Saturday, June 6, 2020

Rules of my @DemographicDoom Twitter Account


My DemographicDoom Twitter feed is a labor of love, supporting my DemographicDoom project and building a database of references in the core topics that interest me.  This feed consists mainly of a series of article links in the main topics of my project: demography, macroeconomics and the future of the family. The goal of this project is to build a database of information relating to the long-term demographic survival of humanity. The endpoint, as I see it, is to propose a new family structure that will allow the best of humanity to continue.

I have been data collector all of my life, and I hope you are impressed with the elegance and complexity of this system. Here are some random notes on this Twitter "database" and how it works. This page is not frequently updated, and some rules below may be out of date.
  1. Every article or reference is accompanied by my own unique hashtags, usually beginning "#dd_" The word after the underscore specifies the topic.
  2. To access all of the posts for this topic, you should click on "Latest" immediately after you click on the hashtag itself. This should pull up ALL posts with that hashtag. (If you view only "Top" posts, then you may not see all posts, and they are not in sequential order.)
  3. Although no one can "own" hashtags on Twitter, I am the only person consistently using those beginning with "#dd_", so nearly all of the posts you see will be from the DemographicDoom account (or sometimes my personal account BadDalaiLama). There may, however, be "noise" from other accounts, where people have used the same hashtags for different purposes. For the most part, these tend to be old tweets (prior to 2019) so they will only appear at the end of the "Latest" list.
  4. Occasionally, these hashtags may be shared with my personal Twitter account BadDalaiLama. (I will use my personal account for references that can't be linked to this project.) DemographicDoom hashtags usually begin with "#dd_" while BadDalalLama hashtags usually start with "#gpc_".
  5. Twitter has been pretty faithful in fully indexing every tweet I produce. If you click on a "#dd_" and then on "Latest", you will probably get a complete listing of everything I have produced. 
  6. However, there can be glitches, including temporary "Shadow Bans" of this account by Twitter. A Shadow Ban is when Twitter temporarily fails to recognize hashtags on a certain account, making old tweets difficult to access. When this happens, the hashtags work for me within my own account, but they don't work for you when logged onto your own account. Shadow bans have no clear explanation, and they are usually lifted within 24 hours. In my experience, they tend to happen when I have generated a relatively large number of posts in a short period of time. If you click on a #dd_ hashtag and get nothing—or get only posts from BDLNotes—then a Shadow Ban is probably in effect. You can still browse my feed, but hashtags may not yield useful results for the next 24 hours. When I become aware of Shadow Bans, I try to note them under #ddoom_shadowban.
  7. When I first started using hashtags in this account in April 2019, all my hashtags began with "#ddoom_". This was unnecessarily long and limited the number of hashtags I could include in one tweet, so I have migrated to "#dd_" hashtags instead. Old "#ddoom_" hashtags still work.
  8. My utility Twitter account BDLnotes provides various tools for hashtag maintenance. Do Not Follow This Account, or you will be overwhelmed by useless posts. BDLnotes tweets are intended to be accessed only by hashtag. Entries in this account will help you find hashtags in the main DemographicDoom account. For example if you click on a "#dd_" hashtag, and entry in BDLnotes should tell you about "#ddoom_" hashtags.
  9. I link #dd_ and #ddoom_hashtags together in Tweets with the hashtag #dd_HashtagSwap.
  10. Only a few of my original "#ddoom_" hashtags are retained for continuity, including #ddoom_mypodcast, #ddoom_hashtag and #ddoom_shadowban. Others have been migrated to "#dd_" or eventually will be.
  11. In my latest tweets, I try to categorize them broadly into 4 general areas, each with a very short hashtag.
    • #dd_d = Demographic tweets, concerning human populations and family issues
    • #dd_e = Economic tweets, chiefly concern with out current economic collapse
    • #dd_cvs = Coronavirus tweets, concerning the Covid-19 epidemic starting Jan. 2020
    • #dd_m = Miscellaneous tweets that don't fit into the 3 categories above.
  12. Countries are now indexed by their 2-letter internet code. For example: #dd_ca for Canada and #dd_uk for Britain. I use the same #dd_XX codes for both @DemographicDoom and @BadDalaiLama, and they can be used for any kind of reference to that country.
  13. When I want to further break down a topic just for that country, I may add a keyword to the code. For example, #dd_ukDebt would refer to debt just in the UK. (I rarely have to make these kind of finer distinction. Usually just #dd_uk is enough.)
  14. I also have broader regional tags, assuming the tweet refers to the entire region not just a specific country.
    • #dd_eu for Europe (including both EU members and non-EU members).
    • #dd_eeu for Eastern Europe (former Communist states)
    • #dd_asia
    • #dd_africa
    • #dd_latam for Latin America.
  15. If a tweet has no country or region tag, #dd_us can usually be assumed, as the majority of my tweets tend to refer to the USA>
  16. There are only a few two-letter codes that do not refer to countries. These include:
    • #dd_QE for "Quantitative Easing", or money printing by the Federal Reserve and other central banks.
    • #dd_rt to indicate a retweet.
  17. Hashtags of three or more characters (after #dd_) are so numerous and actively evolving that no comprehensive list is possible. Instead, you have to access them from existing tweets. 
  18. US states are indexed by #dd_usXX tags, where XX is the 2-letter state postal code. e.g. #dd_usca for California.
  19. Podcast episodes are accessed on Twitter through hashtags of the form "#ddPC99" where "99" is the podcast number.
  20. My own live-action videos from before the podcast are indexed through hashtags for the form "#ddVIDxxx" where "xxx" is a code of several letters for that video, perhaps reflecting the initials of the video title.
  21. My own YouTube playlists are indexed through hashtags of the form "#ddPLxxxx" where "xxxx" is some sort of Keyword, like #ddPLfam for all my podcasts and videos on family structure. [Under review]
  22. I like Emoji, and I try to use them whenever possible to clue users in to the topic of the tweet. They can be a lot of work, however, and I tend to drop them in follow-on tweets and BDLnotes tweets. My reference for Emoji is Emojipedia.
  23. "📣GC:" indicates my own opinions. See all of these tweets via this search.
  24. You can do a word search for my tweets using the Twitter search box, with "@demographicdoom" as the first search term. For example, here is a search for all my references to "Federal Reserve" (but #dd_fed works better).

The rules above are only the "tip of the iceberg" of all the rules I apply to this account. I rarely write these rules down but just implement them. It's like building a new language from scratch.