There is good stuff there. But the people who create that content exist elsewhere.
Perhaps not everyone is able to find it, but this is the wild west of the old days, AFAIC.
It’s still there, and the people are still there.
So, maybe one has to grep and use Bing or whatever. The creators are still there.
Like I said, I use FB heavily, and TBH, I don’t give much of a damn how much data or metadata Meta harvests. I love reddit as well.
Twitter’s just another place. It’s gone now, or going, so, what’s the big?
Here’s an analogy: anyone who knows me personally knows I don’t use my phone except for texts. Friends and family know if they leave me a voicemail it’s not going to be listened to. So, they text or e-mail me.
I happen to use some g-mail accounts. I accept gmail’s irritating ads &c, but it’s just one of several options.
Ah well, I find the people I follow aren’t elsewhere, largely, and when they are the interesting conversations they’re having on Twitter aren’t duplicated elsewhere.
Facebook, on teh other hand, I find unusable nowadays - anything I want to see is buried under waves of algorithm generated nonsense. But that’s in part because I’ve given up on Facebook so don’t put work in curating it.
So, isn’t it good that there’s a social medium I find useful and interesting?
This is both absurd and false, regardless of how many times you say it. There are a number of people I follow that don’t create content anywhere else. Of those I follow that have their content elsewhere, it would be cumbersome/expensive to digest their content.
I don’t think there’s ever going to be a universal advertising company that’s going to ring everyman’s bell, but what’cha gonna do?
C’est la vie!
I would be pretty sad if my years of private conve…well, “private,” you know…rsations including group chats from FB disappeared, tout d’un coup, but I do make archives of those.
Yeah, I get it. It’s a bummer, but, couldn’t be helped! C’mon, man, all those people driving Teslas and shit?
No, I’m serious, it’s a bummer. Obviously I’m not as invested in Twitter as some, and I have found it very useful and sometimes entertaining, but à chacun son goût.
What you appear to be saying here is that one thing Twitter is good for is disseminating outrageous sensationalist stories that are probably not true, and that you therefore wouldn’t see on responsible media. Now perhaps that isn’t a fair assessment of what you meant, and that’s fine, but the important point is that this is actually a good example of precisely the kind of misinformation that gets a lot of traction on Twitter.
And that, in turn, has serious implications. Implications like the fact that Twitter was a major factor in how a dangerous ineffable moron like Trump, who normally couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in Upper Podunk, managed to get elected president of the United States. Twitter is the perfect platform for supporting and promulgating populist demagoguery. It’s also the perfect platform to learn that COVID vaccines don’t work, that they contain tracking chips and make people magnetic, and that masks are a Deep State conspiracy. This was the case even when Twitter tried – but mostly failed – to curtail the worst of it through a content moderation council; today, under Musk, the safety council is disbanded and Twitter has moved full-bore into far-right demagoguery.
It’s true – in case someone feels the need to point it out – that if I don’t like Twitter I don’t have to use it, or that I can choose the content I prefer. It’s also true, however, that I and everyone else has to live in the world that the toxic culture of Twitter and other social media is helping to shape…
On Twitter. And Facebook. And Telegram. And hundreds of different Reddit threads, and Discord threads, and all over TikTok, and on message boards all over the world. And on Fox News. And CNN. And talk radio.
There are toxic people on Twitter. But if it weren’t for Twitter, then Black Twitter wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t have found a community of people that helped get me through the pandemic. Everything that is wrong with the world can’t be laid at the feet of an app.
No, I didn’t say anything about how probable it is that the allegations are true. The fact that a rich and powerful and pernicious individual has been publicly humiliated is the important and funny point here, and “responsible media” won’t tell me - even if they were also aware of the allegations. (Which, as the email points out by linking to suggestive nudge-nudge pieces about what good friends he is with certain people etc., they clearly do.)
But to your general point, I don’t think 2016 Twitter was a big factor in Trump’s election - Facebook and Fox News were much bigger drivers of misinformation.
But as Banquet Bear says, Twitter is made up of people. Maybe people shouldn’t be allowed to talk to each other with the speed and lack of responsible oversight that is inherent in social media. But that’s a big call to make.
There are people who post news updates and discussions about topics I’m interested in who don’t post here at the Dope. It’s basically just another message board to me.
While disinformation is certainly a problem, bear in mind that various branches of liberalism and progressivism are also huge on Twitter. As @Banquet_Bear mentioned, Black Twitter is gigantic.
Today’s Washington Post has an article (gift version below) on how news stories that were first reported on Twitter are now first showing up on TikTok. They give the example of the I95 collapse in Philadelphia and how the governor of Pennsylvania turned to TikTok to communicate construction updates. I’ve been surprised at how up-to-date and breaking news some TikTok posts have been.
I hsve one use case that makes me mad Twitter has gone the way it has.
The customer support organization of a large gaming company that operates a game I play posts customer support updates and status on Twitter. Stuff like “we’re aware of an outage” or “maintenance is scheduled for Wednesday”.
By and large, this is the only place they publish it. And now it’s inaccessible because I don’t have a Twitter account, and never will.
That’s unfortunate for you but that’s on the gaming company, not on you. Any decent company should be able to publish real-time updates on their own website without assuming that all their customers are social media hounds. Apparently their belief is that it’s easier to send a tweet than to put in the modicum of effort that it takes to have a news function on their website. And if you don’t have access to the tweets, well, it sucks to be you – which tells you what they think of their customers. Hopefully as Elmo sends Twitter down the toilet, the better companies, at least, will learn this lesson.
One use case that hasn’t been mentioned yet is that Twitter is a good way to get hold of big companies when you need to talk to them. It’s pretty common to get a near immediate response when you @ mention them and say you have a problem, because they have teams monitoring Twitter. Certainly quicker and easier than emailing or calling them.
Some of these posts, like the two most recent ones – but many others – seem to miss the point that many of us are making. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a messaging app. Communication is a good thing, generally speaking. That isn’t the problem.
The problem is that when a putative “messaging app” becomes essentially an influential media outlet, yet is not subject to any controls or regulation whatsoever, then it gets commandeered by political and commercial vested interests and becomes a toxic cesspool of disinformation that literally poisons the political landscape and the public mindset.
The fact that Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has driven it hard to a fascist far-right position is just the most recent extreme example of that danger. Not only did Musk disband the Twitter trust and safely council, but in addition to the massive firings, several key individuals responsible for ethics have resigned. The former checkmark that Twitter used to at least verify a poster’s authenticity has now been monetized by Musk into a “blue checkmark” that anyone can buy for $8 a month.
Twitter is now a major cesspool of disinformation from the far right, neo-Nazis, and all manner of vested interests including propagandists for the enemies of the free world, like this article I just found a few minutes ago that is typical of millions of others just like it that Twitter is promulgating all over the world. Of all the social media currently in existence – and all of them have similar problems – Twitter is absolutely the last one that anyone should be defending.
Bloomberg commentator Noah Smith argues, The Internet Wants to be Fragmented, and that losing a major aggregator like twitter isn’t a bad thing. Writers can go to substack. Academics to Mastodon. Shitposters to Bluesky. It’s all good. This evening Noah goes further and says, Social media fragmentation has liberated us.
I’ve long argued that the internet wants to be fragmented — that having a single “town square” for all of humanity doesn’t make any more sense for the online world than it does for the physical one. Good communities require that members be able to exit and find a different community if they don’t fit. During its heyday in the late 2010s, Twitter was amazing in many ways, but it was never a good community, because there was nowhere else to go, and so like the characters in No Exit , we were all stuck together in the Hell we created for each other. Now there are other places to go. And as Eugene writes, that likely means we’ll never see the world of public discussion come back together all in one place.
We’ve lost something, but in losing it, we’ve freed ourselves from something.
Cancel culture will be hurt because dogpiles on a website you never visit just don’t feel the same as a dogpile on a self proclaimed worldwide town square. Miniscule subgroups like tankies will lose a megaphone. Reporters will have to cover more than one social media website. Yawn.