The Tragedy of Twitter
amadeuspagel.com
amadeuspagel.com
nah
https://www.manton.org/2017/05/30/182107.html
Titles were always optional. Still are.
>> "Asymmetric relationships. On twitter you can follow someone, and they can follow you back or not."
That's RSS, or any of the myriad following systems on BBSes since time immemorial.
Starting off with a list of unique features that are not, in fact, unique isn't a great sign for the rest of it. I scrolled down, but the sign-up nag was too annoying to click out of.
Titles are optional in some blogging software but they aren't optional in feed readers and link aggregators. (This is explained in the sentence after the one you quoted.)
> That's RSS, or any of the myriad following systems on BBSes since time immemorial.
You can't follow people back on RSS.
In practice they generally were semi-optional, because title-less posts were somewhat common, particularly on Tumblr (which always straddled the worlds of "proper" blogging software and twitter-type things a little uncomfortably); how gracefully readers dealt with this varied.
I deleted my Twitter and Facebook after the 2016 election but lately I've gotten into Mastodon.
My take is that "screenshotting" is a cancer on Mastodon, not so much screenshotting as a replacement for replies, but generally angry people seem to like making images that are mostly text and because images have viral potential, they get boosted a lot and wind up in my feed. Often these are screenshots, often they are made with some meme generator, but it's always crap. If I were going to make YOShInOn into a Mastodon reader, I'd want to put in some filter that kills these images.
There's a story that black people don't use Mastodon because it doesn't support quote retweeting, that is, it's claimed black people on Twitter really like that feature and they won't switch to Mastodon because it doesn't have it.
Personally I think replies on all of those platforms are half-baked, frequently abused, and frequently fraught.
For instance when somebody makes a tweet and then another tweet and then another tweet, frequently the user interface doesn't work correctly for me. Maybe I see the first tweet, maybe I see nothing, maybe I see the thread backwards, maybe I see a sea of mindless replies to the first tweet. I'd love to get through to these people with the message; "JUST GET A BLOG DAMMIT!"
Kinda related to that are the people on Mastodon who feel ownership not just of their toot but all the replies so if they don't like your reply it's not like they just don't like your reply, but they really lose their shit because they think you wrecked their masterpiece.
It seems like a better user interface for threads that has special handling for the "Bari Weiss tweeted 98 tweets about the TWITTER FILES" case which Musk seems to be so hot for (doesn't want you to link out to your blog, newspaper, Wikipedia, etc.) would be a good thing. As it is, I think anybody who tweets like that is tweeting into the wind.