If somebody wants to tell the world their private life, good for them, but without me.
Turns out, I care a lot more about the former than the latter.
You could relatively easily flip the script and use the platforms in the opposite way. (although Twitter's narrow reach makes it harder to follow IRL "friends" because they're not so likely to be on the platform or use it regularly).
And by better I mean, less divisive, and less mindless scrolling of memes/low effort content.
Thinking about it from the business's perspective, it probably ultimately also lowers their user engagement metrics. Users get a higher quality experience using the site, but also spend less time on the site. It sorta reminds me of the freemium/grinding experience in games today. It makes for a worse game experience, but a better company bottom line.
You can subscribe to high quality substacks and publications
It takes effort on behalf of the user to make their
experience on the site "better"
I would say that for me, Twitter falls approximately halfway between:
1. Facebook: which is only barely tolerable, after much effort, and still seems to optimize for negative emotions, spam, etc
and
2. Reddit: with minimal effort (just need to subscribe to subreddits) it is an entirely personalized experience of exactly what I want to see
The reason it takes effort on behalf of the user is because there's no such thing as a perfect read-your-mind content recommendation system that doesn't require any inputs from you, as much as people like to pretend machine learning is magic. Twitter/Reddit et al are a tool for building a content stream that fits you perfectly: their recommendations aren't intended to be blindly and indiscriminately consumed, but to narrow your search space to make the construction of this stream possible in the first place.
This is a simple extension of the trend of broadening distribution we've seen, from having three broadcast channels (all reporting the same news with the same slant and the same blind spots), through cable television, all the way up to today's wide-open, bottom-up distribution system. The root of this type of complaint about social media is that they treat their users with too much respect, trusting them to have the emotional continence and intellectual maturity to build a custom content stream that fits them instead of being told precisely what to believe and what to care about by Walter Cronkite.
- Uncensored/unmoderated
- Encompasses all viewpoints
- Civil
I don't see anything that normally hits the front page, everything I do see is somewhat relevant to me, and it basically deletes all politics from what is presented.
By far the best reddit experience possible, I think.
The whole point here is to get rid of the all of the default subreddits, since they become garbage once they become default no matter what, and then find things that you're actually interested in that aren't default and thus not full of 'normies' who ruin most of reddit.
There was a time before reddit got huuuuge that most of it was pretty ok, but that time was years and years ago. Now there are just niche subreddits of quality and an ocean of garbage.
I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit is heavily influenced by bot activity. If you were a foreign influence who wanted to convey a certain narrative, then reddit would be the de-facto place for that.
1. Upvote and downvote system, where downvoted squelch bad takes, is perfect for narrative forming. 2. The demographic for reddit are young minds who most likely have a position on a certain topic because they’ve been told to from a place like reddit.
It’s like programming using only global variables.
This is a systemic risk of decentralization in all of its forms, too, really. At its most extreme, a world comprised of arbitrarily many self-governed communities is a dystopia.
I think Twitter has forgotten about them, since they don't display ads.
Being able to block entire instances is a really, really nice power.