lenderton

Difference between the two is that beneath the surface Twitter is a functional social environment, while Threads is certainly not.

People forget how "tightened up" the web is nowadays, or many just aren't old enough to remember. It wasn't 10 years ago that Fox News would archive full, uncensored ISIS videos on their website - which is kind of insane, when you think about it.

Average age of first phone ownership is really young these days, which is arguably the #1 factor in everything online becoming a closed system for sheep.

On the other hand, no parents want their 11-year-old wandering into videos of hostages being burned alive. Or getting solicited for photos etc. So the internet is kind of dying for the sake of real life.

You can always search old blogspots. https://www.searchblogspot.com

The model is DesertCross 1000-3, and it retails in the USA for 18,999 USD (MSRP) - which is perhaps more expensive than many of the WWII-era tanks Russia occasionally used earlier on in the war.

...

The Ukrainians have been using electric motorbikes for longer than the Russians. Mostly, from what I've read, as tank hunters - the rider is armed with an anti-armor weapon - or as transportation for snipers (not sure if teams or individuals).

https://armyrecognition.com/focus-analysis-conflicts/army/co...

But longform internet posts are gone nowadays in America, largely - due to English. It's too widely spoken for things to be found easily. Think about finding information about heavy metal concerts in Finland: that's probably doable from Google purely based on the fact you're not imputing English.

Last point: https://www.statista.com/statistics/990899/livejournal-users...

https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/

Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population.

I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.

Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get.

And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end. In the past you could type into Google "new mothers discussion board" and immediately find organic, non-corporate socialization geared towards Americans. That ease of use is sort of erroneously gone, and probably not returning.

Might I ask...which blogs are you reading?

But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media.

There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).

When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc.

Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography.

I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users.

When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization.

In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat.

I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.