3 ms·

I like the party line analogy, and for once the spectre of anonymous trolls isn't used as a catch all. Twitter definitely jumped the shark a while ago. The h

by tnone 10y ago

I like the party line analogy, and for once the spectre of anonymous trolls isn't used as a catch all. Twitter definitely jumped the shark a while ago. The hashtags got hijacked by brands and activists for hollow signaling and marketing. Retweeting and quoting got repurposed to shame and bully. Forced brevity got redirected into hot takes and memes. It was the core community who did it all first. I suspect Twitter has been pushed aside by many for more private and granular services like Discord and Slack. Discovery there is a problem though, a million chat rooms of 10 people each make for a poor community. In some ways it's like the living rooms of Iran: most know public discourse is messed up and broken beyond repair, so they only speak openly behind closed doors. If Twitter could admit that and shift gears, there might still be some hope and a future in it. As it stands, all they're doing is giving people better shovels to dig themselves deeper into the hole of their own making.

flocial 10y ago
Twitter was ahead of its time and tried build a messaging protocol on a doomed stack (ror). Then they nuked the third party apps they didn't already buy and the list goes on. I sometimes wonder how history would be different if they deleted Trump's account for trolling while they still had a chance. I still think a new twitter like service could still be relevant minus the baggage of what twitter has become. They could solve a lot of their issues by quarantining trolls including Trump into a different sub domain. The biggest problem with most social networks is that once celebrities flock to your service they tend to dominate all discourse and you end up with a dichotomy of leaders and followers. Facebook somehow manages to still keep trolls from dominating dialogue though it can be suffocating and reddit manages to counter the trolls with quality subreddits for people fed up with trolls.

by tnone 10y ago

flocial 10y ago

Twitter was ahead of its time and tried build a messaging protocol on a doomed stack (ror). Then they nuked the third party apps they didn't already buy and the list goes on. I sometimes wonder how history would be different if they deleted Trump's account for trolling while they still had a chance. I still think a new twitter like service could still be relevant minus the baggage of what twitter has become. They could solve a lot of their issues by quarantining trolls including Trump into a different sub domain. The biggest problem with most social networks is that once celebrities flock to your service they tend to dominate all discourse and you end up with a dichotomy of leaders and followers. Facebook somehow manages to still keep trolls from dominating dialogue though it can be suffocating and reddit manages to counter the trolls with quality subreddits for people fed up with trolls.