Obviously it's not W3C, but I keep wondering what account leaving Twitter would feel like an absolute nail in the coffin of the platform.
Even if you personally don't use Twitter, virtually all the contemporary media you consume is being molded by it. Even today. It'll take a lot more influential people to drop it or move elsewhere before it won't be significantly impacting your life.
In the US, at least. I don't know how seriously it's taken in other countries.
Take two weeks off, you'll realize that it really isn't that important. Most people don't use it.
My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less influenced by it.
How do you think "the news, media, culture, or politics" are influenced by Twitter except via the people doing the influencing and the people being influenced both being on Twitter?
People leaving Twitter does reduce its social impact.
So you either need influencers to shift out (which is happening, slowly. But I'm not sure if it'll be enough to "kill" Twitter) or somehow generate a new batch of influencers for a competitor. Both are hard.
As long as the journalists, politicians, screenwriters, staffers, celebrities, and other cultural elites continue to use it to signal which issues matter, which ones don't, and how their various tribes respond, it'll continue to underpin the culture.
It already got as far as it has in the US with under 20% of the population. That's with >80% not participating. Getting that back to 90 or 95% won't matter as long as the most influential (including most influential OUTSIDE of Twitter) people stay.
Even mid tier popular people get over whelmed by interactions and ignore and block them, so they your not communicating two ways.
It's just a fire hose of bits of facts. a few thousand likes makes things feel important. A thousand on a local level when towns are made up of 30k people isn't representative of a significant opinion.
Tweets are just entertaining noise
I can't full agree. It may not be as immediately effective as politicians, but politicians are beholden to the people, and people are influenced by influencers. So loud influencers can indeed sway public opinion and even political policy simply by posting on twitter. The largest one being the now owner of the entire site.
I agree the comment replies are just the peanut gallery, but I think we're well past the point in society where social media is "just entertaining noise".
It doesn't do this based on individual politicians taking seriously arbitrary tweets sent to them. It happens because the world's most influential people care about what happens there. And it feeds itself.
And it does that with less than 20% of the US population as users. It'd still do it with less than 10%, or less than 5%. As long as the most influential people stay.
Twitter doesn't really "make news". People talk about news on twitter and lazy news orgs (desperate for free, zero-effort content) post commentary from rando twitter users about the non-twitter news that sometimes actually matters.
Occasionally companies do announce things on Twitter, although most of the time they have a press release or blog post on their own websites that say the exact same thing. That said, there are a few extremely cheap/lazy government officials/offices that use twitter to announce things while failing to provide that information elsewhere and that should really change.
Twitter is a whole lot of advertising. The PR teams of celebrities, advertisers that call themselves influencers, and bots drive the platform.
Twitter isn't usually where things happen, it's where random people talk about things that are happening elsewhere. The vast majority of twitter is as totally worthless and unnecessary as the hot takes found on facebook or the selfies posted to instagram. If twitter were shut down tomorrow and all that content were wiped off the face of the Earth little, if anything at all, of any consequence would change beyond people wasting more of their time on other social media platforms.
Either you believe these influential people are only so because of Twitter, or that Twitter is just a communication medium which is used by some people you seem influential.
I see more influential people posting on LinkedIn than Twitter, for example.
E.g, you can be sure that if Macron starts tweeting from mastodon (the gov has an official instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr), thousands of journalists and politics will switch.
If Twitter is going to be declared dead, I think it will likely be an avalanche type thing. It won't be any individual account that kills it, but rather a large amount of prominent accounts across multiple parts of our culture.
I disagree with paleo-Republican fiscal policy, but in an academic "I see what you're getting at but don't think it's correct" way. It's interesting and instructive to have that debate, though. Even if I'm not persuaded, afterward I can appreciate the other person's viewpoints and respect that smart people might come to different conclusions than I do.
Some rando spouting that "Jews are taking over the world" or something else ridiculous isn't worth engaging or hearing out. I have no interest in a service exposing me to idiotic opinions like that against my will.
absolutely not. See Michael B. Tager's quote about the nazi bar:
All evidence seems to contradict this. People love viewing content that makes them mad (ref: fox news) and companies love the engagement they get from mad people.
But maybe there are more nails, any will do
From loading it just now: my top feed items are over 60% "interaction bait," i.e. ranked posts from accounts that I don't follow. When I turn off my adblocking rules, these are interspersed with bottom-barrel advertisements.
In other words: it's dead, but the corpse is still warm.
What surprised me was how QUICKLY tiktok died for me! It's so vanilla and boring these days, every second video is some ad of a chinese dude selling me some trinket. It's very strange. Instagram caught up with their reel tech, and instagram is just a wild west of content and comments, love it!
This is consumption-side growth, not production-side. A similar thing happened with Facebook when it went all-in on algorithmic feeds: engagement went up, but actual organic content production went down.
Ultimately, whether or not you find that distinction interesting depends on how you use the Internet. But much of the demographic that found Twitter fun and useful before 2022 isn't interested in a reskinned Facebook or Instagram, which is what the current site is.