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As someone from Eastern Europe where no one uses Twitter and no one uses Whatsapp - it’s fun to look at these collapsing at least partially.
by akmarinov 4y ago
As someone from Eastern Europe where no one uses Twitter and no one uses Whatsapp - it’s fun to look at these collapsing at least partially.
- kgeist 4y agoBeing from Eastern Europe myself (I confirm that it's not very popular), I never understood the appeal of Twitter in the current form (I'm not talking about the original idea of just posting your current status). It's like a forum with a very bad UI: a post is divided into dozens of subposts and the rest of UI leaves a lot to be desired (mostly about navigation). Before the modern social web era, we already had specialized forums where you could have deep discussions with experts on all sorts of things and those servers were already self-hosted/decentralized, while also having a decent UI with search and all. I myself used to frequent a forum which specialized on linguistics - hosted by a Ukrainian guy in Israel, you could have very interesting discussions with professors, students, amateurs on all kinds of linguistics topics. There was also a sense of community. Then people flocked to centralized big tech social networks and old-school forums started to die out but the desire to have meaningful discussions around some topic stayed so people started retrofitting existing social networks and I think that's how Twitter threads/discussions were born - same old discussions but in a very weird unergonomic format. I think reddit comes closest to the old forums, although I miss the old forum's hierarchical tree structure (for example, a subforum to discuss a subfield of linguistics). What would be awesome if we had those old-school forums back but if they also had some kind of interoperability (same login, search across a fleet of forums, etc.)