We don’t need a new Twitter
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"Thousands of scientists are cutting back from Twitter"
Essentially, a survey published in Nature about twitter usage among scientists dropping, in part, because of the phenomena mentioned in this New Yorker article.
Eg:
"Žiga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, mentioned in the survey that he had started seeing a lot of “strange” political far-right accounts espousing science denialism and racism in his feed. He has to block them constantly. “Twitter has always been not so nice let’s say, but it is a mess right now,” he said."
If you lurk on the firehose you get it all. Including all the parts you may disagree with or find despicable or... Perhaps also something nice?
I really don't get this point... What do you expect exactly on a large platform?
I mean that wasn't the case historically.
Like if your favorite spot in town was a roller rink and it got bought out by a movie theatre. You'll lamente your loss but sure nothing illegal happened there but obviously you might rethink spending your time at the specific location.
1+1=2.
Discovery best done via the curated list of accounts I follow.
Social media is a fundamentally flawed model that you have can have human communication on a global scale with a “The Algorithm” used to cleanly order high quality capital-C “Content” into numeric categories that can be parceled out to drive capital-E “Engagement”.
If you told people about this 30 years ago, they would have laughed at you, and not because of some garbage about people expecting horses instead of cars (Christ how I’ve come to hate this quote, it needs to die a painful death) but because it is a fundamentally stupid idea that only an autist that doesn’t actually communicate with people could have come up with. This is not how people communicate, this is how computers operate, and we’ve been shoving humans pegs into computer-sized boxes using addiction to dopamine hits to keep them firmly wedged in there, and now we’re wondering why everything’s going to shit as a result.
The old ways were best. An ecosystem of small forum communities where the only ordering is time (the ordering none of us can escape) and the subject of the conversation, and the community itself evolves its rules organically through migration, not what a committee of managers in Silicon Valley thinks its CoC’s should look like this month.
Your comment is typical social media, with language that provokes extreme emotion ("period", "hate", "stupid", "going to shit").
You fit right in with what you feel outraged about.
I am interested in potential future RSS capabilities. Would you mind a chat about that? If so, please drop me an email, see profile.
> I don’t understand the desire to surround yourself with clones of yourself.
Every society ever follows the formula of being with people who share similar characteristics one way or another. Not that crazy.
Its also why HN stays afloat, even though the architecture ensures the amount of content consumed is a small insignificant fraction of the content produced.
Ideally we track content consumed/content produced gives us a ratio of the information waste an architecture is producing. And all these architectures are producing a whole lot of waste.
Oh that's a great quote. I'm off to build a 1-900 service that will just say 'yes' and 'wow' and 'sure, but what about you' whenever the speaker pauses long enough.
Threads is related to and interoperates with Mastodon; so Mastodon is relevant to an article in which Threads is the main topic.
Threads has far more integration with Instagram than with Mastodon, despite repeated promises to the contrary. If you want Mastodon, you should just do that and not Threads.
There are a lot fewer insane takes being posted by accounts that may or may not be bots, but I'm not really missing that as they just derailed the conversation.
I get the impression that more 'normal' people are now using the platform; the quality and ... coherence ... of replies has gone way up.
Also happy to see a lot less engagement from 'people' that post insane takes then meme out and block when questioned.
I’m glad that scientists such as Dr Robert Malone have been unbanned. I’m not an expert in his field so I cannot tell if he is a crazed paranoid lunatic, or if he is the most important whistleblower of the 21st century.
Either way, I want to hear him out and see his arguments judged by the wisdom of the crowds. While science converges on the truth, it SHOULD be messy and there should be disagreement with consensus views occasionally. When disagreement is silently removed, we’re not doing science anymore.
What has changed that has made the platform worse? It feels subjectively better in my experience.
> designed to steal market share from Twitter, which continues to struggle under the leadership of Elon Musk
> interested in a less angry place for conversations.”
> interested in having a platform that is sanely run.”
Here, I'll name three that have gotten noticeably worse:
1. Under any viral tweet I have to scroll through the sea of Twitter Blue subscribers with >1000 followers to reach some sane reply (as in not a one word reply, @reply_to_this_ai_bot, @save_to_this_random_tool, a crylaugh emoji).
2. Monetization depends on impressions, incentivizing ragebait that other people will "dunk on". Correcting someone gives money to the person you're correcting, which is insane to say the least.
3. API is dead, but bots are literally everywhere. And they're the stupidest kind of bots on top of that. "Contact @soandso on Insta and he'll get your account back", there's a shitcoin trending literally every day, and so on.
That's been part of why I've been so surprised by the reactions of people to the changes. Most of the changes have at worst had no impact on my experience.
My opinion on them has largely been "at least they're trying something different", barring some decisions which seemed boneheaded for a platform that relies so heavily on linked traffic (eg when they outright turned off/broke tweet embedding and hiding all replies behind a login).
Some changes, like paid verification, have been a net positive in my opinion. No more of twitter picking favorites, particularly since the checkmark didn't mean much anyway.
This was especially meaningful for non-English speaking Twitter, as even Japanese Twitter, despite being their second biggest audience, often came off as being treated as a second class community when it came to things like verification.
There's a big big narrative being pushed by people who, for one reason or another, really can't stand Elon.
A lot of them are absurdly far left.
I hope we can see the expansion of this legislation soon to cover the modern ways in which people communicate and the modern town square.
Twitter, being the de facto modern public square, should soon be covered by this type of legislation.
[0]https://fr.crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethi...
This has happened to Twitter already in 2013 (the "APIpocalypse", which notably, what started Mastodon), why did they keep using it for 9 years after that ?
I guess when it comes down to it I do believe that the platform should be open to all, but there may well be specific times (such as during active and extensive rioting) that strategic delays and slowdowns may need to be inserted to prevent bad actors from using it as a coordinating tool.
I find this regretful, but necessary.
Condemn me. It is of no importance. History will absolve me.
The ban wasn't regretful nor necessary, and why should I condemn anyone? I understand why Elon don't like anti-corporate discourse and why it bans it from his platform. I have trouble understanding that he apparently rescinded a ban of someone who posted CP, but at least he's coherent.
I understand that libertarian logic uses gray areas as a means to an end of furthering their ideology, but that is not an issue for me.
Governments, as a condition of granting the privileges asscoiated with the corporate form, could specifically apply limits to its use (and should do so much more than they do, generally), but to the extent they haven't, people who control corporations don’t lose rights merely because they are acting through them.
Corporations don't have rights, because corporations don't actually exist. Corporations are treated as having rights, because they are simply vehicles for actions by natural persons, who have rights.
It’s how they signal tribal affiliation.