We’re going to have to agree to disagree about my premise (that Twitter was always a disaster in the making) but agreed that it has been getting dramatically worse since it’s acquisition by Elon Musk and transformation in to “X”, and specifically geared toward promoting autocracy, racism, and even flat-out fascism.
I will note that from the first time I was introduced to Twitter (sometime around 2010 or 2011) I note that the then-140 character format and ‘retweeting’ outrageous or humorous messages promoted bad behavior and the proliferation of outrage; it basically took everything that was already going wrong with Facebook and packaged it in a way that was even more ‘compelling’ (read: psychosocially addictive) form that was intended from the ground up as a mobile application that would notify people by default.
I know that a lot of people promote its use in communications and especially journalism, and many news outlets took to just literally repeating Twitter posts (or in the case of CNN, posting an image of a screen capture followed by reiterating the text, apparently to inflate the size of the article), but I’ll also note that this resulted in people essentially taking ‘factoids’ posted in tweets to be true (or at least ‘true-ish’) without bothering to do even basic fact-checking because the tweets and retweets came so fast that it wasn’t possible to squash obvious nonsense, and assuming someone to be an ‘expert’ in a particular field just because they promoted themselves as so on the platform. As bad as Facebook and now ‘Meta’ is about promoting conspiranoia and falsehoods, Twitter does so in such an immediate and addictive way that even people trained in critical thinking fall prey to the flood of gut reaction and misinformation.
The sad thing is that there are valid use cases for an application like this; if Twitter were just being used to communicate targeted information to interested users and emergency alerts without a bunch of cruft of a platform like Facebook it would be very useful. But of course that wouldn’t get the clicks that earn ad revenue, and ‘the algorithm’ for Twitter has to promote the most outrageous memes and claims to maximize for yield rather than any kind of quality. Which is why I have never had this app on any of my devices and am very circumspect over what posts I even look at when they are forwarded by others.
That’s my point. That it’s no longer just the playground of a privileged few with privileged few concerns.
The library isn’t on fire. The pile of Cosmo and People magazines in one corner has gotten mouldy, and the noise levels have risen, that’s all. People who need to can still find all the useful books they need, completely unburnt.
Do you have some specific examples in mind? This isn’t so much a ‘cite please’ as a request to perhaps be disabused of the ignorance of privilege, as well as maybe gaining a little bit of hope that the internet hasn’t been ruined for everyone.
Quite right. Email is a good example of the “innocence” of the early internet, or more precisely, the assumption of trustworthiness. The security protocols we use today, like SSL, TLS, and OAuth 2.0 are all add-ons. Because of course the modern internet evolved from what was originally a government and academic network.
It’s useful to recall how primitive the early internet was. For many years even after the advent of the World Wide Web, the kinds of search engines we take for granted simply did not exist, and Alta Vista was groundbreaking when it first appeared. In those days you could buy directories listing most of the major websites and their URLs. They were kind of the Yellow Pages of the internet.
Those were the newfangled modems that directly connected to the phone line. Remember acoustic couplers, where you placed the telephone handset into a couple of little rubber cups and the modem beeped and howled, sending and receiving at what was often just 300 bps, and sometimes just 110 bps! 110 bps was the speed of the ubiquitous ASR-33 and KSR-33 Teletypes, with a print speed of 10 characters per second.
I graduated from college in the early ‘90s. My university maintained my account access and email address for another year or so after graduation. But since I had moved across the country, I maintained access by calling the university server up long-distance so that I could continue to read Usenet newsgroups.
When I got out of college c.1996, I spent a month or so dialing into the state university system. It was in the same area code but the phone bill soon demonstrated that it was not “local”. Ouch. Fortunately, I was able to soon find a local dial-up provider where it was something like 5¢ a call for unlimited time due to proximity.
Speaking of costs, I remember the warning our Usenet client would give before posting:
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Yes, my opinions on the latest Magic: the Gathering set ARE worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, thank you very much!
I got my online fix in the heady days of Bulletin Board Systems. Years I would play multiplayer online text games likes Legend of the Red Dragon. Then America Online came out and everyone was google-eyed at all the new capabilities like checking the weather and writing your grandmother and I was not impressed.
Until I had to do homework as a tween on some innocent topic when I fell down the rabbit hole without guard rails and end up looking at real filmed Jihadist decapitations by accident.
Ah yes, the path from (any teenage hangout) to rotten.com was quite short in those days… I also had more than one instance of trying to download some popular song from Napster, only to end up with dog-on-person bestiality porn =/ We didn’t so much have to deal with fake news in those days as much as real horrors…
Yeah, great point. It became a vicious cycle, even… as more and more people started to use it for community, more and more communities became internet-first and then internet-only… =/
I spent some time far upthread reading a few posts nostalgically, and later found a few rabbit holes to dive into (‘enshittification’ being one of those definitions I’d felt but hadn’t seen it in the lexicon). My opinion, in just a few hours’ time has concreted itself into a “Was it better then?” F%#^ yes!!
I disagree. Because a lot of the current Internet has been ‘weaponized’ by commercial/bad actors, just because it’s easy to find intormation does not mean it’s accurate at face value. In my rabbit-holing, I learned about the Dead Internet Theory. Lemme be perfectly clear: I am not a conspiracy theorist. I cannot ‘unsee’ some trends or patterns that parallel the conspiracy theory though. I think the vast majority of ‘weaponized’ material (Facebook feeds, Amazon ‘recommendations’, just about anything political, some “news” articles, etc. etc.) comes straight outta AI or bots.
Seconded. I can’t tell you how much time I’d spent on message boards as a young guy, or even during COVID (which, I guess the ‘electronic 3rd space kinda’ worked out, didn’t it?)
Tripler
– Not a bot. Not artificial. Not intelligent.
Around 2/3 of users on twitter are bots, so the theory isn’t really a conspiracy anymore.
5th Column is an AI that detects bots on social media. After analyzing 1.269M accounts on X.com (formerly known as Twitter), 5th Column AI predicts that approximately 64% of the accounts currently analyzed are potentially bots as seen in Graph 1.
Its going to get even worse with AI, when you consider that many social media is now used to manipulate the opinions of people to make them behave or think the way that the creators of the bots want them to think and act.
But it depends on the site. On social media, more and more of them are going to be bots designed to manipulate people. But on wikipedia, there are no real bots from what I can see. However there are efforts to use wikipedia as a propaganda outlet and it has to be edited to prevent that.
I guess anywhere where people can be pressured to support an agenda, buy a product, vote a certain way, think a certain way, etc you’ll see bots. Which sadly is a lot of the internet
