I never quite "got" twitter, it was never fun for me to participate on. It's telling / disturbing that folks had such trust in random accounts ...
I don't do this with every topic unless I'm interested in discussing something just so I'm more informed just to reduce bias.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
But the thing that was supprising to me, as someone that remembers the world before the internet, is that anger is the thing that makes people stay on a site.
Before the internet came along, one would have thought that Truth would be the thing. Or funniness, or gossip, or even titalation and smut. Anger would have been quite far down on the list of 'addicting' things. But the proof is obvious, anger drives dollars.
There's no putting this knowledge away now that we know it.
The lesson only question is what are we going to do about it?
If you followed a variety of people it was quite addictive - so many celebrities or other notable people meant you got actual "first hand news", and it was fun seeing everyone join in on silly jokes and games and whatever, that doesn't hit quite as hard when it's just random usernames not "people".
But it suffered for that success, individual voices got drowned out in favour of the big names, the main way to get noticed becoming more controversial statements, and the wildly different views becoming less free flowing discussion and more constant arguments.
It was fun for a while if you followed fun people, but I think the incentives of such systems means it was always going to collapse as people worked out how to manipulate it.
X and Reddit are no different.
But the problem with over credulity goes far beyond social media. I've gotten strong push back for telling people they shouldn't trust Wikipedia and should look at primary sources themselves.
Yeah, but basically nobody is capable of evaluating those sources themselves, outside of very narrow topics.
Reading a wikipedia page about Cicero? Better make sure you can read Latin and Greek, and also have a PhD in Roman history and preferably another one in Classical philosophy, or else you will always be stuck with translations and interpretations of other people. And no, reading a Loeb translation from the 1930's doesnt mean you will fully understand what he wrote, because so much of it all hinges on specific words and what those words meant in the context they were written, and how you should interpret whole passages and how those passages relate to other authors and things that happened when he was alive and all that fun stuff.
And that's just one small subject in one discipline. Now move on to an article about Florence during the Renaissance and oh hey suddenly there are yet another couple of languages you should learn and another PhD to get.
Scientists/Researchers
Journalists
Activists
Politicians
Subject Matter Experts (for the fields I am interested in)
There were (when I was using it) a large number of "troll" accounts, and bots, but it was normally easy to distinguish the wheat from the chaff
You could also engage in meaningful conversations with complete strangers - because, like Usenet, the rules for debate were widely adopted, and transgression results in shunning (something that I rarely see beyond twitter to be honest)
I often hear that one community, or another, is "really good, not toxic at all, which is true when it starts (for tech, whilst it's "new" and everyone is still interested in figuring out how it works, sharing their learnings, and actively working to encourage people to also take interest)
Then idealism works it way in - this community is the greatest that every existed ever - and whatever it is centred is the best at whatever
Then - all other things are bad, you're <something bad> if you think otherwise
And, boom, toxicity starts to abound
For me, I've seen it so many times, whether in motorised transport (Motorcycles vs cars, then Japanese bikes vs British/European/American then individual brands (eg Triumph vs Norton), or even /style/ of bike (Oh you ride a sport bike, when clearly a cruiser is better...))
In the tech scene it's been Unix vs Microsoft, then Microsoft vs Linux or Apple, and then... well no doubt you've seen it too
Uhm I would rather say it is when the idealists are pushed out by grifters is when things get bad for a community.
I really don't as far as social media goes. If I see a link here the account posting it likely doesn't play any part, trust comes from the source of the content more than random user.
And to be fair, a lot of these accounts that are exposed as grifters were called out as such for a while now. And most of them were so obviously griftery that the only ones that followed them were those that were already so deeply entrenched in their echo chamber.
It's funny that they're explicitly being exposed now though!
Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.
These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.
IRC
Usenet
Facebook (live)