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I never understood why journalists loved Twitter so much, as it turns out they were writing for each other the whole time and the general public didn't really c
by zwieback 3y ago
I never understood why journalists loved Twitter so much, as it turns out they were writing for each other the whole time and the general public didn't really care.
- webmobdev 3y agoYou don't get the appeal of celebrities writing the story for you, than chasing them for one? ;)
- simonw 3y agoWhen something happened, Twitter used to be the first place that eyewitness accounts of that thing would emerge - often within seconds of the event.
- Aloha 3y agoYeah, during the 2020 election, I was often 48+ hours ahead of print news, and 24+ hours ahead of NPR and TV. I miss that bit, I dont miss most of twitter though.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoI found that the hard part was separating the signal from the noise. There was too much noise and too many conflicting narratives. Not that there wasn't any of that on TV, but with Twitter it was amplified and came at you so quickly.
- flkenosad 3y agoTwitter is where journalists find out what the different view points even are.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Twitter is where journalists find out what the different view points even are. That's actually disturbing, since Twitter users are a unique demographic all by themselves. Twitter has never adequately represented the wider spectrum of viewpoints (and, from everything I hear, is worse at it now than ever before).
- baud147258 3y agoor where the journalists go to find that one tweet with outrageous claims, to then spin in a full article on how "people believe X!"
- Aloha 3y agoVery very hard. You get better with it over time, and I'm reasonably good at reading people - much of it could be tossed out for just being absurd on its face.
- Almondsetat 3y agoAnd how did this improve your life? What actions did you take knowing that information with 1-2 days of advance that you wouldn't have otherwise?
- politelemon 3y agoI was able to have anxiety or outrage, depending on the misleading information being propagated, ahead of everyone else.
- coldpie 3y agoYeah. I closed my account because of Musk's politics, but the reality is I should've left years ago. Life is so much better without all that dragging me down.
- Aloha 3y agoIt was reassuring in a way, and I was able to reassure my friends - they saw things moving in a particular way, but I was often able to see a counter trend moving another direction before they could.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- savanaly 3y agoBut what even was the point of being ahead?
- masklinn 3y agoFollowing the right accounts you could actually get nuanced background on an issue popping up, with a carefully tended feed it was like putting rocket boots on the truth so it could stay within sight of the lies.
- Aloha 3y agoI was able to reassure my friends - they saw things moving in a particular way, but I was often able to see a counter trend moving another direction before they could.
- Yizahi 3y agoI see this line repeated year after year, but is there any truth to it? Assuming at Twitter someone post the news at T+1 second as they happen, because you can't report news before they actually happened (unless your newspaper is called Tomorrow). The question then - are "old" newspapers really reporting major news with 24 hour delay (online)? Does ANY newspaper work with such delay? I honestly don't remember a single case when something big happens in the world today, I go to the "old" news site the same day and that event is not reported. Maybe some obscure regional politic events are reported with delay (even that is debatable), but why would you want some urgent news about obscure regional stuff? And how would a person understand that it is a real event and not a fake posted on twitter for some outrage?
- Aloha 3y agoI was following some very very very inside the beltway political shit, so its not wrong in this case. You could drill down into a bunch of specific areas and have a similar effect all over, but trying to do that in too many places leads to a drinking the firehose feeling.
- camhart 3y ago> Used to be It still is isn't it?
- mattl 3y agoLess so as people are leaving
- slantedview 3y agoIt's becoming less so. During the start of the war in Gaza, many journalists lamented how terrible Twitter has become for the thing it was best at: breaking news. There are many problems, but one of them is that intentionally misleading blue check accounts are boosted above actual journalists. Slate wrote a piece on the whole situation: https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/x-twitter-gaza-israel-misinformation-elon-musk.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/x-twitter-gaza-israel-m...
- camhart 3y agoSlate is far left leaning, and growing more extreme with time. See https://www.allsides.com/news-source/slate https://www.allsides.com/news-source/slate. I'd take that article with a heavy grain of salt. They also use two data points of failed moderation (not a lack of moderation) and try to paint the entire platform based on it. That happened plenty under the old regime as well. If the actual journalists paid for the blue checkmark, that'd solve the issue wouldn't it? Twitter prior to Musk was a sinking ship (cancel culture exaggerated the problem). Asking people to pay is one of the attempts to solve that problem. If a journalist is unwilling to pay, they're going to be deprioritized and can't really complain about it. But Twitter has been very open and transparent about the need to reduce bots by paying for the checkmark.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nvm0n2 3y ago> intentionally misleading blue check accounts are boosted above actual journalists Actual journalists are often blue ticks and intentionally misleading so this is as pot/kettle/black situation if there ever was one.
- zikduruqe 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/723/ https://xkcd.com/723/
- gnicholas 3y agoIsn’t this still true? I wanted to find out the latest developments in the House Speaker situation (cluster) today and went to Twitter. Where else would someone go for such info?
- KerrAvon 3y agoMastodon, Threads, and blogs. News websites like CNN. edited to add: the problem now is that it's often genuinely fake news on Twitter and you have to separate the wheat from increasingly large piles of chaff. You have to be extremely diligent about curating your account to do that.
- gnicholas 3y agoI get that Mastodon has a Twitter-like goal, but since it's federated does that mean I have to join specific instances to find out about international news, US politics, etc.? Honest question, since I've not tried Mastodon. I thought Threads was not supposed to be about news [1], and at any rate its traffic is dropping. CNN is probably one of the first-movers in the news space, but surely it's behind Twitter in terms of timeliness. 1: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23787334/instagram-threads-news-politics-adam-mosseri-meta-facebook https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/7/23787334/instagram-threads...
- adamrezich 3y agoTwitter owes most of its success to the Verified Checkmark, and the sorts of people who crave any kind of Officially Verified status that they can lord over the plebs who don't have such access—it was crack cocaine for self-important, narcissistic journalists and media personalities. once anyone could purchase a Verified Checkmark, once the doors to the Secret Cool Kid Clubhouse were thrown wide open, about half of the appeal of the platform (for them) disappeared overnight.
- simonw 3y agoThat is such a cynical take. For me, the value of the verified checkmark was that it verified people and organizations were who they said they were. This was a big part of what made Twitter such a unique and fascinating place. You could learn a huge amount about the world from tweets that were attached to verified identities. Plus it was really fun. This tweet by Monica Lewinsky really wouldn't have landed without that verified mark! https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/1150348061442551808 https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/115034806144255180... Unfortunately, Musk apparently had the same cynical opinion of this that you have, and threw the entire thing away. No wonder Twitter has less cultural impact today than it did a year ago.
- goldenchrome 3y agoX has a ton of cultural impact today—it’s just that the audience has shifted from neoliberal to classical liberal/libertarian. Lots of politics, philosophy, tech news, and culture thrives. It’s just not happening in your bubble evidently.
- jameshart 3y agoWhat on earth do you think ‘neoliberal’ means? Are you claiming there has been a mass exodus of Thatcherite/Reaganomic thinkers supportive of the Chicago School of market led small state capitalism from the platform? I guess I don’t see many Pinochet apologists on Twitter these days. I suggest a quick read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
- fullshark 3y agoBecause it gave them easy stories and instant validation. So many stories written which were "a bunch of people on twitter said this and I want to write about it."
- JohnFen 3y agoI lost a great deal of respect for many news organizations when they started doing that.
- notjoemama 3y agoAnd reinforced their own opinions in the process. I wonder to what degree that overlaps with election forecasting. Could that have contributed to how off they’ve been?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cma 3y ago1) Having the checkmark gave them access to public figures (DMs were usually open between checkmark people and closed to the public). 2) Using embeds in their articles let them launder copyright via twitter randos to let them avoid paying royalties to license images and videos from the original sources.
- chaps 3y agoJournalist here -- you're missing a lot of the point. There are bunches of reasons. Basically it's near impossible to have a journalism career without being on Twitter. For network/sources building, the ease of access to peers (ever try to find a journalist's unlisted email address?), and it acts as a way to show your "brand" that can make intros much easier (reputation is built on trust, so Twitter can be useful to convey that a person is relatively trustworthy and quickly). A lot of journalists will also share information that got cut out during editing (not many alternatives to host that sort of side-narrative and docs stuff). Also, there's a lot of proximity to orgs (eg nonprofits) who themselves have eyes and ears outside of Twitter. That said, my experience is in local municipal stuff and a lot of this is no longer true because of musk shit.
- moomoo11 3y agoSo you just proved their point? Or is this indicative of journalism just kinda going under where you basically deny what someone said only to bolster their point. You basically said it is to feel important (your branding, whatever) amongst your peers. The general public doesn't care, you do though (what the person you're replying to said, and basically what you just reiterated). As a member of the general public that doesn't use twitter (I use nitter to view twitter, and I won't call it X), I feel that it is a massive echo chamber amplified by bots and fake engagement numbers.
- chaps 3y agoOi mate calm down, hey? You're twisting every aspect of my post to the point of satire. I never said anything about wanting to "feel important" amongst peers and your interpretation is.. strained, at best. I'm literally just talking about career growth here. Maybe take a deep breath and a break.
- moomoo11 3y agoSorry lol just being honest. I'm ESL so sometimes I guess my thoughts don't translate the best into english but I was just saying you refuted their statement only to bolster it, which I thought was odd coming from journalist. Cheers m8
- gopher2000 3y agoTwitter claims something like 2-300MM MAU. Which I just struggle to buy. I'd consider myself fairly well connected in a segment/industry that should be among the primary adopters of Twitter - and very very few are actually active on Twitter. Most are "active" in the sense that they click on links to Tweets. I wonder how many unique (non-bot) users actually post on Twitter each month. I reckon that number versus MAU is going to be very asymmetric.
- jedberg 3y agoMAU includes lurkers. They don't publish how many accounts actually Tweet (Xit?) in a month. I will look at Twitter once or twice a week, so I'm in that 300MAU. But I only see a few of the same people posting repeatedly. Assuming they follow the standard social media rule, only about 40-60M of those people are Tweeting in a month, which is still a lot. And my guess is a lot of those are bot tweets.
- majewsky 3y agoFor what it's worth, I'm an MAU. I have deleted all the old posts that I could and continue logging into the app once a week to ensure that the account does not get deleted. I linked to my account a bunch over the years and don't want it retroactively namesquatted.
- madeofpalk 3y agoHaven't you just described what a "community" is? That's like saying "turns out, that lego enthusiasts was just making little buildings for each other the whole time and the general public didn't really care"
- dockd 3y agoAnother popular use for Twitter is getting "from the street" quotes without leaving your desk. "Here's monkeysheen47x's opinion on the ballot measure." In case you want to know what people on Twitter think without checking Twitter yourself.