Tag: meta

Housekeeping

It is three years since I first discovered that Twitter was hiding tweets with links to my blog.

I’m pretty sure the root cause is the “.party” domain I used (because when I migrated from Blogger it was really cheap and I thought it kind of made sense for something political, though really I’m explicitly not party-political). Twitter seems to treat links to these little-used top level domains as probable spam.

There was an interesting incident at around the same time: links to the World Health Organisation on its “.int” domain got the same treatment. This was early in the pandemic.

Anyway, I had a workaround which was to tweet the link, copy the “t.co” shortened form, and then delete the first tweet and tweet it again with the shortened form. I think that worked at first, but not after a while.

Then I used a free subdomain, pointed it here and wrote a little static web page that could pull the path out of the URL, and generate a link to the right one. That was clunky as hell and fiddly to use.

So I have finally given in, spent a few more quid on a boring .co.uk domain, so https://www.anomalyblog.co.uk/ is the official address of this blog now.

All the old anomalyuk.party addresses still work, and I hope will do for a long time, unless it gets pointlessly expensive to keep renewing it. Most of the links on old posts here don’t work; it’s a great shame how history disappears. I was very impressed, looking at one 2011 post, that links to Robin Hanson’s “overcomingbias” still work, although he has migrated to Substack since then.

Inspired by that, I’ve done some coding to fix up the redirection from blogger, so that even the old anomalyuk.blogspot.com links now work properly, as they did when I first migrated but which I had let rot since then.

To complete the housekeeping, I’ve switched themes: as far as I can see the default themes that come with wordpress are better for a simple plain text-centric blog than most alternatives, including the one I picked back in 2017. I’ve taken one of the old ones.

“To Do” list

Things I need to get around to blogging about. Comments welcome.

  • Better description of how the signalling arms race drives ideology forwards. Lots of stuff exists, spread around here, Jim, Spandrell and Moldbug. Needs pulling together. My recent posts have mostly assumed the process without making the case
  • Want to look up the Yes Minister episode where Humphrey is angling for a retirement position at Oxford. Lots of good stuff on the social milieu of civil service and academia. Also involves Islam, if I remember correctly. The “excellent road” between London and Oxford has a metaphorical significance for NRx
  • Something on the Permanent Government generally. Need a piece for the Neoreactionary Encyclopedia (still a private draft)
  • Dredge up the thing I wrote under another alias about how political parties shouldn’t let members elect leaders and repost it here. Felt at the time it was off-brand but it’s relevant
  • Maybe a “mini” based on my tweet about Naomi Wolf’s good choice of subjects to write about

Twitter account locked again

The @AnomalyUK twitter account has been locked again, for “suspicious behaviour”. As was the case last year, they only want to verify my mobile phone number (which they have), but for some unspecified technical reason they aren’t able to.

Again as before, the @jagifier account is a good place to look for AnomalyUK-related content. I might dig up the @anomalyuk Gab account again too.

Last time, after a couple of weeks of being “locked”, the account went to being “suspended”, and I was able to appeal against that successfully, so I’m fairly optimistic that will work. I also have support tickets relating to the technical issues, but they weren’t resolved last time

Also like last time, there is no obvious reason at all — not even a bad reason — for being locked. The last tweets were extremely dull replies to Sam Bowman about debating tactics. (and the locking happened within seconds of the last one). There were a couple of earlier tweets on the relationship of voting to the concept of republicanism, but, like the comparison of voting systems to bitcoin proof-of-work that I was tweeting about last time I got locked, these were very abstract and nothing to do with any particular election. Did the phrase “republican fascist” trigger something? (I tweeted: “The republican fascist believes in the right of the people to have a government that represents and serves them, but disdains the process of vote-counting. “)

Update: an email came through, rather delayed, that says “Your account appears to have exhibited automated behavior that violates the Twitter Rules”. I actually think the problem is that I type too fast, possibly combined with “yellow flags” being raised by the subjects that I tweet about.

Update: Fixed same day this time. They say it was a mistake.

Anomaly UK Banned from Twitter

My Twitter account just got locked. I can’t unlock it even with my phone number, it just says “Sorry, this carrier is currently not supported.” Normal UK mobile phone number that I’ve had for at least 10 years. There doesn’t seem to be any way to give it a different one, either.

I’ve no idea why I was locked — presumably if I could get past the phone number thing it might tell me, but I can’t begin to guess.

In the meantime, see my contact page to get in touch. The twitter account @jagifier might also be of interest

 

 

It seems my tweets are still visible (but shadow-banned and behind a warning), but I can’t log in. https://twitter.com/anomalyuk/with_replies

 

Update 21st November 2018: When I checked today my account had gone from locked to suspended. There was still no indication of why it was suspended. I filled in the appeal form and it got unsuspended within about 10 minutes.

My hypothesis is that this tweet thread triggered some “election interference” heuristic, and the technical problem with my cellphone number meant that the account lock was an absolute barrier.