How is Twitter rapidly decaying? I am a daily, but very light user so I may not be observing the trends as well as you.
Musk keeps picking fights with vendors; the latest feud with Google means they may soon lose significant trust and safety tooling. Twitter keeps losing staff, Ella Irwin being the latest, and word is that they're running skeleton crews for core functionality, with a lot of the current staff being people who are trapped in the jobs by visas and the like. That suggests we'll be seeing more messes like the failure of DeSantis's campaign launch.
And that's all off the top of my head. If you want to read more, I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it; he's been covering it pretty well.
Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.
Twitters users, the advertisers, have noticed. Thus the revenue decrease. Twitter's product, sets of eyeballs, are still around (despite being compositionally a different population, mostly).
It's not illegal either.
And then someone gave a valid response.
And then you responded to this response by saying "Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site."
This response is a non sequitur.
Nobody in this thread said that twitter is forced to do anything. Instead, the original claim is that this was an improvement.
And yes, twitter is allowed to make this change where they censor less things.
The claim I'm responding to was in the a part you failed to quote, "censorship". Censorship is generally meant as suppression of content, not behavior. In the case described, Twitter was cracking down on harassment, not specific content.
As a clear example, imagine I call you up at all hours of the day and night, reciting the Bill of Rights every time you answer. When you stop answering, I show up out front of your house with a bullhorn and start reading the Federalist Papers at maximum volume. When you call the police and they haul me off, is that censorship? In typical usage, no, because the problem is not my ideas expressed.
The point being that some people think that all legal speech, or legal "insert whatever word you want to describe what twitter now allows" should be allowed on the platform.
So talking about "Twitter as a private entity" is not really a valid response, and actually works against you.
It is not a valid response because twitter the private entity is now choosing to allow this stuff, whatever you want to call it.
> When you call the police
In the context of these types of conversations, people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform, not illegal behavior.
People saying that are generally people who have not tried to run a for-profit social media site. Or even thought about it much, really.
To have a functioning social media platform these days, you need a lot of users and a lot of advertisers. This means you need the site to feel reasonably safe and welcoming to all concerned. However, many of those people and brands do not want to spend time around many of the things that are in a typical T&S policy. Which is why all major platforms converged on pretty similar policies, and why the anything-goes platforms tended to stay niche and look like incel Klan rallies.
It's not like Jack Dorsey really cared about anybody but Jack Dorsey. Ceteris paribus, he would have been happy to stick with Twitter's original "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos, if only because it saved a lot on moderation costs. But he recognized that his platform could either have the racist shitgibbons or the people that said shitgibbons got their kicks from attacking, by which I mean the great bulk of humanity.
There's also the moral and practical vacuity of treating "whatever the legislature voted on" as the correct standard for anything except criminal enforcement, but let that pass for now.
Your understanding of the law is highly dubious.
After: reporting on e.g. Russia invasion of Ukraine gets you shadowbanned, troll farm accounts get boosted once they pay for Blue.
Definite improvement, if you run a state sponsored propaganda troll farm.
Earlier I used to see irrelevant ads. Now I see suspicious ones, like one promising an AI girlfriend and another one promoting some dubious bitcoin token and random people promoting themselves.
That explains why the rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist. He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor problem he can find in tech companies.
But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitter. And I think Newton's doing a much better job of reporting on Twitter than most places.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete...
Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.
There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.
> It was later fixed for ‘cats’, but it took a while.
I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.
I picture my mother using Twitter, searching for cat videos.
She can search YouTube for cats and not get that stuff.
But I frequently think of my kids even for situations they don't directly risk. Call it an empathy gauge.
We also didn't have the massive amount of statistical evidence in mental health that came to light just recently about teenage social media use, especially in girls. Several times these studies have made it to the top of HN.
https://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias...
Overall this comment is weird to me. Does this show Elon was wrong and the org should continue being massively overstaffed and burning money like before?
Not that it's any better presenting such videos to 13 year olds. Or adults, for that matter.
I don't recall it being truly necessary before, though there were annoying banners sometimes.
But right now "age restricted" tweets require a login, and the thing that makes tweets age restricted is the presence of images plus a very buggy per-account setting.
As a business, it's obviously fucked. Revenues are down, regulators are circling and it's difficult to see them recovering when Musk has made a habit of publicly pillorying his customers.
Granted, it was the last boom's RJR-Nabisco/Harrah's Entertainment top-tick LBO, so it started the race ass first. But it's difficult to see Twitter avoiding restructuring, a necessarily distracting and value-debilitating process. (On even a generous revenue multiple, its equity value is zero.)
Musk's only face-saving exit is to fold when a foreign regulator fines him.
Anecdotally, due to Musk's support of extreme-right views (for example re-inviting Trump [2], supporting DeSantis [3], or protecting bullying [4]), many people have left in protest and so these views are over-represented on the site.
The word "decay" seems appropriate.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/elon-musk-twit... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/19/business/twitter-musk-trump-r... [3] https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitte...