I never understood why journalists loved Twitter so much, as it turns out they were writing for each other the whole time and the general public didn't really care.
That said, my experience is in local municipal stuff and a lot of this is no longer true because of musk shit.
You basically said it is to feel important (your branding, whatever) amongst your peers.
The general public doesn't care, you do though (what the person you're replying to said, and basically what you just reiterated). As a member of the general public that doesn't use twitter (I use nitter to view twitter, and I won't call it X), I feel that it is a massive echo chamber amplified by bots and fake engagement numbers.
You're twisting every aspect of my post to the point of satire. I never said anything about wanting to "feel important" amongst peers and your interpretation is.. strained, at best. I'm literally just talking about career growth here.
Maybe take a deep breath and a break.
There was a period between 2010-2020 when Twitter was truly the main convergence of entertainment, media, political and financial commentators. It was the place to be seen.
It doesn't seem to really exist anymore. These different verticals have been scattered all throughout the internet. It is an increasingly small number of people who simply hang around there for the little dopamine hit they get when they see the notification.
Most political and corporate communications strategies have diversified away from Twitter because it is a sinking ship. This started before Elon took the helm, but he has certainly accelerated its demise. Increasingly, it is a reputational risk to even be on the platform anymore.
Ad Revenue is down for sure.
The stock certainly has performed far worse before the acquisition - especially relative to others.
If it's like a liked-in account for developers, it explains very clearly why journalists use it so much. But this is not the use people claim to get from the platform. On that account, linked-in is way more honest.
Side note: it's a very strange thing to read a comment like this from someone who puts their multiple websites in their profile not unlike a resume.
Still, we use github to talk to each other. Not to the public. When news companies talk about posting things on twitter, they always talk about reaching the public, and when journalists quote it, they use it as if it came from the general public.
There's nothing wrong with journalists talking with each other. What's unsettling is that you almost unanimously claim you are using the platform in a completely different way. (And apparently honestly believe that claim.)
"What's unsettling is that you almost unanimously claim you are using the platform in a completely different way. (And apparently honestly believe that claim.)"
I have zero idea what you're referring to here. What is "a completely different way" and why do I apparently honestly believe that?
Also, in the context of the GP “talking to each other” was clearly intended to mean that journalists using Twitter had no point. He’s explained why that isn’t the case.
Journalists on Twitter is totally OK as a community that is Tweeting at each other for the benefit of their own networking and community.
That’s not a bad thing :-)
I miss that bit, I dont miss most of twitter though.
That's actually disturbing, since Twitter users are a unique demographic all by themselves. Twitter has never adequately represented the wider spectrum of viewpoints (and, from everything I hear, is worse at it now than ever before).
I honestly don't remember a single case when something big happens in the world today, I go to the "old" news site the same day and that event is not reported.
Maybe some obscure regional politic events are reported with delay (even that is debatable), but why would you want some urgent news about obscure regional stuff? And how would a person understand that it is a real event and not a fake posted on twitter for some outrage?
You could drill down into a bunch of specific areas and have a similar effect all over, but trying to do that in too many places leads to a drinking the firehose feeling.
It still is isn't it?
https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/x-twitter-gaza-israel-m...
If the actual journalists paid for the blue checkmark, that'd solve the issue wouldn't it?
Twitter prior to Musk was a sinking ship (cancel culture exaggerated the problem). Asking people to pay is one of the attempts to solve that problem. If a journalist is unwilling to pay, they're going to be deprioritized and can't really complain about it. But Twitter has been very open and transparent about the need to reduce bots by paying for the checkmark.
Actual journalists are often blue ticks and intentionally misleading so this is as pot/kettle/black situation if there ever was one.
It's not quite the same as breaking news, but it's illustrative that a lot of the tech conferences I follow no longer have much if any of a Twitter back-channel. It's just not cool to hang out there any more, at least for some interest groups.
Edit: in the past, the rampant misinformation and botnet voting rings were limited to "Trending Hashtags". Now bad actors and edgelords have direct access to my (and everyone else's) default view ("For you")
edited to add: the problem now is that it's often genuinely fake news on Twitter and you have to separate the wheat from increasingly large piles of chaff. You have to be extremely diligent about curating your account to do that.
I thought Threads was not supposed to be about news [1], and at any rate its traffic is dropping.
CNN is probably one of the first-movers in the news space, but surely it's behind Twitter in terms of timeliness.
1: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23787334/instagram-threads...
2) Using embeds in their articles let them launder copyright via twitter randos to let them avoid paying royalties to license images and videos from the original sources.
That's like saying "turns out, that lego enthusiasts was just making little buildings for each other the whole time and the general public didn't really care"
I wonder how many unique (non-bot) users actually post on Twitter each month. I reckon that number versus MAU is going to be very asymmetric.
Assuming they follow the standard social media rule, only about 40-60M of those people are Tweeting in a month, which is still a lot. And my guess is a lot of those are bot tweets.
For me, the value of the verified checkmark was that it verified people and organizations were who they said they were.
This was a big part of what made Twitter such a unique and fascinating place. You could learn a huge amount about the world from tweets that were attached to verified identities.
Plus it was really fun. This tweet by Monica Lewinsky really wouldn't have landed without that verified mark! https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/115034806144255180...
Unfortunately, Musk apparently had the same cynical opinion of this that you have, and threw the entire thing away. No wonder Twitter has less cultural impact today than it did a year ago.
Are you claiming there has been a mass exodus of Thatcherite/Reaganomic thinkers supportive of the Chicago School of market led small state capitalism from the platform?
I guess I don’t see many Pinochet apologists on Twitter these days.
I suggest a quick read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
I guess words don’t have to mean things any more.
when Musk implemented cheap paid verification subscriptions, the first thing most of the formerly-exclusively-verified journalist-type users (that I follow, at least) did was post links to their profiles on new Twitter-clone platforms they were moving to, which, if investigated, revealed that they once again had a special "Verified" or "Verified Journalist" tag on their profiles there as well.
surely you're not implying that my analysis has zero merit and that nobody who was verified on Twitter before paid verification subscriptions were implemented was ever in it for the self-important narcissism?
If someone got verified for narcissistic reasons it didn't particularly affect me: there were plenty of verified accounts that I paid no attention to at all.
I cared about the verified accounts where the verified user or organization was noteworthy and interesting to me.
And so, overall, taking away blue checkmarks from professionals and giving them to spammers has been a net loss for Twitter, at least for those of us who appreciate good information.
It's not verification anymore though, is it? It's just an icon that you get when you pay a monthly fee. AFAIK there is no verification step.
Perfection of any kind does not exist in the physical world, so any test against perfection will fail - it's simply a matter of phrasing to choose what you want to identify as failing.
The test isn't whether All or Every such-and-such meets some test, it's the current state (do many or most meet the test?) and the direction (are more or fewer meeting the test?) that matters.
Once that went away, those people started to leave, and Twitter descended into a morass of nonsense, as they were replaced by people who never did anything notable in their lives but were jealous of the attention given to those who had.
why was this? what authoritative power over verifiable notability did Twitter once have, such that this could possibly be the case for anyone who thinks about it for longer than two seconds, or encounters their first instance of, "ok but why was this person verified while this other person isn't?"
Malik Obama was verified on Twitter long, long before Musk took it over, and he regularly made (and still makes) all sorts of outlandish claims about his half-brother—are these all to be considered implicitly true, on account of his profile having been Pre-Musk Verified?
Even if Twitter got it wrong with blue checks sometimes, by and large, the old approach led to a platform that was a vastly more reliable source of information than the cesspool we have today.
What it did allow, was quickly scanning through a sea of replies to find the ones that might come from someone with more authority or experience on a topic than SassySam123123, and then feeling confident that the post that purported to be from the Foreign Minister actually was. This was of course unpopular with SassySam123123.
It was a signal that you could use as part of your own evaluation of what was worth paying attention to.
It had nothing to do with whether or not something was true.
The fact that some said some wild thing - true or not - is still an interesting piece of information, when the verification process demonstrates that it really IS that person saying that thing.
Twitter faced backlash in November 2017 when it verified the account of Jason Kessler, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist. The backlash forced Twitter to pause its verification program.[9] Several days later, Twitter removed Spencer and Kessler's verification statuses.[10] Likewise, Twitter had removed verification from Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos for violating its policies in January, signaling Twitter verification implied endorsement.
Either you are saying that in fact not having prominent neo-Nazis' content tagged as coming from notable sources was a meaningful problem, or you are making a slippery-slope argument with no clear indication of why we were headed to a problematic part of the slope. In either case it doesn't seem persuasive.
Leftists call anyone to the right of themselves a Nazi so your claims about specific individuals are uninteresting.
There's this swath of people who want to be Notable and just aren't, and they think that painting a checkmark on themselves will fix it.
I completely agree with you.
>Nobody thought that a checkmark made you notable.
I completely disagree with you.
i think the mess of blue checks now shows that this issue absolutely isn’t limited to “journalists and media personalities”
social media as a whole has shown us first hand the lengths people will go to in order to seek impressions. it’s pretty common to see regular people lie, manipulate, twist, etc… to get those impressions.
in the past, We devised something called journalistic ethics which he expected those with a platform to put a good faith effort to follow those guidelines. this allowed us to make a distinction between signal and noise.
of course this wasn’t perfect, nothing ever is.
either way, we’ve seen pretty clearly now for quite a while that it isn’t some nefarious plot by former “narcissistic” journalists or whatever—people on every site do this, and people actually pay money for the checks on twitter now lol.