8 ms·

How to Blow Up a Timeline

75 points by jger15 3y ago

refulgentis 3y ago
Lost a significant chunk of my attention with the thesis, then all of it in a thicket of tendacious musings. > "Twitter will persist in a deteriorated state, perhaps indefinitely." Makes sense. > "However, it's already a pale shadow of what it was at its peak. The cool kids are no longer sitting over in bottle service knocking out banger tweets." Fun visually evocative analogy, but gossamer. As soon as we try applying it to reality, it falls apart. > "Instead, the timeline is filled with more and more strangers the bouncer let in to shill their tweetstorms, many of them Twitter Verified accounts who paid the grand fee of $8 a month for the privilege." What's "the timeline" here? For You? Following? This hides the ball on the fact there's a much simpler concept here that we're already familiar with, algorithmic vs. "true" timeline. In fact, Twitter pre-Musk had this. It's just different bluechecks now. > "In the past year, so many random meetings I have with one-time Twitter junkies begin with a long sigh and then a question that is more lamentation than anything else: “How did Twitter get so bad?”" From above: the cool kids aren't in bottle service banging (whatever that means) and they're stuck on the algorithmic timeline.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  The article was too long but I thought had some interesting ideas. Lately though I think the key to understanding Twitter is the relationship with the media and particularly “media amplification” For instance there was that case where somebody bought a blue check for a fake Eli Lilly account, tweeted “insulin is now free”, allegedly caused the stock to drop, and the media erupts in outrage. Suddenly it is a big problem you can get a bogus blue check but, really, there is very little top stop me from buying some name like “elilil.ly”, copying their template, and making a fake page with all the fake information I want. It would take their lawyers days if not weeks to get a preliminary injunction in a case like that, but truth is a site like that might go undiscovered for years. There is isn’t a lot of talk about about the danger of website impersonation although there must be millions or billions scammed out of people yearly by fake web sites. Similarly there was the incident of J.K. Rowling getting dogpiled on Twitter that was only remarkable because (1) she was famous and (2) the story got picked up in the media. All kinds of people get dogpiled every day (often for being gender-nonconforming) and (as awful as it is) it’s usually a free in the forest that falls without making a sound. In both of these cases only a few very people experienced them on Twitter and the situation quickly blew over. The stories get told over and over and over again away from Twitter, people may still be reading about them 20 years from now but it won’t be on Twitter. Cases like this happen on all kinds of social media but Twitter’s got a special attraction to people in the media that makes it all the more so.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  > It's just different bluechecks now. No, the bluechecks now are simply much worse. Previously, status was a selector, which takes into account the preferences of many, many people. Now, the primary selector is being an Elmo stan with $8. I've little interest in hearing from these people.
  - nancyhn 3y ago
    Some prefer The Annointed (before), others prefer The People (now).
    - timmytokyo 3y ago
      Musk stans are not "The People".
      - flangola7 3y ago
        [flagged]
- rsynnott 3y ago
  It's very clear from the piece that what he means by the timeline is the (old) algorithmic timeline. Though, note that, even if you use Twitter purely on the linear timeline, you are still exposed to the algorithmic timeline, because, well, where did you think the people you follow were seeing the stuff that they retweet? Even without this effect, it would have changed; a lot of people are _no longer using it_. My linear timeline is dramatically different to how it was a year ago, because so many people have just stopped tweeting (though, actually, now that I look at it, I had to scroll back about a hundred items on my linear timeline to find something that wasn't a retweet; presumably something is once again broken.) > In fact, Twitter pre-Musk had this. It's just different bluechecks now. As far as anyone knows, old-Twitter did not prioritise bluetick tweets (at least not directly, though the selection criteria for bluetickdom did mostly select for people who were getting a lot of visibility for other reasons); it certainly did not promote them to the top of the replies. Naughty Ol' Mr Car framed this as a new thing that he was doing (and the sea of irrelevant bluetick responses on anything popular is certainly a new phenomenon).
KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
Twitter hit upon some narrow product-market fit despite itself. It has never seemed to understand why it worked for some people or what it wanted to be, and how those two were related, if at all. But in a twist of fate that is often more of a factor in finding product-market fit than most like to admit Hear, hear! Most internet companies have no deep or useful understanding of how they pioneered their early successes, or how to tackle the widespread growth decline that they are now encountering. Reddit is another fine example of this effect. I think the one thing Musk achieved in his folie a un is putting Twitter on the observation deck for long enough that this fact became painfully obvious to many. I think what we're learning - in fact, what we already knew in the days of newsgroups, and IRC - is "if you build it, they will come". And 'it' can be pretty much any medium that removes the potential inconveniences of connecting with other human beings and voicing opinions to them. There really is no product beyond the people and the content. Google did well to realise this and turn itself into a huge parasite pretty much from day one: search aggregated the product, analytics kept tabs on what it was up to, and ads exploited both of the former. That's why we will continue to see VC money and modern social media companies throw themselves at the wall like spaghetti and, eventually for most, off the cliff like lemmings. The current fracture in social media may be the best thing that's ever happened to the internet (a few pennies in the hyperbole jar, sure). Look how much competition we have now in the 'let humans get their opinions and memes to other humans' space: Mastodon, BlueSky, Lemmy, Squabbles, and so on. Sadly capitalism will once again inevitably demand a winner and we'll be back at whatever Twitter/Reddit 2.0 is but at least there's always hope for the cycle to begin again.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Yep, the genius of Facebook was that it got ahead of the decline cycle. It’s survived several half-lives of decay because it saw what happened to MySpace and they weren’t going to let that happen. Getting a two-sided market for advertisers and consumers was a big part (if it is money you care about you want the effective ad network not a social media product that has other good attributes). Other parts have been continuous investment, buying lots of competitors, side bets like “The Metaverse”, … They understand completely that if they aren’t moving forward they’ll quickly wind up like Kodak, Polaroid or AMC. Contrast that to the average communications app (App X) which starts out with an onboarding process that works (like it really does find your microphone) but a few years later they get complacent and it “just doesn’t work” despite having 1000+ engineers and an engineering blog about how badass they are. Now a friend tells you to try App Y and you’ll say “I’m wary of this, look how App X sucks now” and they’ll say “No, App Y is great, remember how App X was 5 years ago?”. 5 years later App Z will take the place of Y and Y will take the place of X.”. Most people don’t get that this is the reason why communication apps are a technological backwater like narrowbody airliners, but Mark Zuckerberg does.
debrice 3y ago
It's easy to forget that prior to its acquisition, Twitter was a financial catastrophe. It still could be, but Twitter seems to be working hard at becoming a profitable business. Does praising its unsustainable past and lost designs makes us some kind of spoiled brats?
- zenkat 3y ago
  Interesting perspective, considering ad revenue is down nearly 60% y/y. If they are "working hard at becoming profitable", it doesn't seem to be working.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Why are we reconning this? Twitter was net positive for most quarters between 2018 and 2022[1]. They were never a money printing machine like Facebook or Google, but that wasn’t their segment anyways. The phrase is “work smart, not hard.” I’m not convinced that Twitter’s leadership is doing either, and the market for Twitter advertising appears to agree. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-income-quarterly/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
  - idlewords 3y ago
    Not to mention that they were clearly overstaffed, particularly at a time when there were almost no changes to the core product. All they needed to do to be extremely profitable was cut a couple of thousand employees and find a way to let power users pay for the service. In other words, a non-clown-car version of what Musk did later.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    2020 was disaster but that was true for lots of companies. 2021 would have been profitable except for settlement. In 2022, they started losing advertisers after offer but before sale. With moderate layoffs like other companies did, they would have been fine in 2023.
  - optimalsolver 3y ago
    *retconning
PaulHoule 3y ago
Personally I am interested in the comparisons to TikTok that is a subject people don’t really understand. One of the worst problems of many recommendation systems is that they don’t get definite feedback about what you hate, only about what you like. They have to guess about negative examples but it’s just a guess. Systems like YouTube that show you a large number of links that might attract you look smarter in the short term because they can ride on your ability to choose something, but they can draw very little conclusion about the links you didn’t click on. People forgot that StumbleUpon was a recommender for web sites that had an interface very similar to TikTok, my YOShInOn smart RSS reader also works like TikTok but it is a pure content-based recommender. People say that “engagement=outrage”, something that is only about 80% true (my predictive model believes that HN participants like to talk about cars.). In a network like Twitter or Mastodon where people share posts the classic social feed very much amplifies outrage. If I can actually bear to look at 5000 angry toots I might try training an anti-outrage model. This could be used several ways: (1) at the input of a reader (I just personally don’t want to see it), (2) at the output of the write (I know, and I get the feedback, that YOShInOn is a nicer “person” than I am) or (3) at the heart of a network to suppress the cycle of anger amplification. You don’t even need to get all of it, you just have to reduce the coefficient of transmission as you would for a virus to improve the tone of a a space. (3) would by far be the most effective but boy would it get pushback from people, whereas I can apply (1) and (2) to myself and nobody knows. Look closely at an “angry” person and you will find they are “angry about politics” or “gay and angry” or “conservative and angry” and a model like that really will suppress “politics” and “gay” and “conservative” (the conditional probability distribution says to do so) and more so will be accused of doing so. The argument that almost moves me is that networks like that have the potential to enable organizing for change and that suppressing the visibility of outrage would squelch that but we are already seeing outrage-driven politics reach a point where people choose their values to fit their tribe instead of choosing a tribe that fits their values. More and more people will only vote for one party ever which leads to a “doom loop” in politics because there is no competition for “effective”, “not corrupt”, “get what you pay for with your taxes” which are in (almost) everyone’s interest. Trouble is that is the road to Lebanon, at best you have corrupt politicians stealing everything and a government that has no legitimacy because it can’t get anything done. At worst people will tear it all down.
m3kw9 3y ago
This guy wrote almost a book on how twitter “blew up”, or you can go and use it and see if it is on that scale. Meta sensed a sentiment shift against twitter based on a some recent questionable moves by Elon, not a blow up. It’s a good opportunistic move by Meta.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago
  > or you can go and use it and see if it is on that scale I’ll never know because I don’t have a Twitter account and I can’t seem to see Tweets without logging in anymore. Can you tell me what it’s like now?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Pretty much like it has been for the the last 5-10 years.
gilbetron 3y ago
All this reminds me of World of Warcraft. In 2004-2008ish, WoW was a cultural phenomenon. South Park made an episode about it, there was a famous question on Jeopardy about it, parents played it, celebrities played it. Then it started to fade away for many reasons. But as it was fading, people were asking what was the next MMO, what was the "WoW-killer". It never came - sure there were and are other MMOs (ESO, FF, GW2, etc) that people played, but nothing ever peaked like WoW, because WoW happened at a unique moment in time. It was right before social media exploded, and so people were able to be social with each other in the game, creating a unique community situation. All the other MMOs (mostly) grew up with social media, so the social effects were diminished. They were just games. I see an analog with Twitter. There will never be a Twitter killer, a Twitter 2.0. There will be successful, Twitter-like things (Threads, Bluesky) but nothing can be like Twitter because the era is gone. (Which is the point of essay, more or less). Something else will happen that will engross us for a while, and I'm curious what it will be (and really wish I could predict it!), but nobody, not even Twitter (just like WoW itself was never a WoW killer), will be another Twitter.
- kyleyeats 3y ago
  Adam Devine was on Theo Von yesterday talking about pitching movies. He was bothered by executives who asked "Why should we make this movie now?" I was too until I read your comment. Devine just wanted to make a funny movie, but it's not enough to just be a good categorical example of a thing.
the-printer 3y ago
> In the world of Almost Famous, Instagram would be the social network for the Stillwaters, the Russell Hammonds, the Penny Lanes. Beautiful people, cool people. Twitter was for the uncool, the geeks, the wonks, the wits, the misfits. Dichotomies like this are becoming trite in my opinion, even more so because this representation of "cool/not cool" doesn't ring true to my experience on either platform. Who/what falls in line with either category is largely subjective to the subcultures on the platform itself, among other things¹. > Twitter was the closest we’ve come to bottling oral culture in written form. This is nice. 1. With the exception of Tumblr, in my experience at least, Tumblr seemed (entertainingly) hostile to the kind of people who probably went on to launch glowing Instagram personas.
- TeaDrunk 3y ago
  Tumblr had their own sense of influence and a very different kind of person that would launch careers. IMO Tumblr was way more into thought pieces, deep fandom rants were encouraged, humorous quips that would go viral, and collages of pictures/aesthetics.
gary_0 3y ago
> The changes to the Twitter algorithm bulldozed over a decade’s worth of Chesterton fences in a few months. Keeping the Chesterton fences in an established organization was something Musk was particularly ill-suited for. While some ossified companies can benefit from new management, things will only get worse if they throw the baby out with the bathwater. Musk's successes started out as greenfield projects that benefited from ignoring how the incumbents did things, but those days are over for him. Another thing Musk was ill-suited for was being the guy that did the mass layoffs. In the earlier days of Tesla and SpaceX, most talented engineers would at least be intrigued by a job offer from Musk. He had a knack for finding brilliant people who could make his mad schemes a reality. But now he seems to embrace the darker side of his cavalier persona (while also flirting with demagoguery), which has alienated a huge portion of the talent pool that all of his companies rely on.
- bsder 3y ago
  > He had a knack for finding brilliant people who could make his mad schemes a reality. Musk's "knack" was coming swinging into two industries that were notorious for being both ossified and unerpaying their technical people (aerospace and automotive). He provided an outlet for underutilized smart people to flee to. Twitter, on the other hand, was sitting in the social software space. Smart people in social software were already being paid well and had lots of chocies to go to--Musk's mercurial presence could only serve as a deterrent.
j45 3y ago
Fragmentation of community can feel like it sucks but it was also the fun of the early web to seek and find the pockets of communities that resonated with you. So far, all social media platforms have come and gone or faded.. or dealt with remaining relevant with the early adopters and majority that eventually arrives. You can even go back before them to the instant messaging, forums, IRC and BBS years. Once organizing and connecting on a platform reaches whatever its zenith may be able to contain or not correct, it changes. There is always a new curve that emerges, the next curve. Where the masses are ready to adopt the next way of Connecting. As much as I miss the other communities that existed, new ones will come. Heck, one can even have a say in it and build what they need. Maybe it’s fediverse time. Maybe blockchain contracts will let me license and withdraw license to my content anywhere I publish it. I didn’t use Twitter for a decade and recently reconnected with it. Because I remained in a usage of learning from others it was fine to me to just follow others and topics that interest me and avoid following too much news, local, political, populist (on both sides of the spectrum) perspectives.

75 points by jger15 3y ago

Lost a significant chunk of my attention with the thesis, then all of it in a thicket of tendacious musings. > "Twitter will persist in a deteriorated state, perhaps indefinitely." Makes sense. > "However, it's already a pale shadow of what it was at its peak. The cool kids are no longer sitting over in bottle service knocking out banger tweets." Fun visually evocative analogy, but gossamer. As soon as we try applying it to reality, it falls apart. > "Instead, the timeline is filled with more and more strangers the bouncer let in to shill their tweetstorms, many of them Twitter Verified accounts who paid the grand fee of $8 a month for the privilege." What's "the timeline" here? For You? Following? This hides the ball on the fact there's a much simpler concept here that we're already familiar with, algorithmic vs. "true" timeline. In fact, Twitter pre-Musk had this. It's just different bluechecks now. > "In the past year, so many random meetings I have with one-time Twitter junkies begin with a long sigh and then a question that is more lamentation than anything else: “How did Twitter get so bad?”" From above: the cool kids aren't in bottle service banging (whatever that means) and they're stuck on the algorithmic timeline.

PaulHoule 3y ago
The article was too long but I thought had some interesting ideas. Lately though I think the key to understanding Twitter is the relationship with the media and particularly “media amplification” For instance there was that case where somebody bought a blue check for a fake Eli Lilly account, tweeted “insulin is now free”, allegedly caused the stock to drop, and the media erupts in outrage. Suddenly it is a big problem you can get a bogus blue check but, really, there is very little top stop me from buying some name like “elilil.ly”, copying their template, and making a fake page with all the fake information I want. It would take their lawyers days if not weeks to get a preliminary injunction in a case like that, but truth is a site like that might go undiscovered for years. There is isn’t a lot of talk about about the danger of website impersonation although there must be millions or billions scammed out of people yearly by fake web sites. Similarly there was the incident of J.K. Rowling getting dogpiled on Twitter that was only remarkable because (1) she was famous and (2) the story got picked up in the media. All kinds of people get dogpiled every day (often for being gender-nonconforming) and (as awful as it is) it’s usually a free in the forest that falls without making a sound. In both of these cases only a few very people experienced them on Twitter and the situation quickly blew over. The stories get told over and over and over again away from Twitter, people may still be reading about them 20 years from now but it won’t be on Twitter. Cases like this happen on all kinds of social media but Twitter’s got a special attraction to people in the media that makes it all the more so.
jeremyjh 3y ago
> It's just different bluechecks now. No, the bluechecks now are simply much worse. Previously, status was a selector, which takes into account the preferences of many, many people. Now, the primary selector is being an Elmo stan with $8. I've little interest in hearing from these people.
- nancyhn 3y ago
  Some prefer The Annointed (before), others prefer The People (now).
  - timmytokyo 3y ago
    Musk stans are not "The People".
    - flangola7 3y ago
      [flagged]
rsynnott 3y ago
It's very clear from the piece that what he means by the timeline is the (old) algorithmic timeline. Though, note that, even if you use Twitter purely on the linear timeline, you are still exposed to the algorithmic timeline, because, well, where did you think the people you follow were seeing the stuff that they retweet? Even without this effect, it would have changed; a lot of people are _no longer using it_. My linear timeline is dramatically different to how it was a year ago, because so many people have just stopped tweeting (though, actually, now that I look at it, I had to scroll back about a hundred items on my linear timeline to find something that wasn't a retweet; presumably something is once again broken.) > In fact, Twitter pre-Musk had this. It's just different bluechecks now. As far as anyone knows, old-Twitter did not prioritise bluetick tweets (at least not directly, though the selection criteria for bluetickdom did mostly select for people who were getting a lot of visibility for other reasons); it certainly did not promote them to the top of the replies. Naughty Ol' Mr Car framed this as a new thing that he was doing (and the sea of irrelevant bluetick responses on anything popular is certainly a new phenomenon).

KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago

Twitter hit upon some narrow product-market fit despite itself. It has never seemed to understand why it worked for some people or what it wanted to be, and how those two were related, if at all. But in a twist of fate that is often more of a factor in finding product-market fit than most like to admit Hear, hear! Most internet companies have no deep or useful understanding of how they pioneered their early successes, or how to tackle the widespread growth decline that they are now encountering. Reddit is another fine example of this effect. I think the one thing Musk achieved in his folie a un is putting Twitter on the observation deck for long enough that this fact became painfully obvious to many. I think what we're learning - in fact, what we already knew in the days of newsgroups, and IRC - is "if you build it, they will come". And 'it' can be pretty much any medium that removes the potential inconveniences of connecting with other human beings and voicing opinions to them. There really is no product beyond the people and the content. Google did well to realise this and turn itself into a huge parasite pretty much from day one: search aggregated the product, analytics kept tabs on what it was up to, and ads exploited both of the former. That's why we will continue to see VC money and modern social media companies throw themselves at the wall like spaghetti and, eventually for most, off the cliff like lemmings. The current fracture in social media may be the best thing that's ever happened to the internet (a few pennies in the hyperbole jar, sure). Look how much competition we have now in the 'let humans get their opinions and memes to other humans' space: Mastodon, BlueSky, Lemmy, Squabbles, and so on. Sadly capitalism will once again inevitably demand a winner and we'll be back at whatever Twitter/Reddit 2.0 is but at least there's always hope for the cycle to begin again.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Yep, the genius of Facebook was that it got ahead of the decline cycle. It’s survived several half-lives of decay because it saw what happened to MySpace and they weren’t going to let that happen. Getting a two-sided market for advertisers and consumers was a big part (if it is money you care about you want the effective ad network not a social media product that has other good attributes). Other parts have been continuous investment, buying lots of competitors, side bets like “The Metaverse”, … They understand completely that if they aren’t moving forward they’ll quickly wind up like Kodak, Polaroid or AMC. Contrast that to the average communications app (App X) which starts out with an onboarding process that works (like it really does find your microphone) but a few years later they get complacent and it “just doesn’t work” despite having 1000+ engineers and an engineering blog about how badass they are. Now a friend tells you to try App Y and you’ll say “I’m wary of this, look how App X sucks now” and they’ll say “No, App Y is great, remember how App X was 5 years ago?”. 5 years later App Z will take the place of Y and Y will take the place of X.”. Most people don’t get that this is the reason why communication apps are a technological backwater like narrowbody airliners, but Mark Zuckerberg does.

debrice 3y ago

It's easy to forget that prior to its acquisition, Twitter was a financial catastrophe. It still could be, but Twitter seems to be working hard at becoming a profitable business. Does praising its unsustainable past and lost designs makes us some kind of spoiled brats?

zenkat 3y ago
Interesting perspective, considering ad revenue is down nearly 60% y/y. If they are "working hard at becoming profitable", it doesn't seem to be working.
woodruffw 3y ago
Why are we reconning this? Twitter was net positive for most quarters between 2018 and 2022[1]. They were never a money printing machine like Facebook or Google, but that wasn’t their segment anyways. The phrase is “work smart, not hard.” I’m not convinced that Twitter’s leadership is doing either, and the market for Twitter advertising appears to agree. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-income-quarterly/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
- idlewords 3y ago
  Not to mention that they were clearly overstaffed, particularly at a time when there were almost no changes to the core product. All they needed to do to be extremely profitable was cut a couple of thousand employees and find a way to let power users pay for the service. In other words, a non-clown-car version of what Musk did later.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  2020 was disaster but that was true for lots of companies. 2021 would have been profitable except for settlement. In 2022, they started losing advertisers after offer but before sale. With moderate layoffs like other companies did, they would have been fine in 2023.
- optimalsolver 3y ago
  *retconning

PaulHoule 3y ago

Personally I am interested in the comparisons to TikTok that is a subject people don’t really understand. One of the worst problems of many recommendation systems is that they don’t get definite feedback about what you hate, only about what you like. They have to guess about negative examples but it’s just a guess. Systems like YouTube that show you a large number of links that might attract you look smarter in the short term because they can ride on your ability to choose something, but they can draw very little conclusion about the links you didn’t click on. People forgot that StumbleUpon was a recommender for web sites that had an interface very similar to TikTok, my YOShInOn smart RSS reader also works like TikTok but it is a pure content-based recommender. People say that “engagement=outrage”, something that is only about 80% true (my predictive model believes that HN participants like to talk about cars.). In a network like Twitter or Mastodon where people share posts the classic social feed very much amplifies outrage. If I can actually bear to look at 5000 angry toots I might try training an anti-outrage model. This could be used several ways: (1) at the input of a reader (I just personally don’t want to see it), (2) at the output of the write (I know, and I get the feedback, that YOShInOn is a nicer “person” than I am) or (3) at the heart of a network to suppress the cycle of anger amplification. You don’t even need to get all of it, you just have to reduce the coefficient of transmission as you would for a virus to improve the tone of a a space. (3) would by far be the most effective but boy would it get pushback from people, whereas I can apply (1) and (2) to myself and nobody knows. Look closely at an “angry” person and you will find they are “angry about politics” or “gay and angry” or “conservative and angry” and a model like that really will suppress “politics” and “gay” and “conservative” (the conditional probability distribution says to do so) and more so will be accused of doing so. The argument that almost moves me is that networks like that have the potential to enable organizing for change and that suppressing the visibility of outrage would squelch that but we are already seeing outrage-driven politics reach a point where people choose their values to fit their tribe instead of choosing a tribe that fits their values. More and more people will only vote for one party ever which leads to a “doom loop” in politics because there is no competition for “effective”, “not corrupt”, “get what you pay for with your taxes” which are in (almost) everyone’s interest. Trouble is that is the road to Lebanon, at best you have corrupt politicians stealing everything and a government that has no legitimacy because it can’t get anything done. At worst people will tear it all down.

m3kw9 3y ago

This guy wrote almost a book on how twitter “blew up”, or you can go and use it and see if it is on that scale. Meta sensed a sentiment shift against twitter based on a some recent questionable moves by Elon, not a blow up. It’s a good opportunistic move by Meta.

LeafItAlone 3y ago
> or you can go and use it and see if it is on that scale I’ll never know because I don’t have a Twitter account and I can’t seem to see Tweets without logging in anymore. Can you tell me what it’s like now?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Pretty much like it has been for the the last 5-10 years.

gilbetron 3y ago

All this reminds me of World of Warcraft. In 2004-2008ish, WoW was a cultural phenomenon. South Park made an episode about it, there was a famous question on Jeopardy about it, parents played it, celebrities played it. Then it started to fade away for many reasons. But as it was fading, people were asking what was the next MMO, what was the "WoW-killer". It never came - sure there were and are other MMOs (ESO, FF, GW2, etc) that people played, but nothing ever peaked like WoW, because WoW happened at a unique moment in time. It was right before social media exploded, and so people were able to be social with each other in the game, creating a unique community situation. All the other MMOs (mostly) grew up with social media, so the social effects were diminished. They were just games. I see an analog with Twitter. There will never be a Twitter killer, a Twitter 2.0. There will be successful, Twitter-like things (Threads, Bluesky) but nothing can be like Twitter because the era is gone. (Which is the point of essay, more or less). Something else will happen that will engross us for a while, and I'm curious what it will be (and really wish I could predict it!), but nobody, not even Twitter (just like WoW itself was never a WoW killer), will be another Twitter.

kyleyeats 3y ago
Adam Devine was on Theo Von yesterday talking about pitching movies. He was bothered by executives who asked "Why should we make this movie now?" I was too until I read your comment. Devine just wanted to make a funny movie, but it's not enough to just be a good categorical example of a thing.

the-printer 3y ago

> In the world of Almost Famous, Instagram would be the social network for the Stillwaters, the Russell Hammonds, the Penny Lanes. Beautiful people, cool people. Twitter was for the uncool, the geeks, the wonks, the wits, the misfits. Dichotomies like this are becoming trite in my opinion, even more so because this representation of "cool/not cool" doesn't ring true to my experience on either platform. Who/what falls in line with either category is largely subjective to the subcultures on the platform itself, among other things¹. > Twitter was the closest we’ve come to bottling oral culture in written form. This is nice. 1. With the exception of Tumblr, in my experience at least, Tumblr seemed (entertainingly) hostile to the kind of people who probably went on to launch glowing Instagram personas.

TeaDrunk 3y ago
Tumblr had their own sense of influence and a very different kind of person that would launch careers. IMO Tumblr was way more into thought pieces, deep fandom rants were encouraged, humorous quips that would go viral, and collages of pictures/aesthetics.

gary_0 3y ago

> The changes to the Twitter algorithm bulldozed over a decade’s worth of Chesterton fences in a few months. Keeping the Chesterton fences in an established organization was something Musk was particularly ill-suited for. While some ossified companies can benefit from new management, things will only get worse if they throw the baby out with the bathwater. Musk's successes started out as greenfield projects that benefited from ignoring how the incumbents did things, but those days are over for him. Another thing Musk was ill-suited for was being the guy that did the mass layoffs. In the earlier days of Tesla and SpaceX, most talented engineers would at least be intrigued by a job offer from Musk. He had a knack for finding brilliant people who could make his mad schemes a reality. But now he seems to embrace the darker side of his cavalier persona (while also flirting with demagoguery), which has alienated a huge portion of the talent pool that all of his companies rely on.

bsder 3y ago
> He had a knack for finding brilliant people who could make his mad schemes a reality. Musk's "knack" was coming swinging into two industries that were notorious for being both ossified and unerpaying their technical people (aerospace and automotive). He provided an outlet for underutilized smart people to flee to. Twitter, on the other hand, was sitting in the social software space. Smart people in social software were already being paid well and had lots of chocies to go to--Musk's mercurial presence could only serve as a deterrent.

j45 3y ago

Fragmentation of community can feel like it sucks but it was also the fun of the early web to seek and find the pockets of communities that resonated with you. So far, all social media platforms have come and gone or faded.. or dealt with remaining relevant with the early adopters and majority that eventually arrives. You can even go back before them to the instant messaging, forums, IRC and BBS years. Once organizing and connecting on a platform reaches whatever its zenith may be able to contain or not correct, it changes. There is always a new curve that emerges, the next curve. Where the masses are ready to adopt the next way of Connecting. As much as I miss the other communities that existed, new ones will come. Heck, one can even have a say in it and build what they need. Maybe it’s fediverse time. Maybe blockchain contracts will let me license and withdraw license to my content anywhere I publish it. I didn’t use Twitter for a decade and recently reconnected with it. Because I remained in a usage of learning from others it was fine to me to just follow others and topics that interest me and avoid following too much news, local, political, populist (on both sides of the spectrum) perspectives.