curious to get Theo's thoughts on the,
I think it's called TweepCRED or something like that.
Did you want to, can we pivot to him?
Yeah, I read through the album.
Theo, go ahead, go ahead, because that's what I was actually referring to.
I just couldn't remember the name.
Is it whatever it may have said?
But go ahead, Theo.
If you can explain that to us and explain like by removing it,
what kind of benefit that has.
Go ahead.
Yeah, the tweet cred system from what I understood reading the code is primarily as like a spam bot prevention method.
I'm sure we've all noticed that on a lot of our tweets we have the little see more button at the bottom now.
I think that's one of the best additions to Twitter in recent times.
And usually what TweetCredit is referring to is the system in which an account is determined to be more or less likely to be bringing value,
and therefore which accounts are more or less likely to show up under replies without being put under that fold.
There's a bunch of things that are put into it.
Like what percentage of your tweets have links in them?
How new is your account?
How many people are you following?
How recently did you follow them?
How many people follow you back?
How many followers do you have?
And what's the ratio there?
It's a combination of like,
bot slash spam prevention
and like a general mob.
Quick question.
Didn't Elon say he was going to remove it?
So what's his thought process behind that?
Because I thought that was a good thing
that he wanted to remove it to like.
So I can basically engage with controversial,
people and it's not going to impact me.
So it becomes more...
He already confirmed that it doesn't really do that.
It's more so used as a system for like small following accounts
to determine whether or not their replies are bringing value.
From what I...
That's not true at all because I use a secondary account
to watch what happens on my own account.
And when I retweet someone who doesn't have ads or is potentially shadow banned,
all ads are removed from my own account.
So it 100% affects you.
If you're engaging with accounts that are on some sort of blacklist or seen as awful,
you know, like the CEO said, it 100% affects you and your ads,
especially the retweet feature.
That's what seems to really trigger it to affect your account directly.
So if someone, a good way of.
of determining whether or not someone is affected by this.
If you can DM me one of these accounts, I would love to try it.
But like, this isn't tweet cred.
Yeah, sure, but a good way of testing it yourself.
A good way of testing it yourself is to go find a tweet that has more than three comments
and doesn't have any ads.
retweet it yourself and then use a secondary account or someone else on Twitter to check your
tweet that had ads prior to see if it still has ads because 100% of my ads were removed
from my entire account. I mean, tweets that were like a month old. I watched in real time as they
were dropped from my account.
Which is a problem, isn't it, Brian?
Because if that is happening, what that means is the small accounts don't get opportunities.
It means the big accounts don't engage with smaller accounts because you basically don't want to get debboasted.
And Brian, just one more question on that, if that's okay.
Because I know you want to jump in anyway.
And just one more question on that.
I know my tweet where I criticized the ad revenue did not get.
And I pinned it on the top.
I think, yeah, my tweet where I...
criticize that ad revenue did not get sponsors.
So is it, if you criticize Elon as well, you don't get sponsors.
But anyway, Brin.
I just really quickly want to say it's safe to test this because as soon as I
undid the retweet, the ads were immediately back.
And I'm talking like it's immediate within seconds.
The ads were back on all of my old tweets and my page show.
If you can get me an example of one of these tweets, I'm more than happy to test it.
But like, I read the source code that's not how this works and I'm,
I watched it real time and multiple times.
Brian,
Brian,
I love to your thoughts.
Yeah,
yeah,
yeah,
I think first of all,
yeah,
it's,
it's,
it's,
tweet credit is,
is obviously not something
that I think should be in play.
And,
and it has caused a lot of panic.
Like,
people are now afraid to reply to people
that might post things
that might be considered negative.
And even if their tweet that they're replying to,
isn't,
isn't something that's bad,
according to Twitter,
if they posted other bad things, then it's possible that it could get you deboasted.
I know that Shane, I know Shane was working, I think, with Tara and Brock was working with
Tara. And they have been looking at a lot of accounts, and they notice what Tara is saying.
I don't know the coding behind it, but there were several accounts that had similar things,
and they ended up getting them getting ads back on those accounts.
those accounts and get them
got them de-boasted as well.
So boosted. Sarah, yeah.
I've got to clearly say, I'm going to Sarah.
Yeah, yeah. I just want to say, look, the thing that this
comes down to for me is a complete lack of
transparency. When I go to Elon's
profile and I search, he talks
a really big game about making everything
transparent. And I
And I've heard somebody say on this space earlier about giving time, give it time.
Like we're using this now, give it time, as a blanket kind of excuse without any kind of, we're not quantifying what time means.
Is it months?
Is it because there's a plan in place?
Is it?
Is it because that plan to address these issues has been made visible to us and we have a roadmap for it?
So for eight months, we've been giving it time.
Now, he said he'd made the algorithm completely open source, but my understanding is that part of it's blacklisted.
And the blacklisted part of it is, you know, the kind of things that would make your account blacklisted.
So what are the trigger words that you use?
That's not how it works.
The thing that's blacklisted is that you don't have the data.
We don't have the data that the code runs with and through,
but we have the code that determines what appears in your feed.
Like, I just...
these things exist, we can read the source code.
And I feel like we're all taking our individual experiences with one-off,
bad things that happened to our or our friend's accounts in trying to prescribe what's happening.
Let me just ask you a question then, because you interjected to be there.
Are you saying the algorithm is completely transparent?
So you can tell me what words would actually de-boost my account
and literally what words to that extent and nothing is blacklisted and nothing is hidden?
Categorically, is that what you're telling me, Theo?
No, I think that we're mixing up a lot of these different words.
Yeah.
Like, we have now conflated reach and algorithmic, like, discovery with advertising and
advertisement payouts, with blacklisting, with shadow banning and tweet credit.
I haven't talked about shadow banning.
I haven't talked about advertising.
I just wanted to ask you straight question.
But the issue around certain words causing your account to get what you're referring to as de-boasted, that's not an algorithm problem.
That is a shadow banning problem.
And I agree there's probably some amount of shadow banning that occurs when certain things are talked about.
And it sucks that there's not more transparency about that.
I'm not here to say otherwise.
I'm saying that we know how the algorithm work.
The algorithm works.
when a piece of content performs well
in a group of people that have some shared characteristic
let's say all of them liked this specific tweet last week
and of the people who liked that tweet last week
that saw your tweet, all of them liked it.
Twitter will then start recommending that tweet
to the people who liked the similar one before
based on the user engagement patterns in behaviors
it has almost nothing to do with which words are in the tweet.
So Theo, let me go to Ryan.
I know I was going to go to Sarah and then I'm going to go to Alpha
but let me go to Ryan first because Ryan,
you've also read the source code and you said
that you completely disagree with what Theo said.
So go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for having guys.
Can you guys hear me clearly?
Just want to be sure because I have audio issues.
Okay, perfect.
So yes, Theo, unfortunately, is completely wrong.
So there's a, there's every single one of your tweets gets evaluated.
The first thing that gets evaluated, Calisi hints it out of it.
It's called blacklisted topics.
It's literally that's the variable name in the code.
It literally goes through it.
But the funny part is this quote unquote open source algorithm does not provide you
with what these blacklisted topics are.
I even called out Elon.
I said, Elon, what are these topics so we can play your game?
You made the code open source.
You want books on the table, open books on the table, correct?
So give us what this dark set of rules are that we can't evaluate.
But the problem is we don't know what these are.
And this could be anything.
It could be you're not allowed to talk about Pizza Hut because I own Domino stock, for example.
But until we know what these are, your code is not open source.
And every single freaking tweet gets evaluated by this function of the algorithm.
It's literally called a public void evaluate.
The function is evaluate.
Your tweet goes in it.
It gets checked for the blacklist of topics, runs an offensive filter on it, runs a bunch of different preconditions and stuff on it right now.
I'm literally looking at the chunk of code right now.
And it runs through this, but we don't know what these topics are.
That's the problem.
Until you know what those topics are, you don't have an open source.
Open source, by definition, means open.
Everything is visible, naked, and open.
And this isn't proprietary, right?
This isn't a proprietary part of the algorithm that Twitter is, or X, excuse me, is using in order to be like,
okay, we're going to be way better than meta or threads or whoever else.
No, no, no.
This is certain topics that they've chosen to not allow you to know what they are so that when you tweet about them.
So, Ryan, I mean, thanks for doing that.
That's very interesting.
But just another question, you sent me some code.
You were like process, raw count.
What does that mean?
Yes, so I was referring to, that's from Theo's extension.
So Theo's extension to, in order to calculate how much money is made is based off of, again, Theo, correct me if I'm wrong.
But I look through the, you actually have an open source code.
You actually have open source because I can look through every single part of your code,
and I can actually see all the stuff.
So versus Elon's open source half-ass definition, I can actually see everything, which is awesome.
And I appreciate you doing that.
But Theo, like...
Again, I know that in your code, you also said like it's an estimation,
but it's based off of just view count and multiplying it by a number.
But we know that that's much...
My code...
Let me just say, because we know that the monetization is based off of an infinite set of variables,
which, again, is not also open source.
That's the issue that I have when people come on these spaces,
especially huge...
This is the biggest space on the platform, obviously, right?
Biggest space, shout out to these guys.
But when people come out and defend this as being open source
and these guys are fully transparent, they're not.
Right? When Soliman...
Ryan, I have a question for you, too.
I have a question for you, right?
Of course, of course, Brandon.
When Soli gets paid pennies on the dollar, literally pennies on the dollar versus someone who's tweeting about very similar topics.
I'm not going to name names, but that person is friends with Elon directly, but solely isn't.
That's just to me, that's first of all, that's biased.
And secondable, it's not transparency.
Yes.
Sure, you guys are giving the definition of in time, in time.
He said that back in February, he said he's going to give us this ad share revenue.
It's not about time.
They have the code.
The code is calculating how much money you make.
He can make that code open source and you can see how it's being calculated.
YouTube gives you that.
YouTube gives you the CPM, the RPM, excuse me.
And you're able to see how much.
I explained earlier why this doesn't work that way.
Okay, so go ahead and explain.
Can I respond to things about me?
Thank you.
Cool.
Of course.
Go ahead.
But I want to have the right to be able to respond back to you as well.
Of course.
Yeah.
So three...
specific things I want to cover.
Please don't cut me off until I've briefly touched on all of them.
The first is my extension and how it works.
I literally took, my extension was made largely as a joke based on my guess of my experience on Twitter.
I looked at the 90 days that were, I was assuming were the 90 days I was modicized for.
I took my impression count.
I took the amount of money I made, I divided it by the impression count.
I hard coded that value and I just multiply it and throw it in the browser because I thought it was funny.
And it's kind of useful to me.
for the niches that I am in and for my audience, because it's based on my numbers,
but everywhere in all of the things I've posted about the extension, I have put in all caps.
This is a rough estimate.
Do not trust it.
I'm basically making a joke with this extension.
It's not meant to be the super reliable thing.
It's just a multiplier based on my experience.
And I wouldn't expect it to be even close to accurate for people outside of the techniche or even within the techniche.
The second thing I want to talk about quick is open source and how it works.
Open source means open source code.
And both Twitter's algorithm and most of my open source work fall under that definition.
The stuff that you've been touching on here is not the source code.
It is data that goes through the source code.
I think there should probably be more transparency around things that are less changing, such as blacklist values so we can understand what those are.
But those probably change a lot internally at Twitter.
And those aren't things that are encoded in source, which is the definition of open source.
Those are things that are in a database or another storage system that...
or interfacing with the source code.
And you don't just expose your database to the world
when you open source things.
You might put out test data.
There's a lot of things in the AI world
that have open source their training algorithm,
but they haven't open source the data they used to train it.
That's been going on for the last 15 years.
And there's some amount of argument as to whether or not this is
within the spirit of open source,
but we've pretty much blanket agreed within the engineering world,
that it's 100% within the spirit of open source,
to open source the code that you use to process data
without giving away the data for free.
The third thing I want to touch on is the misunderstanding
with CPMs, because this keeps on coming up
in this Twitter space.
The difference between Twitter and other platforms
is that the majority of the ads
that you'll be making money on on Twitter
are not being served on your profile or in your tweets.
They're being served around them
as people scroll through the Twitter feed.
Because of that, your advertising is not targeting a specific tweet and no specific tweet has a CPM based on the tweet, its audience, its content, your profile is not have a CPM based on all these things either.
It all comes down to the experience that an advertisement member or that a viewer or Twitter user has and how much money advertisers are paying Twitter to target a specific content.
viewer of Twitter. And then after we have done that calculation, we take the things they have
looked at through their time. Let's say again, the example I gave it was $5. Advertisers pay $5 to
target a specific user as they're browsing Twitter. They spend half of their time looking at your
tweets, half of their time looking at my tweets. 250 of the $5 is determined to go to creators.
We both make $1.25 in this theoretical scenario.
There is this is just it's a very different platform in that way and the expectations we have around how YouTube works are not going to work here because content isn't specifically targeted with advertisements.
All right.
I was going to let Ryan respond to you Theo and then I did say Sarah wasn't able to a chance to jump in yet on alpha so I'll go to them and go ahead.
So, Theo, regarding the engineering world, I'm a computer engineer.
I got my bachelor's degree from NYU in computer engineering.
If you like, I can send you that.
So engineering world, I'm there.
I've operated and I've built startups.
I've done whatever I need to do.
So engineering world, I'm in there.
I understand it.
Believe me, I'm part of all of that.
One, two, you mentioned data.
I agree with you.
Data is not shared, but this is a function.
This is not data.
This is code.
That is a function.
It's not data.
That is the function again.
Okay, I'll read it to.
Give me one second.
It is within the...
Oh, too many tabs, too many tabs.
Give me one second.
Can I just remind people to retweet this space because it's extremely informative and it hasn't answered so many of my questions.
And I think other people need to be hearing this because there's just so many people in a tailspin right now trying to figure out what's going on.
And these guys are obviously extremely smart, know what they're talking about and are digging into the code.
So retweet the space.
If you haven't done it, you can go to Mario's profile and just retweet it from there.
Can I jump in for one second?
Because you guys are talking about things, okay, things that are being, like, people who are being de-boasted and stuff like that.
Like, how do we figure that out?
Because, like, I've heard everyone I know thinks they're being shadow banned right now.
Bro, we're not talking about Shutter ban right now.
Let us finish the algorithm.
Yeah, just pull one second.
Let Ryan respond and then we come to the rest of the hands.
Go ahead, Ryan.
Okay, it's called blacklisted topics.
It's literally blacklisted topics and camel case.
So if that's what you want to look for and take a look at it, go ahead.
That probably goes to a configuration file, Ryan.
It's like a global parameter that gets set in a configuration file.
Right. But they have that. So why won't they make that available?
That's exactly what I'm saying is that this is if this is open source, I agree with you.
If it was proprietary, don't share, but this is clearly this is part of a main function that's right.
So technically you're open source. By definition of open source, I should be able to take this code and redistribute it and use it myself.
I cannot take this code by the engineering definition of open source that you stated to me and repurpose and use this code because there's a function in there that I have no idea what it does.
It's like if you gave me code and a chunk of it is in there and you don't tell me how it operates and you don't tell me how to use it and then you expect me to go out there and operate with it.
It just won't work. It's like a car that has a pedal. I won't be able to drive it.
I think I understand the specific misconception here.
There's a very common pattern at companies that are bigger than 10 engineers,
where rather than exposing APIs that are like endpoints you hit to get data,
they'll expose it through the form of a package.
But the source code for the, what's the name of the place that Balacosatis?
The internal text topic package.
at Twitter is almost certainly literally just a blank wrapper to authenticate and respond with data from a database.
That's not code that's running.
That's not some crazy algorithm piece that we're not getting.
It's literally just returning a string list.
It's not, though, but it's using it to evaluate that function.
That function without that, if you remove that chunk of the function, it will not give you the same result and same outcome.
Do you agree to that point at least?
Yeah, if you don't have the same data, it won't have the same outcome.
All right.
So if I put a tweet in there and that's there versus that not being there,
I'm going to get two different value results out of that, correct?
Correct?
You can put the same Twitter, the same algorithm twice and get different results.
That doesn't know.
That does not make any sense because I'm taking this function.
I'm putting the same exact tweet through it.
Let's say two raw profiles never tweeted before.
If I put the same exact tweet, hello world, which you and I both know what it is, into this function, we should get the same exact result back.
Correct, Theo?
Not necessarily.
Now you're making excuses, my friend, from an engineering world.
You know the answer.
No, I'm not.
The answer is yes.
Are you?
Can I ask you a question before we move on?
This is computer science and he's playing us.
Yeah, yeah, I get it.
I think you clarified your point.
I think you smashed it.
Sarah, let me jump into Sarah because let me jump into Sarah because let me jump to Sarah so she can give her point.
Go ahead, Sarah.
Well, I think that.
And then Brandon.
I'm sorry?
No, no, sorry, go ahead, go ahead.
Oh, thank you.
So I just wanted to go back to something that Ms. Tara was trying to say and somebody cut her off.
But what she was trying to say and correct me if I'm wrong, Tara,
is that there's a big difference between de-boasted and being shadow banned.
And what she was talking about was her tweets were being de-boasted and they were not showing ads
until she stopped or limited her interaction with certain accounts.
And I think Theo, you called that a one-off, but it's not a one-off.
Lots and lots of people have shown that if they stop,
if they remove a retweet, if they take away likes, if they remove certain tweets, suddenly ads appear.
And it's not happening over weeks, days, or months.
It's happening almost instantly.
So, for example, if I retweeted Tara's PIN tweet and she were de-boasted, I'm not talking shadowband.
If she were de-boasted, my ads would be removed immediately.
almost immediately. And that is something that people are trying to figure out because there is no
transparency that anybody can find in any of the code. I think Ryan explained it pretty well,
that there are even keywords that can get you de boosted, not necessarily shadow banned.
And those are two separate topics. And you keep saying that we're conflating them, but we aren't.
And here's something else.
And I know it's a hot point for a lot of people, but
I don't, I don't have ads that appear on any of my tweets zero. And I don't tweet about any,
you know, Sully I'll tell you. I don't tweet about anything profound. I tweet about my dogs.
I post as a stupid selfie and, you know, just my general everyday life, but I don't get ads
under my tweets for whatever reason, but I do get paid. And so if I'm getting paid with no
advertisements and I have a.
a quarter of the engagement, and I'm just going to throw you out there, Silemon.
I get a third, a quarter, maybe even less than, of the engagement that he gets
and yet I get paid more.
Now, that's a flaw in the system, that there is something wrong there that many people, you know, are not willing to say out loud.
And that's okay.
We can be critical of this app and not be afraid.
I love Twitter.
I'm, or X, I'm not leaving.
I tweeted for free before and I'll tweet long after.
Okay.
But I just don't understand the pushback when people are making very legitimate claims stating that this is happening and they are not one-offs.
Thank you.
And I just want to say, Sarah, your stuff is actually good.
We have a bit of banter, but like, Sarah's stuff is really good.
You know what?
I mean, I, listen, you know, my stuff is garbage.
But it's nice garbage.
But, you know, I don't attack.
I don't attack anybody.
I tweet my dog and I tweet just, you know, normal stuff.
But I don't get ads.
And I went to Colise's account while somebody was yapping.
I went to Tara's account, Mays, Ryan.
They all have ads.
And I am willing to bet that I made just as much money, if not more than them,
Tell me why Theo tell me how that works.
Might be,
might be because you're friends with the cross-in scenes.
We don't know.
Alpha, go ahead.
What is your thoughts?
You're not allowed to criticize you on the platform, by the way.
They're my best friends.
I love them.
I want to get my millions now.
So if that's how it works,
hear the woman.
If that's how it works,
listen, Sully, I'll just say this really quickly.
I'm so sorry, but if that's how it works,
if it works by association,
which I do think that in some ways it does,
then why wouldn't it work in the opposite?
Why if I am engaging with nefarious, terrible accounts,
would it not deboost me and remove my ad rev things?
It doesn't work that way in the positive sense.
What's happening there,
the reason that the people who get replied to by Elon
have huge boosts in their payouts
is because a lot of Elon's audience
is a particularly high value audience.
Like I don't follow any of the accounts he replies to,
but they're often in my feed because I follow him
as an engineer and founder.
I know a lot of people who regularly complain
about the random stuff ending in their feed,
or ending up in their feed just because Elon replied to it.
What Elon's doing is by replying,
people who follow him and look at his stuff
are now seeing those things,
which is an audience that's very different
from the audience as a lot of those creators normally have.
And his audience is, for what I would hope
are obvious reasons, more valuable
than a lot of the average audiences on Twitter.
That's where that's coming from.
I mean, is it really that most audiences
are a large proportion of Twitter?
Like, he's got 150 million followers.
I wouldn't say it's the cream of the crop.
It's just nearly a large proportion of Twitter.
But Alpha, what's your thoughts?
I know you've had your hand up for a while.
Yeah.
I sound okay.
Yeah, much better, much better.
All right, cool.
Yeah, I was going to say that.
I mean, like, I found myself doing what a lot of you guys were saying,
where you're trying to modify your content to try to match advertisers,
revenue policies.
But, yeah, I don't want to do that either.
I mean, that's no fun.
I mean, I made a second account just so I can have, like, another area for more risky stuff,
if you will, but...
Yeah, what I wanted to say was I heard that Twitter's aware of the account-wide issue as far as putting ads on your feed under your comments, I mean, right now it's account-wide.
So if you have one tweet or post that screws up your monetization, your whole account will get checked.
So, yeah.
I was talking to somebody
and he told me that they were aware of that
and they're trying to change it to just
de-boost that one tweet
instead of all of them.
But, but
But yeah, it really stinks.
There's no transparency.
You don't know what you're doing wrong.
You know, your views go from, you know,
million a day to millions a day to, you know,
a quarter of a ton of that overnight.
It's like, what the heck did I do?
So it's super frustrating.
And like, you know, Elon's pledged to make this,
oh, you can make your living offer here.
Not right now.
It's so variable and weird.
You don't know what's going on.
So I know he said he's trying to improve that with more transparency.
But right now there just really isn't any.
Yeah.
and hopefully that comes soon.
Yeah, and that's all we're asked for.
For me, it's always two things with Twitter,
what I want, transparency and consistency.
And that's not just on the ad issue,
but all issues in terms of shadow banning and banning people.
We know certain ideological people have hold certain ideological positions
may get banned, but then others don't.
So I just want those two things, consistency and transparency.
Brandon, I know you had a question for,
And just to be clear, like, what you said, Alpha, you make an excellent point.
And I think a lot of people have made some really good points today that we don't want the content on Twitter to change.
Twitter is amazing, though, because this is what it is.
Like, I can go and attack constantly.
conservatives, I can attack liberals, I can attack people with certain positions, not with other positions.
Because we have such diversity on Twitter, we can just basically converse with anybody and debate with them.
The concern is now that basically, in order to get the back, if you need to have a specific ideological position to get the advertisers,
Twitter is going to be boring, like everyone's going to have the same view.
It'll be dead.
Brandon, I know you got a question for Ryan. Go ahead.
Yes. Okay, now can I pull it together?
Okay, so I think what I was going to say was that we learned through the Twitter files,
and I believe this was like directly through Elon, from Elon and other people,
that Twitter 1.0 had put tags on, different tags they'd put on people's accounts that had different effects,
different restrictions, different ways to prevent people from having reach and various things.
Ryan, you said something, and I don't remember exactly the term you used, but what did you call blacklist what?
Blacklisted topics.
Okay.
And you're saying that according to you, you're saying that, and by the way, I'm on your side, but I just want to be clear.
According to you...
Every tweet that goes out gets an assignment of how it lists, how it is blacklisted or not blacklisted.
Is that correct?
Brandon, it's not according to me.
It's according to the source code that they put out.
Every single tweet gets a source.
Yeah, I'm with you.
You're correct.
Yeah, that's correct.
Yeah.
Okay.
Perfect.
So my question is, since we know that there were bad actors in Twitter, and I believe still are,
and probably fairly plentiful.
who are assigning tags to people's accounts and probably arbitrarily in many cases, probably just public personalities they don't like or people with political ideologies that they don't like.
Is it not possible that they could have assigned tags to people's accounts to make sure that every single tweet that they put out gets a bad blacklist rating no matter what the tweet is?
I think you answered your own question on the answers, yes.
They can do...
Well, but I'm asking an engineer.
Whatever they're going on back in and you won't even see it.
That's the crazy thing about this course.
They can label you, Brandon, and be like, okay, we're going to make sure Brandon's account.
Whenever he tweets, only like 50 people will see it.
The only reason we know how many people see our tweets now is they add of the view function.
Before that, we had no idea.
Exactly. And this is exactly the point that I was making earlier. I think the biggest source of frustration for people is that they rolled out this monetization and it does, look, this is just my own thing. People can agree or disagree. It does feel like there's a handful of accounts that got a lot of preferential treatment and a lot of boosting. That's regardless. It's beside the point it doesn't even matter. But yeah.
I don't think they should have rolled out this monetization before they address that first issue
because people have no idea if their accounts are ever going to be cleaned up, if tags that were applied are ever going to be removed, if the restrictions are ever going to be removed.
And meanwhile, you have all these people being like, we're making so much money on Twitter.
It's great. It's the place to be if you want to make money.
It's like, no, there's a lot of people.
Like many people believe that they have tags on their account that they will never be able to succeed if these things aren't removed.
And that is not being addressed or talked about.
I think he made some good points there.
Mays, I want to come to you and over it.
I know you've had your hand up for a while.
Oh, sorry, and then I'll go to you Wall Street straight after that.
But, Mays, we're talking about ad revenue,
and we are going to go on to the ticketed spaces
and block function in a bit.
But,
In terms of, again, because Brandon and Ryan have just hit on some interesting points in terms of the block function, in terms of certain words being blocked.
And one of my friends did go through some tests and he has made a list of certain words that he thinks are in that function.
But my question to you is we've got the block function.
And then we've also got people who are actually shadow banned.
And then we've got people who are banned.
And again, banning, like, we don't know what the transparency is.
There's no transparency in terms of what the ban system is.
Like, we have a scenario where someone like, for example, Nick Fuentes is banned, but then someone like Amy Mech isn't.
And so where is the consistency and where is the transparency?
And in terms of that, so in terms of that larger issue of banning and there's much more acute issue of ad revenue.
So I think that that's, you know, to be honest, I just sat here for a minute and tried to imagine how they would be able to share that infamous list of what it is that flags accounts.
There has to be some sort of global parameters that are set somewhere that are saying, if this, then do this, right?
And so whatever those are, I think.
I think it would be, you know, that's a scary thing to kind of drop because I think that there's probably influences to some degree that maybe he's dealing with that he can't necessarily reveal them.
I don't know. But I think that that is a major question. I mean, clearly there has to be something that's being set in the system that could be revealed to people.
But I think that there would maybe, maybe.
be some backlash to that. Now, as far as the ad revenue, let's just say that there's the people
who are able to get into the basket for the advertisers to make their choices. And let's just say
someone who has 85 million, I don't know, impressions a month. I mean, that's a little overboard,
but, but however, whatever they're tweeting about isn't relevant to the advertisers. And so they're just not
paying for it. So I think to answer Sarah's question, they would probably see the smaller
checks because people aren't just, they're not being chosen as the, as the ones to get
their ads. Now, when it comes to the, the fact that it's,
interdependent on other accounts,
that's the part that I think,
you know,
is a problem because it's,
it's kind of like these types of infringements are like hanging on to people's
accounts.
And if I go and I retweet something on one of those accounts,
then I get the ding too.
And I think it just continues to go downstream.
And so people,
if they were,
let's just say,
trying to monetize and actually kind of exclusively make their money
from Twitter,
that's a huge risk factor right there because,
you know,
anything could happen to where they might just get de-boasted immediately.
And who knows how long?
And my final little point is that there's really no customer service either.
You know what I mean?
Like there's no one you could call.
There's no one that's, you know, responding to you to be like, oh, this is what you need to do.
Or it's going to take X amount of days.
I mean, even the time for it to take for it to get remediated varies.
And so I think that those are the questions that I have around that.
And so, yeah.
And most of us would pay for that, by the way.
Yeah, sorry, just one second, Brandon.
I just want to jump into what May said.
I think it's quite profound because when Ryan and Theo were having the exchange,
I'd initially raise the blacklist and, okay, maybe it's not part of the source code.
That's semantics, though.
I don't, you know, it's irrelevant where it sits.
The fact is there is a blacklist which is hidden, which doesn't tell us.
And Theo, you'll kind of come back on that was it probably changes on a daily basis.
Right.
I'm sure they can make it visible if it indeed does change, and this is your thinking behind it on a daily basis which I doubt.
But no, Theo, let me finish please first.
If it indeed does change, I don't believe it would.
I think they have the trigger words.
I think they have the categories that are blacklisted.
My concern is for transparency.
I'm not monetized.
I applied four subscriptions many months ago.
People who have subsequently applied after me have got their subscriptions, but I haven't
find whatever.
I was shadow band for four, four and a half months.
And what May says is absolutely correct.
As a blue tick kind of account, there are many different help sections.
And I wrote to every single one of them.
And they all bounced bank and said, not our department, no, go to some other help section.
There was nobody you can write to every single one.
And not one person would pick that up to address the shadow ban.
And there is a, and we have to differentiate because when I mentioned to you, Theo,
earlier about deboasting, you said that shadow banning, it's not.
Your account can be deboasted without being shadow banned.
I had no knowledge why I was shadow banned.
There was no transparency around it.
And I firmly believe, and I was subsequently then it was clarified by somebody who works for X.
that it was to do with something that I had posted.
But Elon talks a great game about visibility.
Elon talks a great game.
I accept that advertisers will choose where they want to put their adverts,
and there's nothing anyone can do about that.
But let's not conflate the two issues.
We're talking about, fine, you know, freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.
The...
that's fine as well, but at least make that visible and let people know what it is.
Some people may subscribe and say, actually, you know what, I want to keep my profile really good because I want the money.
And other people like myself will say, well, that's okay.
At least I know what the consequences are and I'm going to carry on doing what I think I want to do.
Because for some people, it's just about getting the message out there as opposed to making money.
So it's not all just about the money aspect.
But go ahead, Theo.
I actually agree with a decent bit of what you and Mays just said.
In particular, the lack of support is egregious.
I watched a lot of my experience is going to relate to Twitch because that's the company I watched grow, scale and succeed and fail in all these ways.
Having your support grow with the demand for support is super important.
And the fact that they significantly increased the burden that they have to deal with in terms of creators...
trying to figure out if their accounts are banned, or shadow ban, if they are demonetized,
if like why their payouts aren't coming through, where their subscriptions aren't happening,
all of those things are massive support burdens and they have not stepped up to take that on.
Totally agree there. As for the like banned terms list, these things are on every platform
kept relatively secret because it's a cat and mouse game. If we say the specific terms or
topics that aren't allowed, they will just be rephrased and reframed in different ways.
I think there's a future where Twitter's much more transparent,
similar to when you're applying something.
And it says, hey, are you sure you want to apply that?
This might be considered offensive.
They should do that type of thing with more types of posts,
run it through the algorithm ahead of time and let you know before you post,
hey, this does not align with what our goals are as a platform,
just a heads up.
It would be.
Awesome.
How more transparency about all of these things.
But doing that is not just a switch you hit.
It's not just a button you click.
It's a huge shift in how the security model of the platform has to work.
Because now you've given the bad actors, the tools they need to work around the system by giving them that level of transparency.
And transparency and consistency are the direct, like,
opposition of both safety security as well as advertisement interests.
These things inherently conflict and finding the balance is difficult.
I'm not saying they shouldn't put the time in.
I'm not saying it's okay that they haven't gotten the stuff working yet.
And I certainly cannot even begin to excuse the state of the support and like the paths there.
I'm lucky that I have friends at Twitter that can fix things when they're being weird.
And even I have not been able to get my subscriptions turned on,
even though I applied in,
I think April, maybe March.
I still haven't gotten it activated.
I have the exact same error that you do, Kalees.
I think they're just going through the app store.
Man, do I wish they would have like an
an ex-creators account where they put out these things like, hey, by the way, we're not going to be able to add new people on subscriptions for the next two months.
You can still apply, but it's not going to happen for a bit.
Or, hey, this topic keeps coming up.
We're concerned about on the platform.
Don't post about this.
Like, just being that level of transparent, absolutely would be awesome.
And I do wish we would see more of that.
Can I, let me, pardon what you just.
No, go ahead, Tara.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Sorry, I was just going to say part of me wishes that they would have held off on, you know, providing these ad revenue payouts until this was all a little bit more transparent.
But then the other part of me, the competitive part of me, understands the rush to do it, especially with, you know, threads and Zuckerberg copying everything that, you know, Elon is doing here and trying to essentially start his own version of X and, um,
wanting to drive traffic back here. Not that it even really needed to happen that way, but I think it really did help and spark people, especially creators, to come back, put their content on this platform, which is beneficial to all of us here. So I can, it's almost like a catch 22 for me in some ways I can,
empathize with Elon and the team and the decision making.
And in other ways, I just sort of wish that that transparency would happen sooner.
And I also want to agree with you in the fact that if they just release all of these words,
there will be ways around it.
And my biggest fear and something I know that they really...
you know, have worked diligently to crack down on is protecting children on this platform
and not allowing exploitation of children here. And I do feel that that's a huge danger and a huge
risk. If they put out all of the words that essentially hurt you or put you on these lists or
get you banned, then...
people will find ways to get around it.
And I'm not talking about the people here.
I'm not talking about the good people who outweigh the bad,
but there are bad people who will, you know,
use that to their advantage.
So I can 100% agree there with what Theo was saying.
Yeah, I just wanted to add to what you were saying, Theo.
You know what? I agree. Okay, support and everything else. I think we're aligned on that.
Just something that you said and Tyros just mentioned, you're right. Okay, so people may find ways around it.
I think what you proposed Theo in terms of, you know, some sort of a pop-up saying, are you sure you want to post this?
I think that works, okay? Because what's happening now?
right is Elon is the guy that came on on this platform um bought it came on spaces and said
oh it's going to be you know I'm going to keep censorship free I don't care what advertisers want
and I don't care what you know what revenue I'd rather lose the revenue than then compromise
you know the kind of free speech element of this platform it's and he talks about transparency
all the time so
Okay, that may be one of the reasons, and we're speculating here, that they're not making this blacklist transparent to us, but then that goes completely against what Elon came on this platform and spoke about.
But even if you put that aside, the consequences of not giving transparency on the blacklist is that right at this moment in time,
People that haven't been monetized and the only comparables they've got is, you know, the kind of, you know, people who've had a certain amount of interaction and they've got a certain amount of followers, but they've been paid far less than other people.
It's down to, well, maybe it's because of my political position that I'm taking.
Is it because, and people do speculate this, right?
Is it because I'm a Trump supporter?
Is it because...
You know, I'm a Republican is all the Dems are getting paid, all the people on the left are getting paid, people who Elon Musk likes are getting paid.
And I'm sure that people on this platform have heard this again and again and again.
So now there's this almost this environment, which isn't one about putting the message out there.
It's about looking at each other, wondering why people haven't been paid enough.
It's not cohesive.
And I think it's causing more damage than actually making that blacklist visible would do.
when you balance it up.
I really don't agree specifically because of the safety issue.
Like a lot of the things on that list are going to be really,
really bad things you don't want on a platform.
I don't even want to bring up and say.
So, Theo, leave those off the list. The scary black market stuff, leave that off the list.
The stuff like the fact that people can't tweet about certain topics, make those visible.
Like, for example, we know certain topics that we're not allowed to talk about on this platform because it debboost those posts.
Put those out there.
Make those visible.
But the dangerous stuff that you guys are talking about, don't post those.
That's fine.
We all know what those are.
The problem is the stuff that we don't know about.
That's what's the question here.
That's the big issue here.
I'd go as far as to say that the conflation that Twitter has done of like felony offense type content on Twitter and topics they just don't want people talking about at an algorithmic level probably wasn't the best way to implement that.
But that's why they have all of these like 15 different systems that we keep on conflating and confusing.
Like the difference between de boosting and shadow banning and actual banning is things that like.
I don't even fully understand after reading the code for days.
And the thing that is important to understand is that we can't just hit a button and make this transparent,
finding the way to do this correctly where advertisers are happy and don't do a massive pullout,
where creators feel like they understand why their content isn't reaching an audience the ways that they believe it should or shouldn't.
and that like the platform stays safe throughout, that is a really, really hard thing to do all of at once.
And one point that keeps coming up that I'm starting to agree with more is that rushing to get the monetization out before solving a lot of these transparency and just information issues might not have been the best move because it's going to drive even more speculation around things that.
are much simpler if you're willing to take a step back and think through the incentive structure of making a platform that has advertisers that keeps people using the platform and producing value in a capitalist economy.
I feel like we get so lost in the individual details about politics and people's interest in Elon's friends that we're losing the bigger picture of a business trying to make itself monetizable and profitable in the future.
Let me go to Paul.
I know Paul you've handed hand up for a while and then we'll go to Wall Street.
Sover.
Go ahead, Paul.
I just wanted to ask Kalisi because she brought up that she had been either de-boasted or she said
shadow ban.
And then she went to Twitter and they explained her what happened.
And I'm wondering if she would share like what she had done specifically because I mean,
I don't want to say names or anything, but like.
I've been told with like over a million followers that they think that they're shadow banned.
And like I am like contacted like once a week by people like, would you talk to Elon?
Why am I shadow ban?
I'm like, I don't know anything about shadow ban.
Could you explain that?
And could we talk about a little bit?
Like I feel like everyone thinks they're being shadow banned now.
You know, but I was shadow band and it was confirmed.
I mean, so you couldn't actually search for me.
If I came on this Mario space, they couldn't even offer me the mic.
They couldn't find me, even though both Mario and Soleimani, you know, we all follow each other.
People, if I was running a space, they actually couldn't find me.
They'd have to go to their DMs, where I'd DM'd them, to find my profile to then join my space.
Yeah.
Um, my posts were completely, I mean, you know, like they weren't even getting two or three likes,
because I just wasn't visible at all. Um, and we checked it out. And I was shadow band. And it was,
um, back in April, I'd posted something that had been flagged, but nobody told me. Um, that to,
I believe that was the actual reason why. And then I was told various other things by other people,
but it wasn't the truth that that was the reason why I was shadow banned.
And then my shadow ban was lifted and it was only lifted because we ran a campaign.
But can you explain it?
What did you do?
What was the terrible thing you did that caused this to happen?
Like what was your action?
I posted some videos of when Israel had the onslaught against Gaza.
I posted the videos of, I think it was one of the first nights,
the children that were killed in Gaza.
I posted it wasn't their faces.
It wasn't anything really gruesome, but it was just some videos around that.
And I tell you what, every single day I see far worse on this platform.
far worse from people who are not shadow banned.
And I believe one of them was, there was a bot, one of the, I don't know,
there was some bot attached to it saying it was sensitive or something.
This is what I was told.
It was flagged.
And that flag hadn't been removed.
And since that video, I was shadow banned.
So it would be fair to say that was over, like, was over, like, not over something like, over,
the,
gore or anything like that.
It was just basically
politics.
It was because of politics.
It was because of politics.
It wasn't anything gore.
I mean,
I was never asked to take down that video.
And there were things that I posted after that.
I mean,
I mean, this thing, you know,
with Israel and Palestine lasted for weeks.
And I carried on posting stuff,
but it was just one...
video, the initial one, which was flagged and it's shadowbound my account.
Even to this day, I've never been asked to take anything down.
And this was my frustration.
So to be clear, like, so you was not shadow bound because of the video, but because of
the ideological position.
It was.
It was.
And this was my frustration because the thing is, like, you know,
Nobody tells you why you're shadow banned.
You're instantly shadow banned.
And it was because of a political position that I had taken because there was far worse coming out from other accounts and they weren't shadow banned.
And I do believe this is the case, if I'm really honest with you, Paul.
You know, it was because of a position I'd taken.
I've never been asked, and this is the frustrating thing, right?
So nobody from Twitter reached out to me ever to say, and to date, to say, your post is unacceptable, you've got hate speech, this is sensitive content, this is unacceptable, you can't say this.
I mean, because I don't troll anybody.
Right.
Okay, so I don't use foul language.
I don't troll.
I don't post anything that I think is, you know, unacceptable or not PG or something like that.
So it's quite a clean account.
The only thing with my account is I take a strong position on some kind of political aspects.
Let's just put it that way.
And so there's a high chance I probably get shadow band again because I'm going to carry on speaking about these things.
But it is what it is.
This is why when Ryan was talking earlier, he was talking about the fact that this should be transparency on these things.
and I'll tell you why I think they won't give transparency because I think if like some of the
countries that the human rights atrocities that are going on I'm speaking about them if that was on
the blacklist and I suspect it is because two of the advisors that Elon Musk's uses are from
the ADL so if that was on the blacklist and people saw it was
it was on the black list.
I mean,
can you imagine the reaction that would,
you know,
X and Elon would get?
Because it is complete censorship,
ideological censorship,
political censorship going on.
So that's why I believe
it will not be made to public.
But let's go for some of that hands.
Go ahead, Theo.
Well, I just wanted to say this real quick, and I'm going to hop down.
Can I ask a question first?
Yeah, just wait one second, Theo.
Let's just go to Maze quickly.
Go ahead, Mace.
Yeah, because I have to hop down for a minute.
But I just wanted to let everybody know that if you want to check to see if it's just a helpful tool for you to check to see if your shadow band, you can go to this one site.
You can just type in Google.
It's the very first thing that'll come up.
that says Twitter, shadow ban,
and then it'll show you the four different kinds of bands
and which ones apply.
And I also wanted to highlight Theo's,
suggestion that I think
was great suggestion
is that whatever that process
is that it goes through
after launching a tweet
if that were to be able to be more
upfront and give you an option
or let you know that this would in some
way de boost you or but still
give you the option if you still want to
post it you know by all means go ahead
but this would impact your
where you are in terms of your social
status
in the app, I think that that's an excellent option for now, right?
If they don't want to change what's going on in the background,
at least like make it more upfront for the users.
But this is an excellent conversation.
I just got to make a phone call and I will drop down, but I'll be back.
Appreciate you coming on.
Amaz.
I feel, go ahead.
You were going to jump in.
So go ahead.
And then I'll go to tell you.
The fact that a video is the thing that was flagged is particularly interesting.
I obviously wish that they would give you notification like, hey, this video might be deemed
defensive.
Are you okay with taking it down?
My question would be, is it possible that there are other versions of the video that have
like seconds or frames within them shared that are...
aren't within Twitter's terms of service, such as like there is violence in one that isn't the one you shared, to be clear, but there's a longer version or a different edit of the same video that could have much more offensive content within it. Is that possible?
You're asking me that is it possible that there was another version of that that might have been more offensive or violent or something?
Yes. Yeah, no, no, it wasn't. It wasn't the case because I'll tell you why, Theo.
Literally, I was running a 29-hour space. It was the first night.
And as those videos were coming out, there was no editing, there was nothing like that.
It was live. Literally, I was posting it live as they were coming out.
So it wasn't that they were edited. There was longer versions. It was cut short or anything like that.
None of that, no.
Let me go to Sarah. Sarah, go ahead, jump in.
You know, I understand the blacklist.
I get it.
I understand that there are certain words, phrases, or ideologies that are terrible.
But I don't see the problem in sharing that.
You know, I know that people can get around it.
They can use different words or phrases that mean the same thing.
But if we know what they are, if Twitter were to release that, I'm sorry, X were to release that,
I'm sorry.
there would be a backlash and a backlash that I don't think that they want to necessarily have rained down on them at this point because we're already holding Twitter spaces all the time on ad rev, on the new block function.
We're seeing those on a daily basis and...
People will, people know now how to get around, like offensive content.
I think that they wouldn't release it because they don't want the backlash,
not simply because they don't want people getting around it.
We have pedophiles on this app.
They know how to get around their disgusting behavior.
They already know.
I think that there would be too much of a backlash for them to release it,
like Calisi was saying, if people knew, people would be outraged.
Let me go to Walstree. Walshry, what's your thoughts about the various discussions we've had today?
Lots of people reach out to me asking for advice on this because they think I know more, and I don't really, but they ask me a lot.
So I've looked at a lot of people's analytics and tried to help them troubleshoot what's going on with their accounts.
And honestly, people who tell me their shadow band, once I look at their analytics...
And they're out, you know, it's like they're not shadow banned.
It's, it's, it's, it's, you know, it even happens to me.
Sometimes your tweets just suck, right?
And you're just not getting the engagement that you used to.
I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean your shadow band.
So I agree there are people getting shadow banned,
but I bet you 90% of them are not really shadow banned and their tweets are just sucking for a while.
That's my first impression about all this.
Second of all, people are thinking that,
Twitter's, I mean, Elon just announced the other day that they're getting rid of this tweet cred system.
He said it's going to be gone, but, you know, give them time. It's going to take, you know, it takes a week or two or maybe even longer to change the code, put it through QA, then do a release.
I mean, these things just don't happen overnight because Elon states, hey, tweet credit's going away.
You've got to give them some time. It's going to happen.
Yeah.
Yeah, like you already Wall Street.
Keemstar said the exact same thing yesterday before the space crash, too, for what it's worth.
Yeah, Wall Street, you make a couple of good points.
First of all, you're right.
I mean, some things I do take time.
I do think with the ad revenue...
It was rushed because of, and it was, it was the right decision to do because you got threads,
a new app coming out.
It might become a rival, pull out ad revenue, and then you basically get people to re-engage with Twitter.
So it makes sense.
But hopefully there's a lot more, it becomes a lot more better.
And you're right.
There is some people whose tweets aren't.
that great, they're pretty boring, and they think the shadow band, for sure.
With Calisi, I know for a fact that you with Shadowband, we've got verification on that,
but yeah, there are people who that happens to, for sure.
Let me go to Ryan, Ryan, you had your hand up, go ahead.
Yeah, I think the point that I was going to make was the Calisi Shadow Band because she was Shadow Band.
A few people were.
You'd go to their profiles and you couldn't see anything.
Those are like clear shadow bands.
Everything is marked as these posts are sensitive.
You weren't able to follow them.
You weren't able to see them.
They were clearly blocked.
And not for anything gory.
And even if a video is quote unquote gory, it can be edited.
Like platforms like there's other platforms like TikTok and YouTube, you can edit out certain parts.
You can blur certain parts and it's uploaded and it goes through and it's fine.
And those still...
go there, but none of the stuff
that she had posted that I can at least vouch for
had anything that justified
this. It was pure politics. It was a pure political
move for both her and doc.
I think that was a huge jump because I agree with you up until the last half of the last sentence there,
where certainly the content that she was posting was not...
You and your buddies are really dissecting every word I say, huh, Theo?
No, no, it's, there was a logical jump there that's important, going from the content she posted
was fine and on other platforms it would have been deemed fine to, clearly this is a political
incentive. There are so many possibilities between those two. I think the most likely, like having
written a lot of the algorithms that...
do this stuff for my job previously.
It is very easy to write an algorithm that's overly aggressive,
where you have a piece of content that is against the terms of service,
and you have banned it or flagged your don't ever by a human in your system.
And now from that point forward,
an algorithm is going to do its best to detect that same content and flag it.
I am almost positive that Kaleez's experience was an erroneous flag
that wasn't done on her content.
Nobody went to her profile.
You said you're almost,
That's insane,
feel?
That's a huge leap.
That's a huge leap.
I mean,
Yeah, but what I'm saying is
We all have theories about this.
Theo, what happened was she was game.
There's a gamification of the system that's happening that was being done
by the DeSantis team on the Trump team
with blocking. What they do is they mass report and they mass block you
and you automatically get put into this block.
You automatically get debuted and then eventually gets reviewed
if the one thing's posted, whoever's on the other end
can turn the shadow band thing on.
I don't know what the function, how that works.
Do you have sources on this?
What do you mean, the mass blocking and mass reporting?
Yeah, both that like this was done and also that this has a like reasonable
They DM us death threats and say we have WhatsApp groups
So we send you you guys and we mass report you guys
I was actually told I don't want to make this into a dissantis Trump thing we've had many spaces on this
no no no i'm talking about calisi
Theo just to respond to you i was actually told um by somebody who did inquire initially from um twitter um
on on you know as a request that i was being mass reported on a daily basis um and i still am but
but but that wasn't the the reason for my shadow ban but they did say wow she is being mass
reported on a daily basis and it's because of the political positions i take and and i actually agree
with what ryan said i know you said it was a huge leap but you can say that theo because
If you moved in the spaces that I do, if you talked about the things that I talk about, there are hot topics.
I'm not going to lie.
They're not, you know, something that is widely accepted.
People will not sit on this platform and take the position that I take as boldly as I do.
And I do and I will.
And it is because of that.
When you look at the community board that Elon has put together and you look at the representatives on that board.
I think I can't remember what he calls it.
I think he calls it a committee or something, right?
And he put this together in November.
So he didn't actually even go into the offices of Twitter until December,
but he put this advisory board together in November,
who were going to guide him as to what's acceptable speech and not acceptable speech.
on this platform, there are four or five people from various different backgrounds,
heads of organisations, Latin America, Asian organisation, like Black America, Black BLM,
the Bush Centre. So every racial background is there. There's no religious representation on that
board, apart from there are the CEO and the vice president of ADL, and those are the first two names on that list.
Right.
So when I'm speaking, and I only speak politically, okay, so I don't talk about religion, hardly ever, but politically when I'm talking about what one country is doing to another committing apartheid, and I use that term often, then there's a high likelihood that I will get shadow banned, because if you look at who's advising and who's put the guidelines in place.
So I don't think it's as black and white as you're making it out, Theo, and Ryan's right.
Right.
I'm not trying to make it out as black and white.
I'm sorry if I came off that way.
I was trying to give an alternative example of a possibility for why this would be happening
that has more like automatic paths forward.
Generally speaking, when these types of failures occur,
it's not because a human had a specific motive for it to occur.
It's because a system handled things incorrectly.
And that's why I wanted more sources on the mass of an example.
That system makes sense.
Because you literally have a count.
Guys, guys, hold on.
That's not true.
We saw it in the Twitter files.
It's a system made by people, though.
You have videos that are showing people being shot,
people being ran over, people being killed,
and it'll get a million, 10 million, 20 million views,
and it's on there for weeks,
and it's never been pulled down.
The account does a video's,
you know, day after day doing the same kind of content that supposedly goes against Twitter's terms of service,
and it doesn't violate anything.
So it has nothing to do with Calisi's content or anything like that because it would affect all these other ones.
And you keep bringing up the code, but there's plenty of guys on here that have said that there's at least a third to,
if not close to half, the Twitter's code that hasn't been transparent.
So a lot of these codes...
And zero of the video code.
Could exist that.
Yeah.
There are like five misunderstandings there.
I don't know how to even start.
I'm going to try and finish the specific point I was making.
There are many different possibilities for why this happened.
I'm assuming, Kalees, can I ask a couple more questions to Kalee's quick?
Yes, sure. Go ahead.
I'm assuming you've made posts that are more offensive than this video, text posts that take really strong stances on things,
both before and after the shadow.
No, I don't think there's anything that I will ever, you know, write about that's offensive.
I mean, Alpha here follows me, Ryan, Sarah.
Calici offensive is objective.
That's the problem with this question.
Yeah, yeah.
So what I'm saying is, wait, specifically I'm saying, like the people who would have been upset with your video, are there...
Are there posts you have made that would have upset the same people more than the video?
I think equally as much.
Yeah, yeah, Theo, I think, I think equally as much.
I think, look, let me put it this way, Theo.
I think the people that will have been offended by my video,
they would rather I just stop talking about the Israel-Palestine issue overall
because I do post about that.
And what I was going to say to you is that if you look across this panel, there are people of different ideologies all following me.
If even on listeners, there's Dustin who was up here earlier, I don't even know what their political stance is on the Israel-Palestine issue.
But I post what I post, and it's all fact-checked, right?
So it's all in line with human rights organizations, with international law.
There isn't a black and white about it.
It's not an opinion.
It's fact that I post, right?
I agree.
absolutely,
totally have no reason to
disagree with any of that.
I'm specifically asking,
like,
if the assumption is the video post
offended somebody at Twitter,
on the board,
whatever,
such that it was decided
to shadow ban your account,
have you made text posts
that would have led them
to make that same decision?
Yes or now?
No, Theo, Theo, no, one second.
You know what it is? Your question is based on a false premise
because what you're trying to argue is
if she's produced other content
and she never got Shadow Band,
which were equally at the same level.
And this time it was, what's different?
The difference was in that specific situation,
as she's mentioned, it wasn't
all, it was an unusual, not unusual, but it was a specific situation that had been inflamed.
There was attacks going on at that time. There was political, there was ideological reasons why
people didn't want certain narratives to be stated and other people did want certain narratives
to be stayed. And so it made logical sense that one would be impacted by a tweet that happens
at that exact moment in time when that same post, maybe a few weeks earlier, would have had
less of an impact and there would be less reason to block. But anyway, I don't want to get it
I don't want to make the space into an Israel-Palestine thing.
Let's move on.
The next point I want to talk about is...
I didn't get to finish any of what I was saying.
I don't want to get banned as well.
Listen, let me go to ticketed spaces, right?
Another point is...
Another thing that I've seen that's going to be coming out is ticketed spaces.
Now, Sarah, I know you, if I'm right, did the trial version of these ticketed spaces.
You could basically do a space.
charge people some money
and then you can make bag that way
that way and the good thing about that is
you're not relying on some random algorithm
things are not going to go wrong
people love you you're going to make bag
Sarah let's talk about ticket spaces
what do you think is going to go down
I loved them. I was sad to see them go, not only could you charge, you know, a nominal fee, 99 cents, I think was the cheapest and you could go up to $999.
But you could also have, you could at that time, give out 100 free tickets.
So I could invite 100 people, make my price $1,000 so that nobody else could join and I could have this nice ticket.
private conversation. But if I wanted to, I could have my space price be $5. I did hold several
of them. I did make some money. I thought they were a great idea. I think somebody with a larger
platform than I have could make a lot of money and be able to speak to the
their audience about the things that they want to talk about
and have a more intimate conversation while also making money.
I think it's better than ad rev share.
Boys, I'm going to be making bag.
Can't wait.
The big.
Jump in.
What's your thoughts?
I'm just going to hold anti-Salemant spaces and I'm going to charge for it
at the same time that you have yours.
Oh my God, you've got to give me a cut of that.
Tara, what do you think about ticket and spaces?
She's going to be my co-host.
Yeah.
No, no, she supports me.
No way, she'll fight against you.
It'll be the all-tender position.
Okay, so not many people.
Who wants to talk about ticketing and spaces?
I'll talk about it, Sully.
I'll take the other side of the argument.
As far as I do, let me just tell you my views then, because everyone's a bit shy.
They all want to attack Elon.
But point being, if you look at ticketed space as well, what's brilliant about him is you can get like a special guest.
a huge special guest charge people and they can come in and listen to the spaces.
You could also have a scenario where there's a controversial topic.
A topic that you ordinarily maybe won't want to talk about in ticket to
in normal spaces because someone's recording it.
Someone's trying to get you canceled.
Someone wants a deep platform you.
You could do all them spaces.
You could talk about controversial issues.
You could even do it the way Sarah said where it's invite only or you could even charge.
So there's lots of...
awesome ways that this could be used.
But Ryan, yeah, jump in, bro.
What were you going to say?
Yeah, I think it's really, very cool.
But, man, the list of people that'd be willing to pay to listen to,
especially when platforms like yours brings them on for free is very short.
Like, I don't know who I'm going to pay, who I'd be like a dollar, $2, sure, fine.
But like Sarah had mentioned in a conversation we had on another space that a comic did a space,
a ticketed space over COVID for 20, a clip.
Now, comedy, you need to really be in the room.
I don't know how funny it's going to be over a microphone like this.
I think that the use case is very limited for a company that has, as they claim, limited resources for what they're doing.
Should they be wasting time on this feature or focus on tightening up on some of the other features we're discussing earlier today?
That's kind of my point of view on ticket space.
Are they cool?
Yes.
Will they probably be utilized?
Of course.
You'll have people's fan bases that they'll run ticketed space on.
You'll have some special guests come in.
They'll run ticketed space on them.
But I don't see the use case of it.
being there as big as it might be versus like the creator fund that should really get the
resources at this point of view a point of time awesome well i love it i love it i you know i just want to
say i love it because you know i've i've been very critical about the stuff but i want to jump into
no i think it's great i love this idea and one of the things i love most about it is that it sounds
very fair i'm all for anything that's fair and where anyone has the same shot as anybody else
Yeah, and just to add to that, like subscription services, I love the subscription services because, again, it's a fair situation. People subscribe to you. You get the numbers. And like, some of us are doing really well. It's not based on some random algorithm that we know, have no idea or where you think that there is some kind of.
There is some kind of huge biases that's going on.
Right?
The other thing...
No, you love it because you have it.
Because it...
But it's not fair.
I'm making back from it.
I'm making back from it.
That's what I love...
Yeah, but some people can't even get it.
So it's not fair.
That's what I'm saying.
Once we're all able to get it, then it's fair.
It's not fair.
So you apply immediately all right?
What was your situation for?
I applied, it's probably been about a month and a half to two months ago,
but I keep getting these really weird messages that he's changing.
I applied immediately, Brandon.
Like, as soon as they got it out, I applied like day zero.
And then because I was from the United Kingdom,
they gave it to the US people first.
And I think we got it like one or two weeks later.
But yeah, I got it like...
very early on.
I just want to say that I applied in August of 21 when they called it Superfallows.
I didn't get it until three or four months ago when a very conservative account helped me
and was able to get it to go through for me.
Sarah, that's when I got a choice.
I applied in the beginning of 2022 and I'm still waiting for it.
but you learn a lot you learn a lot about what people think about themselves by how they price
their subscriptions i saw somebody's the other day that priced themselves at 20 and i was like
bitch you like wow i i about subscriptions um i applied as soon as i didn't apply for the previous
program that they had years ago the super follows i applied as soon as they announced this new program
I think it was March or early April.
I was doing, I recall getting the first subscribers in the middle of April,
and I'm probably in the top 50, according to that list that was released.
But the point I want to make about the subscriber program, it's, oh God, how do I put?
Still be it?
Watch it on Wall Street. Don't be attacking your boy, Elon.
Yeah.
No, no, no, no, no. It's a program that everyone, if you want to be part of the algorithm, and I've seen Elon comment about this, the algorithm currently, as written, favors people who are playing the game, all right? You've got to think of this app as a video game, and you're going for the high score.
Okay, right now you get favored if you have subscribers.
You get favored if you subscribe to other people.
If you have not yet subscribed to other people and you're complaining about,
oh, my impressions are down.
The algorithm changed in early August, by the way, all right, or late July.
If you're complaining about your impressions being down,
there's several things you can do that will improve how the algorithm views you.
All right.
And this has all been made public.
You've just got to go look for it.
um subscribe to a few people turn on
like i take wall street's advice subscribe to me your algorithm will be sorted out immediately
according to what he says well i mean this is this should not it's not this is common sense
it's not it's not you know rocket science um
Play the game.
He's not even rocket science.
Don't be dumbed.
Subscribe to me.
He's saying your algorithm will be sorted.
I don't think it's common sense at all.
Well, I'm, if you guys will stop talking, I'll share some tips for you, okay?
Um...
Turn on pro.
You know something?
Go buy an advertisement for $10 on one of your tweets and become an active advertiser on the platform.
I guarantee you the algorithm favors people who actually advertise on the platform.
I spend about $50 a month just boosting some old meme, stupid tweet,
just so that the algorithm sees me as an active advertiser every month.
Subscribe to three other accounts so that you're actively participating in that system.
Um, me and a group of people, we got a verified org so that we could put affiliate tags on our accounts.
Do if you really want your impressions to go up and you really want to be successful on this app
Play this stupid game, all right?
Otherwise, just shut up and stop bitching because you're not doing it right
Wall Street one question.
You mentioned pro.
Do you want to tell the people what is the pro?
What is pro?
I've seen it, but I've not really used it.
No, it's it's no, to turn on professional version so that you can advertise on the app.
All right?
So that you can promote a tweet.
And I don't go look, the tweets that I promote, I'm not selling anything.
I go find some stupid old meme that performed well, and I throw $10 on it.
And you know something?
I think I'm pretty damn sure the algorithm favors people who are actually spending some money on advertising.
And I just do it just because I suspect that's true.
But you know something?
I'm doing 800 million impressions per month.
So I must be doing something right.
And my impressions are not going down like all you guys are complaining.
Your impressions are going down.
My impressions are skyrocketing, all right?
So you just have to learn the algorithm
and play this app like a video game.
No, no, but Wall Street, that's not the argument of some people.
The argument people are making isn't...
I don't know about on this space,
obviously, some people talk about boosting
and debanning and banning and so forth.
The argument that a lot of people on Twitter are making...
in terms of against this ad revenue is the opposite.
They're saying that they, and including myself,
they're saying the impressions are sky high.
They're going up every week.
Every week they're going higher and higher and higher.
And they're in the 50 million, 100 millions.
I think a lot of Laura Lumas on the 4,500 million.
And they're saying despite that, then they're not getting the advertising.
So isn't that the impressions of that?
Well, I mean, Laura Lumer is cursing like a sailor in all her tweets.
I'm not surprised.
I saw some tweet where she was complaining to Brian Krasenstein
because she was jealous of his results.
And she's saying, calling him a goddamn liar in the middle of her tweets.
And it's no surprise she's getting demonetized all the time.
I mean, it's not that difficult to say what you want to say and still be advertiser-friendly.
It's not complicated.
I just want to say I love every single thing this man is saying it's such a relief having somebody who like understands how the game works on the other side.
Like everything is that's not the rule of the game.
So many of us understand what Wall Street's saying because what Wall Street is saying is true.
The problem is all of us that quote unquote violated Twitter's terms of service during election fraud and COVID, we can't do know those things.
I don't quote.
Yes, you can.
I'm.
I'm.
I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you, you get with a group of people, buy a verified org, get the little gold check, and guess what? You get internal support.
So it's pay to play, essentially, Wall Street.
Yeah, yeah, it's paid to play.
So screw everyone else, right? Just pay to play, drop a grand a month. Is that what you're saying?
Hey, if you want to get monetized and make money.
I don't give a shit about making money.
I just want to make sure that my audience gets to see my post.
I shouldn't be paying a grand a month to pay.
I'm already paying eight bucks month.
Who cares?
That's nothing.
But a grand a month is a lot to drop to just for people to see my shit post tweets, bro.
I thought the whole point of this algorithm was to reach your audience and to be able to interact with people.
Isn't that the value proposition of Twitter?
I mean, if you want to.
If you want to complain, that's fine, complain.
No, no, it's not about complaining Wall Street.
It's not about complaining, right?
Take the money out of it.
Let's go two months back when the money didn't exist.
I think people are just saying that, hey, they garnered an audience.
They want to be able to have their audience see their posts.
Forget about even growing.
But they don't want the audience to see their post.
He's getting rid of that tweet cred system.
God, give them a few weeks.
Sure, let's give it.
Wall Street.
He probably wasn't even aware there was a tweet cred system.
Well, given the benefit of the doubt that he wasn't aware, Wall Street, it's not about
complain.
What happens is people come on these platforms, they minimize it, right?
Oh, you guys are complaining, pay $1,000 a month, do this and that.
Sure, fine.
To each their own.
You're in a position that you can do that.
Congratulations, God bless.
But a lot of people aren't in that position to drop a grand a month to be able to passively
tweet and have fun.
They've worked hard.
They've built a platform.
They've garnered an audience.
But unfortunately, now they're being chokeholded by this new algorithm or whatever it
this new system, whatever you want to call it is.
And sure, okay, we'll give Elon a year, two years to figure this out.
But the people aren't complaining.
They're criticizing and it's coming from a point because they love this platform.
They want it to be successful.
And they want to also be able to continue to grow on this platform.
You want it to end up like threads where you post and no one sees it.
The reason threads died is because people were posting.
There was no following tab.
All I saw was cat pictures and sports stuff for two, three weeks.
And I left the app.
because I couldn't see what I wanted, which is with the people I'm following.
And that's what's happening now.
People aren't able to see who they're following.
The people that are following, they aren't able to see them.
I get DMs all the time for my buddies, so we're like, bro, why haven't you tweeted in months?
I'm like, go on my page to do.
I tweet every single day and like, oh, we don't see anything.
Should I have to pay a grand a month for that to work?
No, it should be.
There are other, there are, okay, stop, stop already.
I mean, there are other tricks you can do without doing the-
They hate when you're right.
I mean, but listen, listen, there's other tricks you can do.
Go subscribe to someone.
Turn on subscriptions for yourself.
I have.
I have, I've subscribed to six people.
I've turned out subscriptions.
I've played the algorithm game.
I don't curse.
Turn on professional version.
Pay $10 for...
You mean the tweet deck?
No, professional version where you actually can...
I've done that.
I've done that as well.
Yeah, no, no.
I think if you turn on the professional version,
the thing I haven't done is you can't promote a tweet of yours.
And what Wall Street's saying,
I mean, I haven't got, I've subscribed to people,
Wall Street, I haven't got my subscriptions activated yet.
I'm still waiting.
But I'm happy to go and...
promote a tweet and see if that helps.
Go try.
Whenever I think I'm going through a rut,
and my tweets probably just suck,
and that's why my impressions go down,
it's like I'll go on there,
and I'll put $10 on to promote a tweet,
just so that the algorithm sees me as an active advertiser.
And I don't know if all of a sudden that's doing it,
or whether my tweet.
How often do you do that?
Okay, if my daily impressions...
drops below 20 million per day, then I start thinking, all right, it's getting down too low,
and I'll go drop some money to just refresh that, hey, I'm an active advertiser in the system.
And then sure enough, my impressions go back up to 30 million per day.
So it's just, you know, I don't know if that's actually in the algorithm.
It makes sense that it would be, logically.
And so I don't mind doing it.
No, but Wall Street, that makes sense.
Like, what you're saying is really good advice.
Like, a lot of us would be like, yeah, nice one.
We will all do that.
That's all good.
So I completely agree with that.
And literally my plan is as soon as, because I do all the things you said,
except do the sponsor advertiser.
I think I did that like a month or two ago.
I've no done that.
I'll do that.
No problem.
Like, when we get this advice, we're willing to do it.
The problem I think some of us have is where we don't know what's happening.
We don't know if there's kind of, there's no transparency in certain situations.
and there's a lack of consistency in censorship.
So as an example, you talked about
Lauren Luma and you said, well, she used the word liar.
Okay, that's fine.
That, what you're telling me is the advertisers
don't like when Lauren Luma uses the word liar,
but then there's certain people who are getting paid at his
huge amount of money when they're talking causing racial division.
They're talking about black people.
They're attacking LGBTQ.
They're attacking various different communities.
So you're saying that's more amiable to an advertiser.
And that's not.
That doesn't seem logical to me.
And so what seems more logical to me is
One is probably the ideological position that Twitter wants to take and the other one isn't.
And that's fine.
You're saying, so what?
So what?
So get up.
Become the ideology Twitter ones.
But like a lot of us don't.
Some of us here don't care.
Would care more about, you know, Twitter being what it was before, a town hall with various ideas and positions rather than becoming this ideological, you know, constrained.
Okay.
Look, look.
I chat with a lot of other large accounts that are making, you know, all those numbers being thrown around for ad revenue that you're talking about.
I talk with all those guys privately by DM, all right?
There's a lot of Trump supporters that are making plenty of money on this app.
I mean, I won't give you the numbers, but...
You being a conservative Trump supporter is not holding you back from making money on this app.
There's just too many examples of people who are making plenty of money from the ad revenue program.
What I suspect is going on is, you know, I don't follow Laura Lumer.
I mean, I glanced at her tweets when she was going through that, you know, little battle with Brian Krasenstein.
And I was trying to figure out why.
I was just trying to figure out why is she demonetized.
And you look through it and she curses like a sailor in a lot of tweets.
All right.
It doesn't surprise me that she's not making money on this app.
But there are ads on her profile.
So she is getting monetized, yeah?
Yeah.
Yeah, just not to say about it.
Yeah, I did see some ads on some of her tweets.
So, I mean, I don't know what she's been doing the past three months.
Maybe she's trying to...
My argument isn't about Laura Luma.
Like, that's just an example.
What I mean is because you're talking about her cursing like a sailor.
So what you're basically saying is,
If someone curses, they will not get advertising.
But if somebody causes, for example...
I have tweets that don't have ads on them, all right?
I look at all my tweets through a second account to once a day just to see, all right, which ones have ads, which ones don't.
And...
And I'm trying to sort of just personally figure out which words should I not use.
Like I did some, I uploaded some video that was about crime in San Francisco or something and all that shoplifting that's happening in San Francisco.
And I used some sort of crime related.
There was no cursing.
There was no, no, I never used the word Nazi or anything, any of these sort of buzzwords you'd think about.
But just because it was a crime related video and I used some words discussing.
I don't know, shoplifting or things like that, I guess that makes it, it's on some list that those kind of words are not advertiser friendly.
All right?
So what is that list?
The Wall Street, what is that list?
That's what we're saying.
Because, yeah, they're never going to tell you that list.
The other guy, the other people in this, in this space have already said why they're not going to show you the list.
Because if you knew exactly what the list is, you can game the list.
they're never going to give you the exact cliff you just got to sort of figure it out on your own and use some common sense
well street can i ask you a question can i ask a question real quick um uh first of all you've been very very nice to me uh
so i totally appreciate that and i so like nothing i'm about to ask in any way shape or form as a criticism
i actually respect when you say like treat it like a video game and and try to like game it and went like
i actually think that's really cool um
But my question is, if you were being honest and a lot of people who are like making a lot of money and using Twitter a lot right now.
And for the record, you probably missed earlier too when I said...
I really don't care that much about making money.
I just, I'd like to get my engagement where it used to be a while back.
That's a whole other matter.
So for me, it's about engagement.
It's not about money.
But my question is, when you're talking about, you know, like boosting post and subscribing
and having people subscribe to you and like helping boost other people.
Like, how much time are you spending thinking about Twitter?
Because that's the other thing.
I think, like, for people maybe like the Krasenstein's and people who are, you know,
just flashing these like $12,000 a month, I get it.
Like, if I was making $12,000 a month, I would do nothing else but think about Twitter.
But, like, that's kind of not how I want to live my life.
So I'm just curious, like, for the people who are killing it,
do you just literally have to be thinking about Twitter all day long?
And, like...
No, no, maybe
half the day, not all day long.
I'm saying that's you, but I mean,
I'm at that same level as the Krasenstein's, all right?
It's, um,
in fact,
I exceed it.
I exceed what they do in some areas.
like subscribers are,
I'm way ahead of them,
but,
The point I'm trying to make here is that, yeah, when you're making six, on an annualized basis, when you're in the six figure category, yeah, you're going to put a little bit of time into figuring out how to optimize what you're doing. And that's what we've done, obviously. All the people who are at that level have clearly learned how to optimize this.
Yeah.
You know, it's not, if, if, if you don't care about the money, that's fine.
I respect that.
I know that your main thing is the walk away thing, and I actually admire what you do with walk away.
Thank you.
Everyone should, everyone should give Brandon a follow if you, if you believe in that, which I do.
I'm a follower of Brandon's account.
But, yeah.
If that's your...
Yeah, I get it. You just want your engagement back.
You want the visibility of your account.
That's fine.
I would suggest in your situation specifically,
just be patient.
The tweet credit thing's going to go away.
Then I suspect all your problems are going to be fine.
So, I mean, Wall Street is given a number of good advice
in terms of what one can do to basically improve
on work the algorithm.
Because let's be clear, he's right.
Like,
We're on Twitter for a reason we want people to see our posts.
If it wasn't the case, we would be like not on Twitter and be writing in our DMs.
So basically that is the reason why we're on Twitter.
We want people to see our posts.
So if anything helps in that, and I don't think it's about like spending loads of time.
Like I write my post on the evening and then schedule them because...
again, there is certain algorithms
where you post for certain times,
you post for certain consistency,
that improves it as well.
So there is certain things that you can do to improve it.
My only concern is, like I said,
I like a lot of stuff what Elon does,
but then just this bit,
I'm not like someone who just has to defend him
no matter what,
and I'm not someone who has to attack him no matter what.
I just think it's important to have some level of transparency,
some level of consistency on this app.
And then therefore, it won't become an echo chamber.
It won't be ideologically acute...
or it won't be ideological in terms of a certain perspective.
And I think that's what will make Twitter awesome
as it was as it seemed like it was going to be before.
So I think that's the main argument.
But I appreciate everybody who has joined the space.
We appreciate everybody who's provided their voice.
We've had a wide, wide range of ideas and thoughts.
It's been really fun.
I've learned a lot as well.
Much appreciate.
Can you see last thoughts before we wrap up?
Well, hey, just I want to say, by a show of hands, and I'm going to look through, scroll through, raise your hand if you've subscribed to anyone on this app.
Yeah, it seems like a lot of people.
No, no, no, no.
But the reason I'm asking is if you really care about, Elon has flat out said people who are doing the subscriber piece of the game have an advantage in the system.
So if you're not subscribing to other people and, I mean, look, like I turned on my subscriptions and they're $3.
I actually regret that I charged so much.
I wish I had been like Greg and set it at $1.
Because, you know, it's, it's, um, Greg's down there.
I wish I had done what Greg's doing.
Uh, and just set it at $1.
Because then it's like a tip and people don't really even think about it.
And I think the numbers would have been far higher.
So, you know, think about that when you turn on subscriptions and you start filling it out, don't go for those crazy high numbers like $5 or $10 like some people are doing.
I mean, do a much lower number like Greg's doing, $1.
And you're going to have such a stronger experience and just my advice.
Yeah.
That's a good point, Waltry, because even Mario's got it at 1.
And he's got a significant number of subscribers.
So, yeah, definitely that does work.
It does become a lot more like that.
It becomes a lot more easier to subscribe to someone.
Sorry, Kalis, you're going to jump in before we wrap up?
Yeah, I just wanted to say very quickly,
I've really enjoyed this discussion as well.
And I've also learned a lot from Wall Street and some of the things that Theo and Ryan shared.
This thing, I just find it difficult to reconcile if they told people the blacklist.
that game it. Because if I give you an example, and let's say a thousand people as an example,
are being penalized at the moment, or shadow band or de-boasted, because they're using either
a terminology or reference that they shouldn't be using. They don't know what that is.
So by not making the blacklist visible, what is happening is that people are being punished
for a crime that they don't know that they're committing.
And so these thousand people, you're saying that they could potentially game it, but at least some of them won't, right?
Some of them will be good citizens with this social credit system that's being built on their X and not do it.
So I still think it should be made visible.
That was my parting thought.
I appreciate everybody coming on to the discussion.
We will be back tomorrow live for the presidential debate
between in the,
for the presidential debate for the GOP nomination minus former President Trump.
So tune in tomorrow.
We'll have a discussion about it.
We'll be watching it live and then listen to it live
and then we shall be discussing it.
So see you tomorrow.
Bye.
