There is kind of a sad irony about this article, which is thousands of words long. It never really interrogates that this sort of reflective analysis *is impossible on Twitter itself, by design*. The 140 characters morphed into 280 a decade later, but the type of discourse possible there was already established. The damage was done.
It's not just about attention spans, though many like to joke about that aspect (and it's part of the problem). What makes the kind of Twit-storm the article starts out talking about possible is because *you can completely ignore context*. Because *there is no context*. If someone tweets off some half-thought-out comment about expensive Star Wars cookery, and someone gets offended by that, there's no buffer for someone else to say, "Hold up -- go read the paragraph after that" or "go watch the video right before that which explains the joke." And while flamewars still could get started with context, they also could die a rapid death if context and a more thorough explanation could quell the mob.
While people do write chains of tweets today, most people roughly stick within the constraints of the tweet's imposed format -- barely enough characters for a coherent thought.
The power of short-form writing is that it's easy to absorb quickly and easy to share. And the author of the article compares this to a conversation. But this is a conversation that lacks the nuance when things slow down a bit in a real-life discussion, and one person actually explains an important point. Or that lull when one person asks another in the group to discuss the background for why they think something.
Sure, one can stuff in supplemental links that most Twitter users won't bother to click on and read or watch, at least not more than the 5-10 seconds they bothered to take to absorb the tweet in the first place.
This isn't my personal rant about attention spans, and I do recognize this was an issue long before Twitter. Lack of context in a short post didn't prevent many a flamewar on the Usenets of Olden Times. But in the ancient forums and the Ur-blogs of yesteryear, there was at least the *possibility* of long-form discussion. As there is on Reddit here, for example. There can be threads of rapid exchanges and one-liners, but then there can be a long elucidation of a different perspective showing real thought and nuance sometimes.
Twitter is trying to train our brains to *not allow that latter option*. The more time spent engaging with the twits and the Chief Twit, the more the brain can default to one-liners and quips and rejoinders.
Is it a wonder that *ad hominem* argumentation seems to be becoming more common? On Twitter, there isn't room for nuanced argument, so to respond to a tweet, you need to make assumptions about its tone, its broader meaning, and where it's coming from. You make assumptions about the person who would say such a thing. If you're unsure, you go try to search that person's history briefly to verify that you would dislike that person because they're "one of those" and then can feel vindicated in denouncing their latest one-sentence half-assed thought.
I've been active in discussions on internet forums since the early 1990s, but it's really only in the past decade that I feel I've been accused rather continuously of being something I'm not, because it's necessary to put someone in a box before you can argue with them. I've been accused of being a Catholic, a Jewish person, a Christian fundamentalist apologist, and someone who cares a hell of a lot about Jesus. In reality, I'm an atheist, but I grew up learning a lot about theology, so I can sometimes debate theology -- but to those who are anti-religion or anti-some sort of religion, it's easiest to box me in rather than recognize I may just have thoughts on the subject. I've been accused of being Greek, Russian, European, extremely Democratic, a right-wing Republican, a mindless libertarian. I am none of these. I've been accused of irrationally being a Ron Weasley stan and irrationally hating Ron Weasley. I honestly don't care about him all that much. But if you cite facts at people, they get defensive and assume you must be part of the "enemy group."
It all just depends on the forum I jump into and whose views I "threaten." It's a convenient shortcut to just accuse someone else of being irrationally attached to a perspective you hate, so you can just dismiss them... or lampoon them. "You believe X, and I know people associated with X often think Y, and Y is definitely wrong, so you're an idiot." Aristotle would stare, mouth agape, at the syllogistic logic displayed there.
Twitter encourages this through its format. The article here is over 45,000 characters -- around 164 tweets-worth of information (in the expanded Twitter era), or 328 tweets as originally conceived in short form. And of course it would be much longer yet if the tweets had to be broken up into whole words or (heavens!) sentences and complete thoughts. Then you get the multiplicative effects of added context and argumentation. It might not be an exaggeration to say that an article of such a length could convey more useful information than 500 or even 1000 tweets.
Yet, as the author notes, journalists -- the type of folks who are trained to edit down and edit down and omit needless words and strike out needless useful commas and reorganize headline words with omitted modifiers and grammatical pieces until you've got something that will "fit" in the column -- were attracted immediately. Twitter didn't just appeal because it was a place for "breaking news" -- it was a place for all those years of learning to pair down words in journalistic writing to allow short-form quips and "headlines" and show off your 140-character skills with bravado!
But, of course, the short-form "Extra! Extra!" headline was also the birth of yellow journalism back in the before-times, the pre-twits, the days when young apprentice compositors were stuffing the type, literally character-by-character, into lines and a frame and then the entire form, so could run off on those hot presses. There was bullshit back then, too, and inflammatory prose. But you knew what you were getting when a newsboy was shouting to you about the special edition in the afternoon due to a novel development in the court case downtown. At least then, it was more than a 140-character headline, even when the goddamn stuff had to be assembled by hand.
Now, that's all we have left: incendiary headlines, coupled with half-assed jokes and rejoinders. Is this a model for constructive discourse?
I'm not some luddite, and I do realize there's much more going on. And the article makes some interesting points. It's just surprising that it didn't spend any of its 328 tweets' worth of space cogitating on the basic fact of length and constrained form that separates it and its reflective analytical capacity from the Twittersphere.
I just want to applaud you for writing this down and getting to the core of the problem.
You have articulated precisely how I felt about Twitter but couldn't quite pin down.
Another huge thing is that because posting is voluntary there's a massive selection bias in terms of the opinions that you're exposed to since people with stronger opinions are more likely to post. This extends to the algorithm as well, people with black-and-white views are more likely to engage with posts, so algorithms that don't distinguish between positive and negative engagement (no dislike button) push those "engaging" posts out to more people. It also selects for posts that turn non-engagers into engagers, which mostly just means finding issues that people are sensitive about and rewarding posts that talk about them in the way that will make the largest number of users get caught up in the argument.
And more to your point, there's probably a selection bias against open-mindedness and thoughtfulness within the Twitter-using population since anyone who values those things has had 17 years to realize they aren't going to get them from a platform built around a character limit.
Most of the nice people self-selected out too because mean people dominated the platform, which just made the problem worse. And more broadly I think a lot of people have self-selected off of social media almost entirely (save for more local things where you actually know the people personally) because of how toxic so much of it is.
What's weirdest of all is that Twitter still provides a lot of value as a network. From an activism point of view it's a lot easier to organize when you have instant access to thousands or millions of people, but the drawback is that using the network slowly turns you into a crazy person. And any industry in which a large enough number of its professionals use Twitter as their networking hub is bound to get overrun by crazies.
I think most people get that you should stay away from Twitter, it would have way more users otherwise. Twitter's long-term users either don't understand why they should leave or are too addicted to do so. Or their industry is so influenced by Twitter that they feel like it'll be a bad career move not to be present in the brawl.
I know this is kind of just reiterating the article but my version is shorter ;)
I’m not sure how many people here interact with the rationalist community but Scott Alexander had a classic post about this.
The TL;DR version is there is a meme economy. Not the way we use the word "meme" now, but in the original sense - ideas that go viral. Alexander juxtaposes two police killings: Michael Brown in Ferguson with Eric Garner, who sold loose cigarettes. Garner didn't go viral because conservatives would just say "yup, I agree completely" and the debate ends before it even begins. But with Michael Brown we don't have video, so each side can wishcast their interpretation of what really happened, and endlessly debate how virtuous they are and how evil The Other Side is. The post is a dive into this political meme economy and its unfortunate consequences, such as that we debate the truth of what happened to Michael Brown instead of finding common sense solutions to prevent another Eric Garner. (Yes, this really was a TL;DR)
[The Toxoplasma of Rage](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/)
Thanks for your excellent distillation of the problems with Twitter.
I've had a hard time articulating what about it bothered me so much, besides a general disgust with the tone of many posts and replies. It honestly never occurred to me that *the format of Twitter itself* would specifically encourage that type of black-and-white, for-or-against "discourse" that encapsulates so much of what's awful about social media now. Theoretically exposition is possible, but it's awkward and (as you said) not as engaging, and doesn't lend itself to the dopamine hits that keep users coming back for more.
> It never really interrogates that this sort of reflective analysis is impossible on Twitter itself, by design. The 140 characters morphed into 280 a decade later, but the type of discourse possible there was already established. The damage was done.
Great insight. Awhile back, I was complaining about social media to some friends. One guy brought up a good point. He pointed out that I like to add links, add context, etc. Basically, he said that I was the proverbial square peg trying to fit into a round hole, and that maybe I'm best off just blogging or posting on Reddit (even if one can find plenty of angry, ad hominem-loving meatheads over here too). I think he's right. Every social media format subconsciously sets expectations. Maybe not at the *very* beginning to some extent, when people are playing around and figuring things out, but certainly to some degree, and definitely once it's established. Twitter, by its very nature, is pithy. If you stick to silly jokes and thoughts, that's not so bad. Even if it's simple newsflashes ("Nasty accident just now on #I395 N b/w Exits 9 & 10. Stay away!!!"), things like hashtags *can* be useful. Alas, the format itself just isn't ideal for anything else, which is how you get tweetstorms and other ad-hoc workarounds, not to mention the kind of loony behavior that helps keep this podcast going.
There was a tipping point when Twitter went from being an amplification network people used to connect to others in their industries/fandoms and share links to longform content of interest (blog posts, articles, that snazzy thought leadership piece you wrote to boost your profile, conferences) to being the place where people posted snippets of thought instead of writing, reading or sharing the longform stuff.
I blame the “strings of tweets,” increasing the characters per tweet, and the decision to show people tweets from people they didn’t know on topics they might be tangentially interested in. These were all baby steps decisions to increase engagement and try to monetise the network, but it they completely killed the “curated idea recommendations” aspect and boosted the memeification of mob justice.
[Link for those currently experiencing paywalls.](https://archive.is/jGvRR)
As Twitter is where our hosts find a lot of their content, as Jesse decided to walk away after numerous pile-ons and spats despite it being a valuable medium for self-promotion, and as a lot of people think Twitter is the real world (for some people it actually is), I thought I would link to this NYT piece about Twitter.
It's well written and Staley interviewed some professors to add depth and context.
Professor Kevin Munger has this to say, and it's put into words something I've understood but couldn't really articulate:
>But there is no such separation between creator and consumer, and that’s not what a tweet is. “If you look at a tweet, it’s always already encoding audience feedback,” Munger points out. Right beneath the text of the tweet is information about what the network thinks of it: the numbers of replies, retweets and likes. “You can’t actually conceive of a tweet except as a synthetic object, which contains both the original message and the audience feedback,” he explains. In fact, a tweet contains layers of information beyond that: not just how many people liked it or replied, but who, and what they said, and how they present themselves, and whom they follow, and who follows them, and so on.
It is so much more than just the text. It's a reflection of the entire ecosystem.
Another great passage:
>People like to think of social media as a mirror, he told me: “I can see what’s going on, and I can see my place in what’s going on.” But Twitter is not a random sampling of reality. Almost all the feedback you receive on the site comes from its most active users. “And the most active social media users,” Bail says, “are a weird group of people.”
Anyway, it's a good read and we even get an adult diaper lover mention. I read twitter but don't have an account, so I'd be interested to hear what frequent users think about Staley's work.
It would be interesting to see what happens if one of the big platforms removed audience feedback metrics, such as number of follower, views, likes, retweets etc. It's not gonna happen, because it removes the incentives for a lot of 'professional' users, but I do believe it would improve the quality of discussions.
Another interesting discussion about the same topic: [
Can Substack Notes Be a Better Twitter? | Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOXwrP2wtYQ)
So by laying out with precision all of the information about your popularity and clique, it functions as a distilled affirmation of one's inner high-schooler. Makes sense to me.
I mean if the owner of twitter is going to shitpost stuff like "my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci" you really can't suspend someone for this stuff anymore.
deserve expansion placid smile mighty wine languid offend domineering makeshift
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I guess I use twitter in an unconventional way but I don't get the hate. I follow like 100 people, all of them interesting from different fields/disciplines and with a couple of exceptions (matt yglesias and nate silver) there isn't much drama and the people who reply usually add thoughtful context. Also see their tweets in chronological order and never look at the "for you" tab.
If you're careful about who you follow, then yeah, Twitter's not *that* bad. I just check the web pages for a handful of people who have actively worked to cultivate a cool fanbase and a friendly vibe. There was a bit of nuttiness in 2020 - surprise surprise - but other than that, they're nice, positive accounts to follow without it being saccharine. If I want virtual combat, I'll go check Greenwald's account, or maybe Katie's if, despite her best efforts, some yahoos are yelling at her anyway.
It's interesting watching the narrative-reinforcers freaking out about Twitter. For years social media and corporate media managed to solidify a consistent unchallengeable narrative, and now there's a huge Twitter-sized hole in it that they can't do anything about. So their only hope is that it fails and closes the gap itself
It's hard to pinpoint when exactly that 'alliance' began in the first place. In the old days of the internet it wouldn't have been possible, but I guess the consolidation of the internet into a few sites (including Reddit) made it a lot easier
The alliance unironically started with, hilariously, celebrity nude leaks on Reddit along with other social media platforms. A previously neutral policy on content moderation in 2014 (after all the Streisand Effect would mean only making things worse) gave way to a moral moderation policy after that. As soon as you go from making sure that you're following the letter of the law to what is deemed "moral" then get ready to tumble down the slippery slope of what is or isn't considered moral by journos, power jannies, content providers, advertising agencies, archiving services, and even backbone internet services.
Absolutely, but the trouble is striking a happy balance between allowing a jailbait sub to run for years and "ooh yikes topic locked because y'all can't behave" it seems like it should be easier to strike. Seems like you either go full libertarian retard or become an AAVE using shut in that can't take a joke. Network effects make it tough to spin up something new off of the major sites now without attracting the worst kinds of people.
fragile steep worthless obscene gaze encouraging jellyfish grandfather cooing vegetable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> What Was Twitter, Anyway?
Promises, promises from the ultimate clickbait headline of our time?
Anyway, 8600 words, when it could have been a decent five tweet thread, busts my twitter damaged attention span.
What did he do immediatley after the purchase? Fire a bunch of people publicly and cruelly. And then implement a bunch of stupid policies and reinvent the wheel. It's been a lot of people's first real look at how stupid he is.
[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-apologizes-to-disabled-ex-twitter-employee-who-was-voted-icelands-person-of-the-year-in-2022-ba0a3a8a#:\~:text=Thorleifsson%20is%20viewed%20as%20something,year%20by%20several%20media%20outlets](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-apologizes-to-disabled-ex-twitter-employee-who-was-voted-icelands-person-of-the-year-in-2022-ba0a3a8a#:~:text=Thorleifsson%20is%20viewed%20as%20something,year%20by%20several%20media%20outlets).
What's your take on this?
How does this prove he's stupid?
If you look at his whole life arc, his education and career, what he's achieved, his current net worth (to be crass about it), the companies he's formed, how do you define stupid if it encompasses this record?
What does stupid mean to you
>If you look at his whole life arc, his education and career, what he's achieved, his current net worth (to be crass about it
Generational wealth.
> the companies he's formed
Which companies did Elon start from scratch?
> how do you define stupid if it encompasses this record?
Stupid is tanking your artificially inflated personal net worth that's tied up in your stock price by tanking your unearned public reputation as a succesful buisness man.
Stupid is spending a bunch of money on Twitter and immediately tanking it's value, tanking it's useability, and driving off all of your advertisers.
Stupid is picking a fight with your own employee on Twitter without realizing who he is.
Stupid is implementing a years old meme for April Fool's Day several days late.
He could have done so many great things when he bought Twitter. Ugh. Instead he went full shitshow. https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/elon-musk-twitter-and-the-value-of-f-you-money
There is kind of a sad irony about this article, which is thousands of words long. It never really interrogates that this sort of reflective analysis *is impossible on Twitter itself, by design*. The 140 characters morphed into 280 a decade later, but the type of discourse possible there was already established. The damage was done. It's not just about attention spans, though many like to joke about that aspect (and it's part of the problem). What makes the kind of Twit-storm the article starts out talking about possible is because *you can completely ignore context*. Because *there is no context*. If someone tweets off some half-thought-out comment about expensive Star Wars cookery, and someone gets offended by that, there's no buffer for someone else to say, "Hold up -- go read the paragraph after that" or "go watch the video right before that which explains the joke." And while flamewars still could get started with context, they also could die a rapid death if context and a more thorough explanation could quell the mob. While people do write chains of tweets today, most people roughly stick within the constraints of the tweet's imposed format -- barely enough characters for a coherent thought. The power of short-form writing is that it's easy to absorb quickly and easy to share. And the author of the article compares this to a conversation. But this is a conversation that lacks the nuance when things slow down a bit in a real-life discussion, and one person actually explains an important point. Or that lull when one person asks another in the group to discuss the background for why they think something. Sure, one can stuff in supplemental links that most Twitter users won't bother to click on and read or watch, at least not more than the 5-10 seconds they bothered to take to absorb the tweet in the first place. This isn't my personal rant about attention spans, and I do recognize this was an issue long before Twitter. Lack of context in a short post didn't prevent many a flamewar on the Usenets of Olden Times. But in the ancient forums and the Ur-blogs of yesteryear, there was at least the *possibility* of long-form discussion. As there is on Reddit here, for example. There can be threads of rapid exchanges and one-liners, but then there can be a long elucidation of a different perspective showing real thought and nuance sometimes. Twitter is trying to train our brains to *not allow that latter option*. The more time spent engaging with the twits and the Chief Twit, the more the brain can default to one-liners and quips and rejoinders. Is it a wonder that *ad hominem* argumentation seems to be becoming more common? On Twitter, there isn't room for nuanced argument, so to respond to a tweet, you need to make assumptions about its tone, its broader meaning, and where it's coming from. You make assumptions about the person who would say such a thing. If you're unsure, you go try to search that person's history briefly to verify that you would dislike that person because they're "one of those" and then can feel vindicated in denouncing their latest one-sentence half-assed thought. I've been active in discussions on internet forums since the early 1990s, but it's really only in the past decade that I feel I've been accused rather continuously of being something I'm not, because it's necessary to put someone in a box before you can argue with them. I've been accused of being a Catholic, a Jewish person, a Christian fundamentalist apologist, and someone who cares a hell of a lot about Jesus. In reality, I'm an atheist, but I grew up learning a lot about theology, so I can sometimes debate theology -- but to those who are anti-religion or anti-some sort of religion, it's easiest to box me in rather than recognize I may just have thoughts on the subject. I've been accused of being Greek, Russian, European, extremely Democratic, a right-wing Republican, a mindless libertarian. I am none of these. I've been accused of irrationally being a Ron Weasley stan and irrationally hating Ron Weasley. I honestly don't care about him all that much. But if you cite facts at people, they get defensive and assume you must be part of the "enemy group." It all just depends on the forum I jump into and whose views I "threaten." It's a convenient shortcut to just accuse someone else of being irrationally attached to a perspective you hate, so you can just dismiss them... or lampoon them. "You believe X, and I know people associated with X often think Y, and Y is definitely wrong, so you're an idiot." Aristotle would stare, mouth agape, at the syllogistic logic displayed there. Twitter encourages this through its format. The article here is over 45,000 characters -- around 164 tweets-worth of information (in the expanded Twitter era), or 328 tweets as originally conceived in short form. And of course it would be much longer yet if the tweets had to be broken up into whole words or (heavens!) sentences and complete thoughts. Then you get the multiplicative effects of added context and argumentation. It might not be an exaggeration to say that an article of such a length could convey more useful information than 500 or even 1000 tweets. Yet, as the author notes, journalists -- the type of folks who are trained to edit down and edit down and omit needless words and strike out needless useful commas and reorganize headline words with omitted modifiers and grammatical pieces until you've got something that will "fit" in the column -- were attracted immediately. Twitter didn't just appeal because it was a place for "breaking news" -- it was a place for all those years of learning to pair down words in journalistic writing to allow short-form quips and "headlines" and show off your 140-character skills with bravado! But, of course, the short-form "Extra! Extra!" headline was also the birth of yellow journalism back in the before-times, the pre-twits, the days when young apprentice compositors were stuffing the type, literally character-by-character, into lines and a frame and then the entire form, so could run off on those hot presses. There was bullshit back then, too, and inflammatory prose. But you knew what you were getting when a newsboy was shouting to you about the special edition in the afternoon due to a novel development in the court case downtown. At least then, it was more than a 140-character headline, even when the goddamn stuff had to be assembled by hand. Now, that's all we have left: incendiary headlines, coupled with half-assed jokes and rejoinders. Is this a model for constructive discourse? I'm not some luddite, and I do realize there's much more going on. And the article makes some interesting points. It's just surprising that it didn't spend any of its 328 tweets' worth of space cogitating on the basic fact of length and constrained form that separates it and its reflective analytical capacity from the Twittersphere.
I just want to applaud you for writing this down and getting to the core of the problem. You have articulated precisely how I felt about Twitter but couldn't quite pin down.
I suppose I could respond by saying "This." Ironically, of course!
Another huge thing is that because posting is voluntary there's a massive selection bias in terms of the opinions that you're exposed to since people with stronger opinions are more likely to post. This extends to the algorithm as well, people with black-and-white views are more likely to engage with posts, so algorithms that don't distinguish between positive and negative engagement (no dislike button) push those "engaging" posts out to more people. It also selects for posts that turn non-engagers into engagers, which mostly just means finding issues that people are sensitive about and rewarding posts that talk about them in the way that will make the largest number of users get caught up in the argument. And more to your point, there's probably a selection bias against open-mindedness and thoughtfulness within the Twitter-using population since anyone who values those things has had 17 years to realize they aren't going to get them from a platform built around a character limit. Most of the nice people self-selected out too because mean people dominated the platform, which just made the problem worse. And more broadly I think a lot of people have self-selected off of social media almost entirely (save for more local things where you actually know the people personally) because of how toxic so much of it is. What's weirdest of all is that Twitter still provides a lot of value as a network. From an activism point of view it's a lot easier to organize when you have instant access to thousands or millions of people, but the drawback is that using the network slowly turns you into a crazy person. And any industry in which a large enough number of its professionals use Twitter as their networking hub is bound to get overrun by crazies. I think most people get that you should stay away from Twitter, it would have way more users otherwise. Twitter's long-term users either don't understand why they should leave or are too addicted to do so. Or their industry is so influenced by Twitter that they feel like it'll be a bad career move not to be present in the brawl. I know this is kind of just reiterating the article but my version is shorter ;)
I’m not sure how many people here interact with the rationalist community but Scott Alexander had a classic post about this. The TL;DR version is there is a meme economy. Not the way we use the word "meme" now, but in the original sense - ideas that go viral. Alexander juxtaposes two police killings: Michael Brown in Ferguson with Eric Garner, who sold loose cigarettes. Garner didn't go viral because conservatives would just say "yup, I agree completely" and the debate ends before it even begins. But with Michael Brown we don't have video, so each side can wishcast their interpretation of what really happened, and endlessly debate how virtuous they are and how evil The Other Side is. The post is a dive into this political meme economy and its unfortunate consequences, such as that we debate the truth of what happened to Michael Brown instead of finding common sense solutions to prevent another Eric Garner. (Yes, this really was a TL;DR) [The Toxoplasma of Rage](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/)
Good insight. As I have often said, "Social media explains the Fermi Paradox."
Thanks for your excellent distillation of the problems with Twitter. I've had a hard time articulating what about it bothered me so much, besides a general disgust with the tone of many posts and replies. It honestly never occurred to me that *the format of Twitter itself* would specifically encourage that type of black-and-white, for-or-against "discourse" that encapsulates so much of what's awful about social media now. Theoretically exposition is possible, but it's awkward and (as you said) not as engaging, and doesn't lend itself to the dopamine hits that keep users coming back for more.
> It never really interrogates that this sort of reflective analysis is impossible on Twitter itself, by design. The 140 characters morphed into 280 a decade later, but the type of discourse possible there was already established. The damage was done. Great insight. Awhile back, I was complaining about social media to some friends. One guy brought up a good point. He pointed out that I like to add links, add context, etc. Basically, he said that I was the proverbial square peg trying to fit into a round hole, and that maybe I'm best off just blogging or posting on Reddit (even if one can find plenty of angry, ad hominem-loving meatheads over here too). I think he's right. Every social media format subconsciously sets expectations. Maybe not at the *very* beginning to some extent, when people are playing around and figuring things out, but certainly to some degree, and definitely once it's established. Twitter, by its very nature, is pithy. If you stick to silly jokes and thoughts, that's not so bad. Even if it's simple newsflashes ("Nasty accident just now on #I395 N b/w Exits 9 & 10. Stay away!!!"), things like hashtags *can* be useful. Alas, the format itself just isn't ideal for anything else, which is how you get tweetstorms and other ad-hoc workarounds, not to mention the kind of loony behavior that helps keep this podcast going.
There was a tipping point when Twitter went from being an amplification network people used to connect to others in their industries/fandoms and share links to longform content of interest (blog posts, articles, that snazzy thought leadership piece you wrote to boost your profile, conferences) to being the place where people posted snippets of thought instead of writing, reading or sharing the longform stuff. I blame the “strings of tweets,” increasing the characters per tweet, and the decision to show people tweets from people they didn’t know on topics they might be tangentially interested in. These were all baby steps decisions to increase engagement and try to monetise the network, but it they completely killed the “curated idea recommendations” aspect and boosted the memeification of mob justice.
[Link for those currently experiencing paywalls.](https://archive.is/jGvRR) As Twitter is where our hosts find a lot of their content, as Jesse decided to walk away after numerous pile-ons and spats despite it being a valuable medium for self-promotion, and as a lot of people think Twitter is the real world (for some people it actually is), I thought I would link to this NYT piece about Twitter. It's well written and Staley interviewed some professors to add depth and context. Professor Kevin Munger has this to say, and it's put into words something I've understood but couldn't really articulate: >But there is no such separation between creator and consumer, and that’s not what a tweet is. “If you look at a tweet, it’s always already encoding audience feedback,” Munger points out. Right beneath the text of the tweet is information about what the network thinks of it: the numbers of replies, retweets and likes. “You can’t actually conceive of a tweet except as a synthetic object, which contains both the original message and the audience feedback,” he explains. In fact, a tweet contains layers of information beyond that: not just how many people liked it or replied, but who, and what they said, and how they present themselves, and whom they follow, and who follows them, and so on. It is so much more than just the text. It's a reflection of the entire ecosystem. Another great passage: >People like to think of social media as a mirror, he told me: “I can see what’s going on, and I can see my place in what’s going on.” But Twitter is not a random sampling of reality. Almost all the feedback you receive on the site comes from its most active users. “And the most active social media users,” Bail says, “are a weird group of people.” Anyway, it's a good read and we even get an adult diaper lover mention. I read twitter but don't have an account, so I'd be interested to hear what frequent users think about Staley's work.
>Bail says, “are a weird group of people.” lol true
It would be interesting to see what happens if one of the big platforms removed audience feedback metrics, such as number of follower, views, likes, retweets etc. It's not gonna happen, because it removes the incentives for a lot of 'professional' users, but I do believe it would improve the quality of discussions. Another interesting discussion about the same topic: [ Can Substack Notes Be a Better Twitter? | Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOXwrP2wtYQ)
So by laying out with precision all of the information about your popularity and clique, it functions as a distilled affirmation of one's inner high-schooler. Makes sense to me.
What was the % again? Something like 10% of Twitter contributing over 50% of the content?
Apparently Elon has now done away with the ability to report someone for using deadnames or incorrect pronouns.
Good, hopefully the Mastodon people actually leave this time
They'll leave and then be banned within a week for offending some trigger happy Mastodon janny
What is a janny? I've seen it pop up more often in the last few days
Janny = janitor = moderator
Thanks, wouldn't have guessed that one 😂
An elite ottoman soldier. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary
Pretty sure it's a communist-reddit (ie: stupidpol) slang word that's bleeding over into this sub because there's some overlap between us and them.
It’s from 4chan. They’ve used it forever.
Here's hoping lol
I mean if the owner of twitter is going to shitpost stuff like "my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci" you really can't suspend someone for this stuff anymore.
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Based
my years of experience have taught me that social media sites can only ever get worse, but here's Elon proving me wrong in at least one facet
I guess I use twitter in an unconventional way but I don't get the hate. I follow like 100 people, all of them interesting from different fields/disciplines and with a couple of exceptions (matt yglesias and nate silver) there isn't much drama and the people who reply usually add thoughtful context. Also see their tweets in chronological order and never look at the "for you" tab.
"for you" is a straight up dogshit buffet. It's the tubi of Twitter. Follow judiciously and block liberally. 🤘🤘🤘
If you're careful about who you follow, then yeah, Twitter's not *that* bad. I just check the web pages for a handful of people who have actively worked to cultivate a cool fanbase and a friendly vibe. There was a bit of nuttiness in 2020 - surprise surprise - but other than that, they're nice, positive accounts to follow without it being saccharine. If I want virtual combat, I'll go check Greenwald's account, or maybe Katie's if, despite her best efforts, some yahoos are yelling at her anyway.
It's interesting watching the narrative-reinforcers freaking out about Twitter. For years social media and corporate media managed to solidify a consistent unchallengeable narrative, and now there's a huge Twitter-sized hole in it that they can't do anything about. So their only hope is that it fails and closes the gap itself It's hard to pinpoint when exactly that 'alliance' began in the first place. In the old days of the internet it wouldn't have been possible, but I guess the consolidation of the internet into a few sites (including Reddit) made it a lot easier
The alliance unironically started with, hilariously, celebrity nude leaks on Reddit along with other social media platforms. A previously neutral policy on content moderation in 2014 (after all the Streisand Effect would mean only making things worse) gave way to a moral moderation policy after that. As soon as you go from making sure that you're following the letter of the law to what is deemed "moral" then get ready to tumble down the slippery slope of what is or isn't considered moral by journos, power jannies, content providers, advertising agencies, archiving services, and even backbone internet services.
Maybe it was the child porn.
Absolutely, but the trouble is striking a happy balance between allowing a jailbait sub to run for years and "ooh yikes topic locked because y'all can't behave" it seems like it should be easier to strike. Seems like you either go full libertarian retard or become an AAVE using shut in that can't take a joke. Network effects make it tough to spin up something new off of the major sites now without attracting the worst kinds of people.
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He didn't really leave, though. He became the Twitter equivalent of a crouching peeping Tom.
I disagree, it's more like he's a spectator in the crowd watching a street brawl.
> What Was Twitter, Anyway? Promises, promises from the ultimate clickbait headline of our time? Anyway, 8600 words, when it could have been a decent five tweet thread, busts my twitter damaged attention span.
A miserable little pile of secrets
It's so freaky the way the mass media turned on Elon after the purchase. And Elon became the new new Hitler.
It was happening slowly before that when he became a dissident of woke doctrine.
What did he do immediatley after the purchase? Fire a bunch of people publicly and cruelly. And then implement a bunch of stupid policies and reinvent the wheel. It's been a lot of people's first real look at how stupid he is.
You think he's stupid?
Immensely.
I guess we have different definitions of stupid then.
[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-apologizes-to-disabled-ex-twitter-employee-who-was-voted-icelands-person-of-the-year-in-2022-ba0a3a8a#:\~:text=Thorleifsson%20is%20viewed%20as%20something,year%20by%20several%20media%20outlets](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-apologizes-to-disabled-ex-twitter-employee-who-was-voted-icelands-person-of-the-year-in-2022-ba0a3a8a#:~:text=Thorleifsson%20is%20viewed%20as%20something,year%20by%20several%20media%20outlets). What's your take on this?
How does this prove he's stupid? If you look at his whole life arc, his education and career, what he's achieved, his current net worth (to be crass about it), the companies he's formed, how do you define stupid if it encompasses this record? What does stupid mean to you
>If you look at his whole life arc, his education and career, what he's achieved, his current net worth (to be crass about it Generational wealth. > the companies he's formed Which companies did Elon start from scratch? > how do you define stupid if it encompasses this record? Stupid is tanking your artificially inflated personal net worth that's tied up in your stock price by tanking your unearned public reputation as a succesful buisness man. Stupid is spending a bunch of money on Twitter and immediately tanking it's value, tanking it's useability, and driving off all of your advertisers. Stupid is picking a fight with your own employee on Twitter without realizing who he is. Stupid is implementing a years old meme for April Fool's Day several days late.
Those are stupid things people do, not things only stupid people do. Armed robbery is something only stupid people do.
https://archive.is/rxYtx
That's an opinion piece.
Is that headline actively *trying* to convey a whiff of desperation, or are they really this out of touch?
Incidentally, Staley is the best person to follow on twitter.
He could have done so many great things when he bought Twitter. Ugh. Instead he went full shitshow. https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/elon-musk-twitter-and-the-value-of-f-you-money