The Sandbox Test Post

The reason for yesterday’s exercise was multi-fold. First, I did need to see how many readers we had. We now have an answer, about 1200 or so who will reply if asked, maybe.

The reality is we had 1201 responses yesterday. I am only going to deal with yesterday so I can cleanly isolate the stats. However WordPress only shows 984 visits to the Sandbox page yesterday, when we had 1201 comments posted from it.

Google analytics, which tags every time a snippet of code on the page is loaded by a user, only shows the page being loaded 829 times.

That might mean somebody may have visited the page and posted 3 digit numbers repeatedly to disrupt the test, and make it look like we have more traffic than we do. It would be strange for a troll to do, as it only enhances this site’s appeal to advertisers to increase or concrete follower count. And if somebody loaded the page once and posted numbers 220 or 370 times, they could have done it much smarter and simply refreshed the page so views would match comments. And maybe somebody else did that. However, my main log files at the host show that page being requested 2846 times.

On top of that, WordPress shows 2175 unique visitors hit the site that day, while Google says we had 1816 unique visitors. So even as only 1201 people maybe posted comments, there may have been many more lurkers who did not.

You can see how impossible it is for us to discern what is going on.

My interest was partly because I had been looking into advertising and I had to create a Google Analytics account, and I began to wonder about discrepancies between the log files, WordPress stats, and Google analytics. I find it interesting Google, which is what you need to present to advertisers to show you have enough traffic to be worth giving an account to, appears to eliminate at least 150 views which wordpress records. And WordPress too for that matter, registers a lot less than the logs, and even than what I think were honest responses by honest readers.

I tend to suspect Google and WordPress are the fake stats. Way back, when Vox Day first sent me traffic, it would show up in the WordPress stats as a torrent. Six or seven years ago it would be an immediate rush between two and four thousand hits, and it would include a referring link stat which would show all of the increase as coming from his site. Then one day he linked, and all I saw was a small bump a tenth to a twentieth the size of normal, and the referrer section only showed a couple of the links as coming from his site. My logs still showed the increase when I looked, but I only noticed it and looked when I went to his site and saw he linked to me and put two and two together. Since then his spikes are a fraction of what they were on wordpress stats originally, albeit that is still massive numbers. I assume WordPress is rigging his traffic spikes downward for some reason. (One other interesting point – Around the time Vox could dump 2-4K hits on me and I saw them in stats, I got a link once at National Review, in an article from Jonah Goldberg no less poking fun at this site as nutty, and despite NR supposedly having millions of monthly pageivews, I got about 120 incoming visits, IIRC.)

The second reason I was curious was that tweet about the bots on Twitter. That idea, of being completely isolated without knowing it is haunting. And yet it is happening to some degree. I’ve been here ten years now, with the generous help of others, from Vox Day, to Stephan Molyneux, Bill Whittle, Heartiste, Krauser, and too many more to list. According to the email list for the free release, I have given away almost 10,000 Evopsychs.  And yet we averaged a gain of about about 12 followers per year, and now have only 1200 total, if we can believe the experiment.

And it is not for lack of effort, or interesting material. Nobody is writing about a lot of this stuff, and it is critical to anybody who wants to function in the world. Among conservatives online, this is the zeitgeist. Q, Trump, the Cabal, the takeover of our government is all smoking hot.

Traffic increases are a log function, and growth is faster now if I can believe the stats (and maybe I cannot, because I would not be surprised to find I had 1200 readers five years ago when I had half the pageviews), but still, 1200 is a drop in the bucket compared to twitter, where people routinely gather tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of followers. Or do they?

Here is what has always bothered me about the math on Twitter. Take Jack Posobiec. He had 130 tweets yesterday. Among them were marveling at how fast his kid grew up, pimping MyPillow Dog Beds, a Gif of Steve Carell in The Office dancing, a pic of Bush, Clinton and Obama asking how it makes you feel, and a bunch of mini videos, about 40 seconds each, that make Oz look bad. My point is, 130 tweets in 13 hours means your phone is going off every six minutes, often for info like his kid is growing up fast, or there is a gif of Steve Carrell dancing like an idiot out there. If it takes an average of 15 seconds to look at each tweet, which it may when you factor in removing the phone and unlocking the screen, and watching the videos, then at 130 tweets, you have invested more than a half hour of each day just on Posobiec if you follow him and read all his posts. Do you really think there are almost 2 million people spending a half hour each day on him? Especially when you factor in all the other accounts like him? Because nobody can just be following him. Is anyone following even ten people like that, spending five+ hours a day on twitter? Official twitter stats say the average twitter has 707 followers, but only uses twitter for 6 minute’s per day. At best, statistically, nobody is reading the vast majority of what they are being sent. If average use is six minutes per day, it is highly likely they are all using the site as a digital graffiti wall that nobody looks at. Twitter may never have been about telling people a narrative, so much as getting them to speak into a black hole so nobody will ever hear anyone of the people on it say what their perception of the narrative is.

I would like to someday see a mathematical analysis comparing the total number of followers times 525K minutes/year (their total life per year, including sleeping time), compared to the total number of tweets, multiplied by how many followers are supposedly getting them, times the average time it takes to read those tweets. My guess is you will find all the people on twitter have X minutes of life in a year, and all the tweets will amount to a time-consumption of 100,000X minutes of life, maybe 1,000,000X or more. The math will not work, even in the slightest. The few real people who are not bots will be tweeting their opinions, and not reading others, and because of that, almost all of their tweets will have to be going into the void, save for a few icons like Trump who people are genuinely fascinated by. The time will just not be there for people to read the tweets, if the average person spends six minutes there, which is probably just enough time to create one or two tweets and bail. Which will also mean any ads will be going into the void as well.

I don’t think there is any doubt twitter is an operation designed to take people who wanted to say something, and suck them in like a black hole, so it can send all of their thoughts through the event horizon, and into oblivion, never to be seen by any living being. Its entire purpose was to isolate everyone by getting them to talk into the event horizon, rather than listen to each other. Add in bots, making the dialog even less interesting or productive, to drive people even further away from listening, and nobody is listening to anything said on that site, even as everyone with anything to say goes there to speak their piece to its practically deaf audience.

Everything online is going to be found to be structured like that, to keep people apart, prevent them from connecting, and impede the spontaneous flow of information. Vox Day runs operations which now not only meet in performance, but exceed Wikipedia, Marvel and DC Comics, Simon and Schuster, Instapundit, Twitter, and CNN’s streaming service. Could Cabal just leave him, to grow on his own naturally, in equal competition with all those inferior services? I think there has to be something else, probably as mind blowing as all of twitter being a fake psyop to isolate people and prevent them from communicating. Some way they are guiding traffic, or selectively displaying links, or impeding connections. They may even have an AI which serves distorted version of pages to specific people so they see something other than what you post, or which serves them the wrong pages to prevent them from thinking a site is relevant to them.

Our government is as corrupt and evil now as any in history. It’s intelligence services are just as intrusive and controlling as any of the past. The idea the Cabal running the propaganda machines we see, is running the internet even vaguely like we are told it runs, to allow regular people to freely meet, and exchange the flow of information between them, is as laughable as thinking the elites behind Cabal would allow us to freely elect leaders who will serve our interests in honest elections. The internet cannot possibly be even remotely uncontrolled, and IMO there is no limit to how astonishing the systems of control will prove to be when exposed.

I have done searches on google for a specific phrase I used here, to locate a specific page, and Google has served me several pages from this site that do not have that phrase, and that cover entirely different subjects. Basically Google hid the page I wrote which definitely used that phrase, and delivered unrelated pages purposely. Any searcher would leave my site frustrated, and continue their search for their topic, rather than satiate their curiosity and then go on to skim this site.

Coming back around, it made no sense to me Musk would buy twitter. I have told you, ads do not generate value on regular websites, and there is not big money in this game of free things. That will apply even more if Twitter is one big app designed to suck in and disappear information, and prevent people from taking it in. I assumed maybe Musk really was a white hat, and all of that money was being thrown away to create something for good. But he is using other people’s money as well. To buy something worthless, which probably cannot do good because it is overwhelmingly just a bunch of narcissists screaming at each other, and what little is listened to by non-narcissists is bot posts pushing the Cabal’s bullshit narrative.

Now I am wondering if the whole purpose of the buyout was simply to expose that all of twitter is fake, all of the followers are fake, all of the interaction is fake, and it was just one more psyop in a world made up entirely of psyops. I do not see how he lets his purchase go through. Because if nobody is reading anything, bots are the least of his problems. If nobody is reading anything, nobody will see ads. And sooner or later nobody will buy his service just to scream into his little digital void, if nobody else is listening. Shorting twitter might actually be the best move out there right now.

My final point is, we need to better understand this system around us. Increasingly I think their entire strategy to keep us weak is to make all of us isolated cargo cultists, by never letting us see how things really work. By luring us in to use their systems which are supposed to help us, but which really are all designed to serve as chokepoints giving them hidden control.

I certainly fell for it creating this site, even writing Evopsych. I thought people were buying books by the millions and visiting websites fifteen years ago. When r/K hit me, I figured if people bought books and that was how ideas spread, then surely r/K could use that. Matt Drudge had millions of readers, so surely r/K could promote itself some fraction of that the same way. Interesting things went viral online all the time. Surely if a website had that power, and r/K was so interesting, I could send it viral here in a couple of years and be done with this and move on. Ten years later, probably 100K likes on facebook and Google before getting booted, 10,000+ free books given away, 10,509,580 views, 86,375 comments, and only 1200 people are here on a daily basis and willing to announce themselves if asked. Clearly we need a new system of drawing in readers here, because the way they sold the system is not how it works.

And I think it works that way elsewhere. Start a restaurant, better than the others, and watch people not show up each night as it goes under, even though you create your facebook page and opened a twitter account, and everything else was better than every other restaurant around. Become a landscaper, and find out how tough it is to land those first customers, and end up having to abandon it because you had the Post Office deliver flyers for your business, but maybe they never arrived. Buy a machine shop, and bid on contracts, and strangely never win any. I think all over people see businesses which took off, and try to replicate it and fail, never knowing that all the others had a secret conspiracy giving them a boost for the first few years until they could get self-sustaining. Dating services, climbing the ladder at the corporation, passing the bar, getting into one college or another, it may very well all be controlled. And if it is, we are all Cargo-Cultists, just like the natives on the islands who saw our military create airfields in WWII and begin receiving supplies, so they created their own airfields, expecting cargo planes filled with supplies to come flying in just because there was an airfield there. But they never did. We think we get good grades and work hard, and everything will work honestly. It might not.

My point is not to give up. But we have to get a grasp on how this system works, and figure out what really works and what does not for those of us not in Cabal. What businesses will allow us to control whether we succeed or not, how to promote among our kind, how to go around, above, and below their systems of control, how to actually succeed. Maybe we need to all learn construction and how to build houses, and hand deliver the ads for them. Maybe we need to develop another means of connecting with each other. Maybe any business we form needs to be directly between us and the consumer, and we need a consumer who we can reach directly in a specific way, to eliminate all these chokepoints where Cabal has set up mechanisms of control, be it of the flow of information, or the distribution of products.

And right now I think the entire internet is just one big chokepoint they control. We may find we are actually better buying billboards, or hand delivering pamphlets. And there are a lot more chokepoints set up in society. We need to find them and identify how to avoid getting choked off by them, and how to bypass them.

Next up I think we are going to have to look at how readers came here. Where were they originally, how did they begin to open themselves to the idea they needed to know more, and what keeps them coming back. I need to think more about this for now, but at some point we will go deeper.

I think this will prove an important field for those on here looking to advance projects like this site. Maybe as important for users as everything else on here. Because it doesn’t work the way we are told.

We need to figure this out and fully understand it, before we can actually move forward.

UPDATE – I wanted to expound on this a little more. Suppose as Elon Musk now speculates, up to 90% of twitter’s daily users are bots. And suppose he further shows nobody on it is reading tweets or looking at ads, so advertising is now not a way to monetize it. And since nobody is reading tweets, and nobody will listen to your tweets, nobody will pay for the service of being allowed to tweet.

If that happens, Elon Musk will have just turned Twitter into a multi-billion dollar money hole, with no way to monetize. It will be worthless as a stock overnight, and the shareholder lawsuits will be epic, looking for any deep pockets to completely bankrupt, to pay for the fraud which will have stolen all the investor’s money.

Now imagine if anyone can show any linkage between the structure and operation of Twitter, and the CIA, and they can show in court the CIA is in any way responsible for the sudden worthlessness of Twitter stock – by violating its mandate and operating domestically. In addition to the scandal of CIA being involved, what would the impact be of that, on the CIA’s yearly operating budget?