It made me realize how much content these twitter blue checks are creating. It's crazy.
The Internet used to be a refuge from the corporate public sphere; now it's its home.
Internship ended up being a dud (they paid me for 40 hours a week but only had work for me to do about 5-10 hours a week). I read over 50 books that summer, mostly classics that I got free from Project Gutenberg. Definitely got my money's worth.
I hardly ever see an ad on the phone now. Astroturfing is a whole other question though.
Which is fine, if you treat it as entertainment, but people think they're following the news and instead they're watching a wrestling match.
I'm generally politically very left and I listen to a show which I won't name here but is also relatively left. At some point, I realized the income the hosts make puts them squarely in the same economic bracket as many of the people that they are often calling greedy or unprincipled. From that realization stemmed the next, that these people, even if they started with perfect intention and perfect action, necessarily must be subverted towards entertainers over informers by the design of the platforms they use to spread their message.
This post is entirely independent of the subject being discussed. I have no opinion on these particular podcasters.
After this experiment, I'm realizing it's more complicated than that. Twitter is a reverse-shit sandwich. Crap in the lowliest dredges (the bot level), crap at the top (the pundit level), and a few pleasant people talking about cakes, music, and urban planning in the middle.
I mean, I'm pretty critical of social hierarchies (for a long time I considered myself an anarchist but no longer). But particular kinds of social hierarchies are part of this society and while improving this society is one thing, imagining we can eliminate social hierarchies without changing other stuff is another and problematic thing in my opinion. A lot of the problematic evolution of this society over the last fifty years has involved the change from authorized, rules-setting authority to bullying-authority and that's produced some actual abuse but has moreover, reduced our ability to act against visible problems, a situation that's past the verge of crisis.
i felt the same: a lot of middle ground conversation, but nobody was calling out each other with quoted RTs.
It also overlaps to some extent with how you get to be a real celebrity, but social media makes the effect more extreme.
Twitter users are extremely unrepresentative of the US population.
>The analysis indicates that the 22% of American adults who use Twitter are representative of the broader population in certain ways, but not others. >Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users
so 2.2% of Americans make 80% of the tweets lol
2- select "Latest tweets" instead of "Top tweets" in the timeline config (the "starts" icon on the top right middle corner)
It will improve the quality of the timeline
no ads, always latest.
PG&E style automated trips when things reach a certain pitch when it comes from the blue-checks (at least the ones historically looking for reaction)
Where do you want to be when a major hurricane hits? New York or New Orleans? How about Puerto Rico? Having a voice matters.
If other citizens are making decisions for Twitter, some government rule about being a neutral carrier sounds less radical than a government rule about maintaining decorum.
Honestly, I don't even read Twitter or have an account, I'm just wary of calls to control conversations in order to seek harmony.
> It made me realize how much content these twitter blue checks are creating.
Ironically, content that includes yelling at the unwashed masses for making twitter toxic. Bastards.