The Dogs of X
I'm up to 150,000 followers on Twitter.
I’m up to 150,000 followers on Twitter/X at Steve_Sailer.
I was around 40,000 followers in April 2022, after 11.5 years on the platform, when Elon Musk announced his bid. Since then, my total has grown fairly steadily.
I’ve never had a hugely viral post to drive this growth, however. I believe this might be close to my all time most popular post with 10,000 likes:
This one was awfully ephemeral: it was a parody of the following post complaining about a dinner party attended by Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox of Friends, plus a whole bunch of other good-looking Gen Z people who look vaguely famous and who seem more ecstatic to be at a party with Rachel and Monica than Rachel and Monica are to be at a party with them.
I generally don’t unload like this on poasters I’ve never heard of. But the video of owners trying to get their 488 excited golden retrievers to pose momentarily for a photo at the castle in Scotland where the breed originated is wonderful:
"I’m up to 150,000 followers on Twitter/X at Steve_Sailer. // I was around 40,000 followers in April 2022, after 11.5 years on the platform, when Elon Musk announced his bid."
It was only sometime in winter 2016-17 that you started posting (or "tweeting" as they said in olden times) much at all on the platform currently known as "X". Almost all the activity from the @Steve_Sailer account before some point in early 2017 (when a slow ramp-up in activity begins) was of the auto-repost sort: links to blog-posts or columns.
Twitter/X highly rewards on-platform engagement. It has always punished (by lower visibility) those who seek to use it for posting external links. This has become much more true than ever. Posting a link to X triggers a mechanism to slash your view-counts by a large degree.
It isn't until around summer 2017 that on-platform interaction for the @Steve_Sailer account becomes truly regular in the way the Twitter-algorithm god demands. Starting around that time (definitely by mid-2017 in a full-on way), as later revealed in The Twitter Files and similar exposes of what Google and others were up to, these "platforms" had, along with the FBI and ADL and SPLC, created extensive domestic-enemies lists of problem-thinkers, dissidents, and racists, and archetype-profiles for others who the system detected interacting with major problem-people.
They ran black-lists and brown-lists, the latter for use the occasional waves of bans. The bans were sometimes random, without explanation. They wanted dissidents to soak in time that would all be lost (permanently deleted) when the random ban eventually came. The post-mid-2017 ramped-up system -- of always-on systematized reach-reduction for people on the lists -- was in place until the Elon Musk purchase. A successor version remains in place, except that @Steve_Sailer is obviously no longer on the most-restrictive lists.
Really the Twitter suppression of @Steve_Sailer is primarily a story of something like mid-2017 to mid-2022.
Zuck and Trump best buds; Sailer-mania hits publishing world; Golden Retriever ownership becomes acceptable again (vs. rescuing a pit bull and having it bite your neighbor); what’s the world coming to?