8 ms·

The best alternative to twitter is no twitter. Let me explain. The feed and micro blogging format is a recipe for disaster. It's a combination of dopamine hits,

by asim 4y ago

The best alternative to twitter is no twitter. Let me explain. The feed and micro blogging format is a recipe for disaster. It's a combination of dopamine hits, crack addiction and rage inducing hyperbole. While there's merits to such a service, it's not clear they outweigh the costs of the format. When it's too easy for people to tweet their thoughts we end up in a disarray of thought leadership from mostly clueless people or those who elevate their significance based on number of followers. In all honesty the best alternative to twitter is no twitter, until we find a better format for community discussion. Maybe it's private community chat, or similar, not sure. Maybe it's the end of public social. I think a lot of us are just looking for quieter smaller groups to share with. A note on Mastodon. It's going closer in that direction of community specific servers but I think a better alternative would be if we could keep it private and cap group sizes. Right now it just feels like a replica of twitter segregated by topic or community. All the inherit bad behaviour still propagates because of the form factor.

3watts 4y ago
This is the best reply.
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  Yes and no. No because it is missing one popular use case: getting updates from projects that don't have mailing lists or RSS feeds.
  - tomku 4y ago
    Mailing lists and RSS feeds don't incentivize me to compulsively check them so that the important updates I care about aren't buried under a 47-post rant about why I should be angry about something in the news or hidden by an algorithm because it thinks I'm more likely to engage with a bunch of memes. Maybe it works if you only follow low-traffic announcement accounts, but when I was actively using Twitter I found that I regularly missed posts like that because they either didn't get engagement (algo timeline) or were posted when I wasn't paying attention (chrono timeline). I understand that a lot of projects have chosen to rely on social media for that kind of news for various reasons, but it's not a good situation.
  - mikae1 4y ago
    If the project is in Mastodon, it has an RSS feed. Just subscribe to https://domain.tld/@username.rss https://domain.tld/@username.rss.
toastercat 4y ago
Time for a return to the InvisionFree/phpBB forums of old (I fully acknowledge those also had their fair share of toxicity).
badloginagain 4y ago
I'll take the other side of this. While there certainly are examples of click bait and inflammatory BS on Twitter, there is also an element of legitimate thought leadership that can go viral in a way you just don't have on any other social media platform. There are few other platforms I can think of where someone with deep expertise on any subject can publish interesting, informed takes on their field- On a platform where the barrier to entry to publish is near-zero, provided with a random chance to go viral. When I used Twitter, seeking out and following these kinds of experts actually made the experience of Twitter a rich and informative platform- albeit one where you constantly needed to "weed the garden". The problem of course is that was a thin layer of wheat in a big bucket of chaff- but there is a better answer to "best alternative to twitter is no twitter": The best alternative to Twitter is one that can maximize virality for expert opinions; incentivizing other users to write engaging, structured opinions. Try to build a system where the best way to engagement farm is to show real thought leadership.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- stubybubs 4y ago
  Well, here we are seemingly near the end of the thing, and I'm not sure it's worth the risk. Twitter was really good at getting people to write, letting them know that others are interested in their area of research or expertise, and I hope they continue to do that. But the awfulness of the propaganda just doesn't seem like it's worth it. Aside from the format being the message (ideas devoid of nuance) I think the incentives are all wrong. Twitter is grade school. You don't "win" by being right, you get that be being funny, sarcastic, a little cruel, and getting lots of likes. I'd like to see a return to a platform at a slightly elevated level. Asking for it to be like a university discussion group is maybe a little bit too much, but how about like, the last year of high school, when all the drama has died down and you've all pretty much agreed to be friends? I feel like that's the time when people start listening to reasoned arguments over name calling. I don't know what that platform looks like, and it's almost sure to be less viral that Twitter. But if that last 3 years have taught me anything it's that fast-moving viruses are bad. I think we should slow down.
lapcat 4y ago
> The best alternative to twitter is no twitter. I used to think this. And by "used to" I mean 3 months ago, after I quit Twitter. Initially, I didn't miss social media. I had a nice restful period, a vacation if you will. Eventually, though, I found that I did miss it, so I signed up for Mastodon. Some of the same problems as Twitter had exist on Mastodon too, I admit. I guess I am addicted anyway. In recent years I've quit both alcohol and caffeine entirely, yet I'm not sure I can quit social media entirely. It's my weakness.
starkd 4y ago
It would be unfair to evaluate twitter according to current features. It is now being actively developed, looking for new features to give it more value. The pre-elon twitter stagnated on a static set of features. For instance, they recently filed to turn it into a payment platform like paypal. These kinds of changes can be a game-changer. Whether they happen or not is another issue, but twitter is no longer a corporate social media, it is a startup.
tomku 4y ago
This is exactly right, but it's really hard to see when you're still in the mindset of needing to be part of The Discourse. The people I know who were Twitter addicts and left for Mastodon have become Mastodon addicts. They've kept all the self-destructive attitudes they learned on Twitter and view Mastodon as better precisely because it lets them indulge with less out-group interference. I see a lot of arguments that Mastodon is better because it lacks various bad things about Twitter (algorithmic sorting, the misalignment of incentives between Twitter-as-a-company and users, centralized moderation/ownership) and it certainly is in some sense, but we're still living in a world where the social norms that were created on Twitter completely dominate any other conception of how to behave. There can be no online space that is "like Twitter but good" because anything that is sufficiently like Twitter to appeal to Twitter refugees will import enough of the culture to end up with Twitter's problems. Mastodon might be a step towards fixing the problem, but undoing the damage caused by Twitter will require the grueling and unpleasant work of changing ourselves as well as changing our technology. The only option for us as individuals in the short term is to reject the entire model and choose to engage with other people in ways that respect each other’s fundamental humanity. Prefer in-person to online. Prefer one-on-one communication to broadcasting. Prefer small groups to large groups. Prefer local to global. Prefer synchronous communication to async. Prefer video or voice to text. Trust me, I know each of those preferences is difficult in its own way and there’s excellent reasons to choose the other option in many circumstances (like this post, in which I'm violating almost all of them!), but they’re also powerful tools for connecting with others as whole people rather than as simplified abstractions. We should work to make it easier to connect people (particularly across geographical and linguistic boundaries) but it cannot be at the cost of flattening each of us into the most shallow, reductive versions of ourselves so that we fit through the machinery we’ve built and can be easily consumed by strangers on the other end.
- asim 4y ago
  Good rationale and I agree with all of it. Looks like Mastodon has become the self reinforcing echo chamber of the far right for any group. Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right? There's a feeling of safety in that lack of challenge. A lot of people will say twitter is an abusive place and I don't disagree but to never have your points of view ever challenged again is incredibly dangerous. It's the path towards ignorance. We as humans are imperfect and constantly learning. Part of that means accepting that maybe our opinions or viewpoints could be wrong and taking a step back to think about it when someone does question the things we say. Now there's communities on Mastodon where that will never happen again. It'll be something that creates a new type of privilege. The privilege of choosing to be and believe whatever you want without anyone ever telling you you're wrong.

by asim 4y ago

3watts 4y ago

This is the best reply.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Yes and no. No because it is missing one popular use case: getting updates from projects that don't have mailing lists or RSS feeds.
- tomku 4y ago
  Mailing lists and RSS feeds don't incentivize me to compulsively check them so that the important updates I care about aren't buried under a 47-post rant about why I should be angry about something in the news or hidden by an algorithm because it thinks I'm more likely to engage with a bunch of memes. Maybe it works if you only follow low-traffic announcement accounts, but when I was actively using Twitter I found that I regularly missed posts like that because they either didn't get engagement (algo timeline) or were posted when I wasn't paying attention (chrono timeline). I understand that a lot of projects have chosen to rely on social media for that kind of news for various reasons, but it's not a good situation.
- mikae1 4y ago
  If the project is in Mastodon, it has an RSS feed. Just subscribe to https://domain.tld/@username.rss https://domain.tld/@username.rss.

toastercat 4y ago

Time for a return to the InvisionFree/phpBB forums of old (I fully acknowledge those also had their fair share of toxicity).

badloginagain 4y ago

I'll take the other side of this. While there certainly are examples of click bait and inflammatory BS on Twitter, there is also an element of legitimate thought leadership that can go viral in a way you just don't have on any other social media platform. There are few other platforms I can think of where someone with deep expertise on any subject can publish interesting, informed takes on their field- On a platform where the barrier to entry to publish is near-zero, provided with a random chance to go viral. When I used Twitter, seeking out and following these kinds of experts actually made the experience of Twitter a rich and informative platform- albeit one where you constantly needed to "weed the garden". The problem of course is that was a thin layer of wheat in a big bucket of chaff- but there is a better answer to "best alternative to twitter is no twitter": The best alternative to Twitter is one that can maximize virality for expert opinions; incentivizing other users to write engaging, structured opinions. Try to build a system where the best way to engagement farm is to show real thought leadership.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stubybubs 4y ago
Well, here we are seemingly near the end of the thing, and I'm not sure it's worth the risk. Twitter was really good at getting people to write, letting them know that others are interested in their area of research or expertise, and I hope they continue to do that. But the awfulness of the propaganda just doesn't seem like it's worth it. Aside from the format being the message (ideas devoid of nuance) I think the incentives are all wrong. Twitter is grade school. You don't "win" by being right, you get that be being funny, sarcastic, a little cruel, and getting lots of likes. I'd like to see a return to a platform at a slightly elevated level. Asking for it to be like a university discussion group is maybe a little bit too much, but how about like, the last year of high school, when all the drama has died down and you've all pretty much agreed to be friends? I feel like that's the time when people start listening to reasoned arguments over name calling. I don't know what that platform looks like, and it's almost sure to be less viral that Twitter. But if that last 3 years have taught me anything it's that fast-moving viruses are bad. I think we should slow down.

lapcat 4y ago

> The best alternative to twitter is no twitter. I used to think this. And by "used to" I mean 3 months ago, after I quit Twitter. Initially, I didn't miss social media. I had a nice restful period, a vacation if you will. Eventually, though, I found that I did miss it, so I signed up for Mastodon. Some of the same problems as Twitter had exist on Mastodon too, I admit. I guess I am addicted anyway. In recent years I've quit both alcohol and caffeine entirely, yet I'm not sure I can quit social media entirely. It's my weakness.

starkd 4y ago

It would be unfair to evaluate twitter according to current features. It is now being actively developed, looking for new features to give it more value. The pre-elon twitter stagnated on a static set of features. For instance, they recently filed to turn it into a payment platform like paypal. These kinds of changes can be a game-changer. Whether they happen or not is another issue, but twitter is no longer a corporate social media, it is a startup.

tomku 4y ago

This is exactly right, but it's really hard to see when you're still in the mindset of needing to be part of The Discourse. The people I know who were Twitter addicts and left for Mastodon have become Mastodon addicts. They've kept all the self-destructive attitudes they learned on Twitter and view Mastodon as better precisely because it lets them indulge with less out-group interference. I see a lot of arguments that Mastodon is better because it lacks various bad things about Twitter (algorithmic sorting, the misalignment of incentives between Twitter-as-a-company and users, centralized moderation/ownership) and it certainly is in some sense, but we're still living in a world where the social norms that were created on Twitter completely dominate any other conception of how to behave. There can be no online space that is "like Twitter but good" because anything that is sufficiently like Twitter to appeal to Twitter refugees will import enough of the culture to end up with Twitter's problems. Mastodon might be a step towards fixing the problem, but undoing the damage caused by Twitter will require the grueling and unpleasant work of changing ourselves as well as changing our technology. The only option for us as individuals in the short term is to reject the entire model and choose to engage with other people in ways that respect each other’s fundamental humanity. Prefer in-person to online. Prefer one-on-one communication to broadcasting. Prefer small groups to large groups. Prefer local to global. Prefer synchronous communication to async. Prefer video or voice to text. Trust me, I know each of those preferences is difficult in its own way and there’s excellent reasons to choose the other option in many circumstances (like this post, in which I'm violating almost all of them!), but they’re also powerful tools for connecting with others as whole people rather than as simplified abstractions. We should work to make it easier to connect people (particularly across geographical and linguistic boundaries) but it cannot be at the cost of flattening each of us into the most shallow, reductive versions of ourselves so that we fit through the machinery we’ve built and can be easily consumed by strangers on the other end.

asim 4y ago
Good rationale and I agree with all of it. Looks like Mastodon has become the self reinforcing echo chamber of the far right for any group. Never to be challenged again. In fact that's the point of why so many people go there right? There's a feeling of safety in that lack of challenge. A lot of people will say twitter is an abusive place and I don't disagree but to never have your points of view ever challenged again is incredibly dangerous. It's the path towards ignorance. We as humans are imperfect and constantly learning. Part of that means accepting that maybe our opinions or viewpoints could be wrong and taking a step back to think about it when someone does question the things we say. Now there's communities on Mastodon where that will never happen again. It'll be something that creates a new type of privilege. The privilege of choosing to be and believe whatever you want without anyone ever telling you you're wrong.