Blogging is writing something to change minds. Twitter is harrassing other people to change their minds.
Do people simply not bother curating their follows?
The first is a “For you” tab which contains recommended content based on YOUR browsing habits (and a “Not Interested” option to curate, just like Tiktok).
The second tab is a “Following” tab which is strictly tweets from people you follow, in chronological order.
It’s pretty great now. Twitter used to be nothing but quasi activism and rage bait. Now it’s exactly what I envisioned it could’ve been, which is nice.
But stay away from it if you have the reddit mindset of “If I don’t agree with it, it should be banned”, because your feelings will get hurt.
It feels a lot like the internet 10-15 years ago, it’s great.
But I can freely talk about sports and shoot the shit without worrying about triggering an autoban for saying the “badspeak” term or phrase which is currently flavor of the month.
I will say it’s one of the only services of its type that’s no longer a contrived echo chamber though. All opinions can be heard… But only if you seek them.
I’ve posted here before about how I refuse to use Twitter due to its toxicity (in the past), but its recent lack of toxicity has made it very fun and addicting lol
Now, if you’re a positive person who just enjoys tech and cat videos, that’s all you’ll see.
In the past, you could spend hours trying to curate Twitter to be good/positive, but you would still see nonsense.
The biggest improvement is the removal of the feature where completely unrelated content would be pushed into your timeline with a note at the top that said “Your follower [insert follower name] liked this”
So you were at the mercy of what the people you followed also engaged with. Now, you can follow someone who may be on the other end of the political spectrum (who may post cool tweets) - And while you don’t agree with their views on the election, you can still see their tweets without the “Pastor Bob liked this” type post appearing of QAnon bullsh*t.
But it was also this bad before Musk.
You can't productively argue with someone by splitting your position into 280-character-long bites, each of which can be easily quoted out of context.
The twitter UI is just not designed for conversation.
Then you have devs posting clickbait "hot takes" about the most inane thing you've ever seen or screenshots of code in order to then sell their courses or gain more social influence.
I won't give specific names, but one of these characters rhythms with prime numbers and another rhythms with thesaurus.
The moment, twitter added monetization, engagement farming got much worse. Was Social Media always destined to be like this?
Personallly, I think an anonymous social media could work better. If people view content as content without carying about who published it, then you would get good stuff trending and not a 2am selfie from some random celebrity who at this point is famous for being famous. Brands would also have a hard time because their junk wouldn't get engagement unless it was actually good.
Creating a good Social Media site is a hard problem IMO.
For all the snark Hacker News gets, I think its not a bad attempt at creating a tech focused social media. Reddit and its many subreddits is something else that works to some extent.
I'm leaning hard in the opposite direction. In my mind, a social network graph that is extremely personal and reflects and behaves like an _actual social network_ is "the way".
I run my own ActivityPub node. There is no reason for anyone to want to join who doesn't know me personally and want to join in just for personal reasons.
Then I federate with nodes that I personally know, not for exposure but because I want to follow their updates and occasionally chat with them about things (e.g. I follow Codeberg because I think what they're doing, particularly with Forgejo, is interesting).
I also _do not_ federate with generic instances like the main Mastodon one because they're not focused/personal enough for my taste (that's where you get the "eh, might as well" crowd").
This does mean I have a low rate of discovery of new stuff, but that's the way real socializing goes as well. Most of your time is spent with people you already know and occasionally either you change contexts and meet someone new or your existing actual social network introduces you to someone new.
That said, there are different use cases for social networks which is more the "publishing" angle that needs a much broader but shallower network (probably same for discovery which is probably just the other side of publishing). I haven't thought as much about these use cases, but it seems necessarily fraught because once you get to publishing, bad actors get interested, even (/especially?) if it's anonymous. I'm not sure there is a solution to that problem.
Focused and text based platforms like Reddit’s subreddit and HN are also nice as long as you have moderation that keeps things civil. And no user specific algorithm.
For a social media to work, some sort of consequences must be forced upon responsible users. Else people quits functioning. I'm guessing that the reward scoring don't have to be exposed to the public, but there has to be something, and forcing users have pseudonymous usernames is a workable implementation.
Charlie Munger