Whenever I read about the death of twitter, I wonder to what extent this is an American/elite and elite-adjacent death, but not an overall death. Are all the small sub-twitters (car/sports/hobbies/industries) also wholesale abandoning the platform? I don’t see evidence of this in these communities that I follow. This will sound trite, but I have an almost “who cares” attitude about red and blue twitter spaces being divided and separated by platforms. They were always echo chambers to begin with - pulling their most extreme content from other sources and then amplifying for their audiences there.
“How many stories can you find of a corrupt republic being replaced by a supposedly benevolent dictator...?”
Perhaps this is hair-splitting, but I would not consider the internet as a whole--or town-square social media platforms specifically--as being the digital equivalent of a republic. Instead they strike me more of a pure, mob-like democracy, which is a hellish system. With trepidation, I’m using the F-word here: I am confident our Founders recognized that. Unfortunately, our citizens never did.
This is a great post, and I agree with all your points, but I feel like there are a lot more issues with a large social media platform than the political biases of the leadership. Even if they had zero political leanings, they'd still have engagement greed. They amplify anything that means more engagement, which are often the worst messages, not the best ones. Beyond that, there are always users trying to game the system, either with multiple accounts or bots. The crowd on any social media platform doesn't represent reality, which is why people who have any grounding in reality give up and go away.
“Controlling speech without a basis in a constitution nor with democratic oversight is an intoxicating ambrosia normally denied to all but Roman emperors and popes.”
I really appreciate this sentence because it highlights for me that controlling who gets to talk and how much they get to talk and what about, is not a new phenomenon. In the history of religious institutions, like the Catholic Church, those in power controlled what information was allowed to be heard and where you could hear it. Heard it somewhere other then that 3rd row pew at this particular cathedral by that specific cardinal? FALSE INFORMATION. Now it just feels like we have new cathedrals popping up every week around the town square with every self appointed cardinal shouting how the other places are bad but theirs is the best. And the most truthful. And please come in and fill seats because I have many bills to pay. (This is not an attack on the Catholic faith or church, please let me have my small analogy that made sense!)
I often wonder what the thing will be that is better/different then social media/rapid online discourse. Like what will be the “thing” that does for internet communication what social media did for utterly changing the landscape for internet communication? Versus the seemingly endless repeating of a different Twitter versions?
Thank you for an excellent (in my view) report. You have a very creative intellect, a lot like Étienne's..capable of dazzling lateral movement and binding disparate things together. "Religare". Essentially to me,yours is a religious voice of a sort, always in search of a community. I wish you the best. Difficult times are rushing down on us now. You'll help us make sense of them.
Can’t help but feel we’ll be better of for the siloing. Reddit is mostly very nice, and attracts people of all persuasions, and I think that’s because you pick the communities to be a part of around shared interests. You’re not all thrown into the shared room to borrow your metaphor.
People have the memories of goldfish. Meta is still the same company behind Facebook, with the same policies, audiences, and fundamentally the same objectives as that septic tank of an app.
Musk's paranoid scarcity mindset is irritating: as if substack or notes would take anything away from twitter. In restricting the reach of these posts linking to substack or other platforms, he limits the reach of twitter and its reach as a purveyor of links within a network. Just frustrating.
I just post the picture to my substack posts on twitter, otherwise I have 10 times fewer views there.
Great points and I think the interesting part is that humans really aren't coded for that volume of expsure. Fundamentally diversity is super healthy and useful outside of your immediate social group. It's the salad bowl, not melting pot. A salad bowl had little groups. A melting pot all becomes one group. The issue is we are simultaneously mixing a melting pot while at the same time hyper-hyphen-identifying everyone. I'm suddenly not in a psychologiclly safe place and it turns into a mess.
That's what happened with Twitter, that will happen with Threads (and I hate all the "OMG this is amazing" stuff....Notes has it too and then along comes the trolls.)
When Elon bought Twitter, I was wondering whether he would improve or destroy it. Both options made good sense. Apparently he couldn't decide and went on multi-track drifting. For most of the time, it still felt like an improvement on 2020, but now that he has deliberately shadowbanned the whole outside world from twitter, I'm not sure the place is long for this world. Yes, the journos can still read it and write about it, but outsiders won't care if the platform makes them feel excluded; nor will the current political slapfight seem worth watching if you know you have a limited number of posts to view. Good riddance, I guess. Too bad it's taking Elon's reputation along with it, because at this point no one can claim it was his intent.
Do we even need those services? PhpBB-like forums are still alive and well in communities that care about self-sufficiency and being able to decide how to moderate (e.g., themotte.org or DataSecretsLox). Hacker News shows that the tech underlying even a whole-world centralized forum can be minimal and written by a guy as a hobby. And everyone now knows that the internet can neither be trusted to forget nor to remember, so the sort of people who care about the work they produce know they cannot just park it in a reddit thread and hope it will be around in 10 years.
I agree that power corrupts and it’s a significant problem in this context but I also think that moderating large social media platforms is genuinely very hard.
Also, I am not sure if threads will be a big thing (or even a thing) but there is certainly an internet split trend. Even on regional level, first we had global web, then global and Chinese, now it seems there is Russian/CIS web as well and even European and American web seems to be slowly drifting away.
P.S PayPal is a terrible company/product and also very different from Twitter
Great post, however, "...Musk announced calling someone “cis” or “cisgender” is a punishable offense on Twitter..." is not true. It was definitely reported this way, but if you look at the tweets, he said cis or cisgender are slurs, but not that they are a punishable offense. Sense he also said that continued harassment of individuals is punishable in a later tweet, it is definitely implied, but it would be wrong to say that he said calling someone cis or cisgender is a punishable offense.
This is so well worded. Love it. This line is the perfect summary of the Musk-Twitter debacle:
"Elon Musk was unwilling to give up his own freedom of speech to save that of others."
Whenever I read about the death of twitter, I wonder to what extent this is an American/elite and elite-adjacent death, but not an overall death. Are all the small sub-twitters (car/sports/hobbies/industries) also wholesale abandoning the platform? I don’t see evidence of this in these communities that I follow. This will sound trite, but I have an almost “who cares” attitude about red and blue twitter spaces being divided and separated by platforms. They were always echo chambers to begin with - pulling their most extreme content from other sources and then amplifying for their audiences there.
“How many stories can you find of a corrupt republic being replaced by a supposedly benevolent dictator...?”
Perhaps this is hair-splitting, but I would not consider the internet as a whole--or town-square social media platforms specifically--as being the digital equivalent of a republic. Instead they strike me more of a pure, mob-like democracy, which is a hellish system. With trepidation, I’m using the F-word here: I am confident our Founders recognized that. Unfortunately, our citizens never did.
This is a great post, and I agree with all your points, but I feel like there are a lot more issues with a large social media platform than the political biases of the leadership. Even if they had zero political leanings, they'd still have engagement greed. They amplify anything that means more engagement, which are often the worst messages, not the best ones. Beyond that, there are always users trying to game the system, either with multiple accounts or bots. The crowd on any social media platform doesn't represent reality, which is why people who have any grounding in reality give up and go away.
“Controlling speech without a basis in a constitution nor with democratic oversight is an intoxicating ambrosia normally denied to all but Roman emperors and popes.”
I really appreciate this sentence because it highlights for me that controlling who gets to talk and how much they get to talk and what about, is not a new phenomenon. In the history of religious institutions, like the Catholic Church, those in power controlled what information was allowed to be heard and where you could hear it. Heard it somewhere other then that 3rd row pew at this particular cathedral by that specific cardinal? FALSE INFORMATION. Now it just feels like we have new cathedrals popping up every week around the town square with every self appointed cardinal shouting how the other places are bad but theirs is the best. And the most truthful. And please come in and fill seats because I have many bills to pay. (This is not an attack on the Catholic faith or church, please let me have my small analogy that made sense!)
I often wonder what the thing will be that is better/different then social media/rapid online discourse. Like what will be the “thing” that does for internet communication what social media did for utterly changing the landscape for internet communication? Versus the seemingly endless repeating of a different Twitter versions?
Thank you for an excellent (in my view) report. You have a very creative intellect, a lot like Étienne's..capable of dazzling lateral movement and binding disparate things together. "Religare". Essentially to me,yours is a religious voice of a sort, always in search of a community. I wish you the best. Difficult times are rushing down on us now. You'll help us make sense of them.
Can’t help but feel we’ll be better of for the siloing. Reddit is mostly very nice, and attracts people of all persuasions, and I think that’s because you pick the communities to be a part of around shared interests. You’re not all thrown into the shared room to borrow your metaphor.
Think that’s why substack is so nice too.
This is the fairest social media analysis I have seen
People have the memories of goldfish. Meta is still the same company behind Facebook, with the same policies, audiences, and fundamentally the same objectives as that septic tank of an app.
It will be totally different this time. Sure.
Musk's paranoid scarcity mindset is irritating: as if substack or notes would take anything away from twitter. In restricting the reach of these posts linking to substack or other platforms, he limits the reach of twitter and its reach as a purveyor of links within a network. Just frustrating.
I just post the picture to my substack posts on twitter, otherwise I have 10 times fewer views there.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Petty power corrupts all out of proportion.
Great points and I think the interesting part is that humans really aren't coded for that volume of expsure. Fundamentally diversity is super healthy and useful outside of your immediate social group. It's the salad bowl, not melting pot. A salad bowl had little groups. A melting pot all becomes one group. The issue is we are simultaneously mixing a melting pot while at the same time hyper-hyphen-identifying everyone. I'm suddenly not in a psychologiclly safe place and it turns into a mess.
That's what happened with Twitter, that will happen with Threads (and I hate all the "OMG this is amazing" stuff....Notes has it too and then along comes the trolls.)
When Elon bought Twitter, I was wondering whether he would improve or destroy it. Both options made good sense. Apparently he couldn't decide and went on multi-track drifting. For most of the time, it still felt like an improvement on 2020, but now that he has deliberately shadowbanned the whole outside world from twitter, I'm not sure the place is long for this world. Yes, the journos can still read it and write about it, but outsiders won't care if the platform makes them feel excluded; nor will the current political slapfight seem worth watching if you know you have a limited number of posts to view. Good riddance, I guess. Too bad it's taking Elon's reputation along with it, because at this point no one can claim it was his intent.
Do we even need those services? PhpBB-like forums are still alive and well in communities that care about self-sufficiency and being able to decide how to moderate (e.g., themotte.org or DataSecretsLox). Hacker News shows that the tech underlying even a whole-world centralized forum can be minimal and written by a guy as a hobby. And everyone now knows that the internet can neither be trusted to forget nor to remember, so the sort of people who care about the work they produce know they cannot just park it in a reddit thread and hope it will be around in 10 years.
You nailed it - there is no bridge and cannot be
So like the Religious wars in Europe of the Shiite split in Islam
A brilliant insight that changes the game
I agree that power corrupts and it’s a significant problem in this context but I also think that moderating large social media platforms is genuinely very hard.
Also, I am not sure if threads will be a big thing (or even a thing) but there is certainly an internet split trend. Even on regional level, first we had global web, then global and Chinese, now it seems there is Russian/CIS web as well and even European and American web seems to be slowly drifting away.
P.S PayPal is a terrible company/product and also very different from Twitter
Great post, however, "...Musk announced calling someone “cis” or “cisgender” is a punishable offense on Twitter..." is not true. It was definitely reported this way, but if you look at the tweets, he said cis or cisgender are slurs, but not that they are a punishable offense. Sense he also said that continued harassment of individuals is punishable in a later tweet, it is definitely implied, but it would be wrong to say that he said calling someone cis or cisgender is a punishable offense.