I remember all too well when Twitter came on the scene, threatening the hegemony of the blogosphere as the means by which ordinary folk were able to put thoughts in writing for a broad array of other ordinary folk to read. In the early days, some tried to call it “micro-blogging,” as if to trade off the popularity of the blogosphere by framing it as blogging for people with extremely short attention spans.
In the beginning, I refused to believe it had legs.
Seriously, who has the time for this? Who cares? If you want to know what’s going on in the life of the people you care about, speak to them. Can’t you see the kid with the crackberry flipping back and forth between Facebook and twitter and blogs and email, all while you’re sitting there trying to have a conversation. He’s living online and ignoring the real person in front of him. This is progress?
And I proudly proclaimed I would not dive down the twitter hole as I had no thoughts that could be adequately expressed in 140 characters. Of course, I was wrong about pretty much everything. Twitter not only became a thing, but a huge thing.
And we may be watching in real time what happens when the level of ruin in a network — specifically X, previously Twitter — reaches the tipping point at which the edifice implodes.
After Elon Musk bought twitter and tried to rename it “X,” because hubris knows no bounds, some fled to other venues. Trump had already created his “Truth Social,” which became his personal silo and, as a money-losing sinkhole, perfectly reflected his business acumen. There were a few others that sought to replace twitter, like Mastodon and Bluesky, to serve as silos for the twitter refugees who sought a silo of their own. Whether users liked it or not, none became the substitute for twitter their founders hoped they would be. Why?
By a network I mean a social arrangement held together by what economists call network externalities — situations in which people find it convenient to engage in some activity because many other people are doing the same thing. A commonplace example is the long-running dominance of Excel spreadsheets; I don’t know anyone who loves Excel, but businesses keep using it largely because everyone else is using it.
The thing about twitter was that everybody was there. It wasn’t so much that twitter was special, offering some techno-magic that drew humanity into its bowels, but that it was there when the time was right for people to find a new online digital square, whether the grass there was greener or weedy or dead. That’s where the people were, and so that’s where the people went to be with other people. There isn’t much point to talking in an empty room since there’s no one there to hear you or reply.
Journalists looked to twitter for what people were thinking, even if it was a poor reflection of reality since only about 3% of users produced 90% of content, and the 3% generally reflected the views of the unduly passionate rather than the normal folks who lurked but rarely contributed. What happened on twitter became news reality, and thus was reported as if this was what normies were thinking. For the media, twitter became the golden goose, the easy source of what people should know about and, thereupon, think about it.
Did Musk kill the golden goose? Twitter, or as Techdirt’s Mike Masnick calls it, ExTwitter, has become a different place of late. While there is much of the same banter, occasionally thoughtful, and less occasionally witty, twits tossed about, there is also a surprising volume of remarkably offensive and assholish twits. The n-word appears with some regularity, and just this morning, some rando replied that I was a “subversive Jew.” While this could have come from right or left, that people are openly and proudly twitting such things reflects the disinhibition that has become ubiquitous on social media.
I’ve looked at the alternatives like Bluesky, and frankly find them a crashing bore. The once-swarming gnats of twitter have now formed the hallelujah chorus of Bluesky, where no one disagrees and no heresy is uttered. This works for some, I suppose, but not for me or others who prefer to engage with ideas beyond “you are so right, Qween!!!”
Is it over? Is the age of the digital village square coming to an end? Maybe it was doomed anyway, as even new tech gets old after a while, and kids hate it when us olds turn their cool, new things into a safe haven for grandmas. And if it’s over, is there anything to replace it? Should there be? What happens if there is no longer a village square, digital or otherwise, to connect people with each other? Twitter may suck now that it embraces the worst impulses of the idiocracy, but doesn’t isolation suck even worse?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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I was banned from pre-Musk twitter for pointing out the absurdity of our health system being managed by an obese mentally ill person. I quickly realized that they had done me a favor. Sitting in front of the computer reading garbage and responding to it is not a good use of my time.
If you live in the city and thus have nothing to do outside, or maybe you just don’t appreciate the value of the real world, then Twitter is great. The only problem is those annoying people who need to be censored. The solution is a snowflake silo, but since you are a special snowflake, that silo needs to be tailored especially for you. So far, nobody has been up to the task of constructing a special silo for every snowflake. Either they allow Nazis and fascists to call you nasty names, or they censor your totally inoffensive posts.
I expect that “AI” will eventually solve this problem. The successful snowflake silo that replaces Twitter will censor everyone that you hate, and will never censor you, not that you know about, because everyone that you know and love will see everything you post, and you will see everything that they post. All of the brilliant people that agree with you will be there, and none of the idiots who disagree. Like Baby Bear’s bed in the story of Goldilocks, it will be just right, and you will sleep peacefully there.
I agree an AI-moderated community may be possible, but the example of YouTube as a heavily moderated environment is not encouraging.
Reddit has a model that works for some, maybe not for all.
I belong to the tribe whose members, as the joke has it, must have two places of worship: one to attend, and another to denounce as the place of worship that they would not be caught dead in. so I get the urge to derogate x-twitter. the only problem is that one has to be on x-twitter for the big crowd to hear your derogation. And as the other joke has it, bragging is everything: the rabbi’s hole in one golfing on yom kippur was actually punishment from god, for whom can he tell?
Social media is a playground of confirmation and recency bias. The terrible appeal of it was that everyone gets to curate their own view of reality, whether by hate/doom-scrolling or by comfortably siloing themselves with like-minded zealots. Our attention span is so bad that even mass media routinely repackages old news as bombshells, and so on Twitter the sky is always falling because stuff that has happened routinely since the beginning just happened now omg!
After a couple decades of marinating in this supercharged fentanyl, maybe society will start to evolve past it. Hopefully new generations are gaining increased facilities beyond typing 100wpm on their phone. and are learning to see with more clarity how their biases are manipulated by the nefarious nonsense of the pushers.
Lauren Smith at Spike Online discusses the X-odus in a story posted yesterday. She writes about the Flouncers, “all the most pompous people in public life are flouncing off of X, owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, in a spectacular fit of pique.” And about the Remoaners, “who have nobly vowed to stay on X and ‘fight on’, whatever that means.” Smith later adds, “The great and good really are convinced that online speech must be controlled. Otherwise, those pesky voters will continue to defy their supposed betters and vote the ‘wrong’ way.”
I think it’s premature to call Bluesky a silo. It has about 20M users and is growing by 1M/day at the moment. (Twitter has over 300M but is dropping fast, and Musk has no incentive to tell you how fast)
Bluesky will be whatever you make it to be. At the moment, though, it has great tools for moderation and finding people.
You obviously like Bluesky, but I’ve tried it and it’s mostly an echo chamber. It spans liberal to progressive, but that’s pretty much all there is and all there will ever be. It’s never going to reach critical mass the way twitter did.
It’s too early in the game for Bluesky to know if it will reach critical mass. That’s why I focused on its tools/functionality.
Like Scott, I also panned Twitter at the start. I was wrong.
At the moment, though, the top 100 follows are filled with lawyers and journalists. For whatever that may be worth.
The number of people who want to be insulated from differing opinions is small, and I believe that we have already reached peak snowflakery. Platforms that cater to this audience will fail.
Even hardcore MSM believer normies like our benevolent host can’t stand the censorship-nanny intolerance of these “safe” platforms. Nobody likes being called nasty names, but in order to be free from that, you have to give up the ability to offend stupid people, and where is the fun in that? The vast majority of people are starting to realize that censorship, if encouraged, will target them.
An echo chamber that attempts to censor everything that offends anyone will eventually have nothing left.
I forget who said it, but, “When I was young, I thought that reading minds would be a great super power. Then along came Facebook and Twitter…”
But finding cute animal videos and Actual Relevant Thoughts from another (unnamed) site is worthwhile. Otherwise, I prefer long thinking pieces to agree or disagree with.
Missing the forest for the trees, eh? There is a cycle going on at Twitter, YouTube and every element of the interactive internet: people reverting to lurking, then leaving when everything enshittifies.
The town square metaphor has one aspect that is often overlooked–many, if not an outright majority, of people that participate say nothing at all. Lurking in public is the default setting–just taking it all in.
Lurking is also the basic, default setting for interaction online. One reads before writing anything, after all-it’s built-in. Take 4-Chan and 8-Chan, the precursors to what is occurring now at Twitter. One might lurk there to see unusual art, or the musings of unusual people…until the ugliest aspects of humanity saw the opportunity to post unusual art and musings, and the whole thing enshittifies. Isn’t this what is occurring at Twitter now?
The cycle of lurking and enshittification continues unabated, only made worse when fools with too much money and time on their hands take control and bombard everybody with advertising–taking enshittification to a different order of magnitude and eventually driving even the lurkers away…or becoming truly stupid and declaring something like Twitter should become a subscription-based service…
So one should merely expect more of the same. Twitter’s enshittification began long before a certain EV and rocket-obsessed man took over in October 2022, and the ability to lurk on the site is fast disappearing.
So wring your hands over what’s happening on various social media sites, but realize you are spitting into the wind. Once enshittification begins it is a one way ratchet, and Twitter is no different.
I’ve seen several Leftists in my social network proclaiming their departure from Twitter after the election. I mostly shrug since I thought Twitter was a cesspit long before Elon Musk was involved. I like Tumblr myself, the lack of algorithm and corporate neglect make it more interesting.
For folks that have to have their 250 characters I recommend Mastodon
Twofer Tuesday.
This Blue Sky is the good stuff.
I hate to use a Twitter/X link in a comment, but given the topic of conversation, it seems apropos. CNN just did a segment showing the partisan shift on Twitter/X, as a news source, from pre-Musk to current times. Unsurprisingly, years ago, when Twitter was moderated by the previous regime, it was mostly Democrats who got their “news” from Twitter. Today the partisan split is almost identical. I think everyone can agree there is a fair amount of unhinged and offensive commentary on Twitter/X, but anyone who has been on the platform for more than a decade can attest to the fact that, for all intents and purposes, there was just as much unhinged and offensive content in the past (even if the political leaning of that content was slightly more skewed towards Democrats).
https://x.com/ByronYork/status/1859018851998204109
At the end of the day, if we want even a semblance of free speech and free discourse on a platform, that is going to include a lot of knuckleheads and idiots that are offensive and/or not worth listening to. But that is a small price to pay for a place where we can have a (relatively) unmoderated discussion about issues and current events, rather than cloistering ourselves in one of the many sanitized echo chambers filled with people who all agree with each other.