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X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says
- sys_64738 3y agoDon't call "X" anything other than Twitter. It's like don't call "Meta" anything other than Facebook.
- averageRoyalty 3y agoThat doesn't make sense. Facebook was Facebook (the company)'s property. Now it's Meta's. Twitter (the product and company) were both renamed.
- sys_64738 3y agoYou can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig.
- skymast 3y ago[dead]
- 46452458 3y ago[flagged]
- delecti 3y agohttps://archive.is/bIVGg https://archive.is/bIVGg
- tupac_speedrap 3y agolol, lots of salty Twitter users in these comments It was a sewer long before Musk took over, that's why the previous owners were so happy to dump it on him, cash out and let him polish that turd
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- afdhinionio 3y ago[flagged]
- threeseed 3y ago> let him polish that turd Not sure that is the right choice of words given how many advertisers and revenue has left the company. Even Musk himself has acknowledged that the company is now worth a fraction of what he paid for it.
- simondotau 3y agoTo be clear though — Musk acknowledged it was worth a fraction of what he paid for it many months before he paid for it. In his view, the company's value crashed in early 2022 and that more information came to light during the acquisition process which further changed his view of the company's value.
- raydev 3y ago> the company's value crashed in early 2022 This is objectively true, since every other tech company's stock prices dropped dramatically. Twitter's stock price was pinned because Musk made a commitment. > more information came to light during the acquisition process which further changed his view of the company's value This is objectively false, he misread Twitter's quarterly statements and didn't understand what mDAU meant, he wasted months and millions of dollars dragging Twitter through court, only to be forced to follow through on his commitment or get a worse judgment from the court.
- simondotau 3y ago> This is objectively false, he misread Twitter's quarterly statements... Whether it's objectively true or false is irrelevant. What I said was it changed his view of the company's value which resulted in him acknowledging that his estimation of Twitter's worth had dropped. And while I don't disagree that Musk had a different interpretation of mDAU than Twitter did, I don't sign onto the assertion that how 2022 Twitter's view of the world is anything like objective. These numbers have been considered controversial and suspicious long before Musk's interest in Twitter.[0] Twitter had a history of dodgy numbers.[1] And there was substantial evidence that Twitter was turning a blind eye to bot traffic in their mDAU analyses.[2] [0] https://venturebeat.com/business/twitter-is-slowly-perfecting-the-art-of-inventing-nonsensical-performance-metrics/ https://venturebeat.com/business/twitter-is-slowly-perfectin... (From 2019) [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/28/23046170/twitter-miscounted-daily-users-three-years-q1-2022-earnings https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/28/23046170/twitter-miscount... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23320461/twitter-mdau-mudge-zatko-elon-musk-discovery https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23320461/twitter-mdau-mud...
- paulddraper 3y ago[flagged]
- ImJamal 3y agoWhen was Twitter not a sewer?
- snickerbockers 3y agonever, but from her perspective she probably means it wasn't a sewer back when "the good guys" were the only ones using it to manipulate public opinion to sway elections and foment civil unrest in foreign countries.
- timbit42 3y agoEverything is relative. It's not that it wasn't a sewer, it wasn't as much of a sewer.
- ImJamal 3y agoWhich could be true, but not what the article claims. The title says "has become" and the first paragraph says "had devolved". It makes it sound like it wasn't complete garbage before.
- porcoda 3y agoTo be honest, Twitter/X has been a sewer for a good decade or so. The only thing that has changed is the kind of sewage that is allowed or encouraged to flow through it.
- pityJuke 3y agoAnd the fact that sewage is now the content that is prioritised. Blue checkmarks went from being a flawed, but useful signal of interest, to being a symbol for the most garbage content on the internet. And I have to wade through the filth if I want to make it to anything interesting. Elon's checkmark system is the equivalent to the hot weather that caused the Great Stink [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
- numpad0 3y agoTwitter of late is blue-checked bot replying to trending topic with copy-pasted text, to which bunch of another bots doing the same, creating fabricated and monetized reply trees. A lot has Arabic profile too. It's money laundering in the open, weird that no actions are being taken.
- threeseed 3y agoIt is objectively much worse now. Which is natural when you effectively disband the safety teams and allow all previous banned accounts back onto the platform. Also where as Twitter at least tried to comply with codes of practice, X has simply just given up. Also a lot of it has to do with Musk being the face of the platform and endlessly trying to start culture wars.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago[flagged]
- vore 3y agoIf you consider Parti socialiste to be socialist then I'm literally Karl Marx.
- Shorel 3y agoNarrator voice: It always was.
- GamerUncle 3y agoJust like Paris I hate twitter , and a lot, specially before Musk, however it is insane to see some people just starting to complain. Only when finally those who disagree politically with them have a crumb of a voice. The place was always horrible problem is this people had an elite of horrible "journalists" being yes men and secluding them from divergent voices.
- twixfel 3y agoParis is much nicer than Twitter. If I had to choose which to keep, I'd pick Paris over some shit social media platform.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- GamerUncle 3y ago"If I have to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all." Never said that you have to choose or that twitter is nicer.
- escaper 3y agoMy man what is your beef with Paris? Now it's evil?!
- mingus88 3y agoAbout 20 years ago we found a true villain in France, when they dared to suggest that destroying Iraq was not a worthy response to 9/11 It was wild. Your below-average American went so far as rewriting their menus so they wouldn’t have to order “French fries” any longer. The pettiness was bottomless. More recently the Paris accord has given these same below-average Americans angst because it dares offer introspection on the F150 lifestyle that will soon be coming to an end. Paris is truly evil to dare challenge such mediocrity
- ekianjo 3y ago
- ThalesX 3y agoX is the best social media platform out there at this point. What are the alternatives? Meta's Facebook, Instagram? TikTok? It's just bollocks. X is where a lot of interesting people post, and where freedom of speech is the most upheld. Community notes is also a super interesting aspect. It's not X's fault someone follows nazis or whatever and don't know where the mute / block buttons are.
- wnevets 3y ago> and where freedom of speech is the most upheld. Elon is literally suing for speech he doesn't like.
- rpmisms 3y agoThat's compatible with freedom of speech. He's not censoring it, but he can show damages from misleading speech.
- wnevets 3y ago> That's compatible with freedom of speech. He's not censoring it I would rather have my account "censored" then being forced to spends tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers.
- jwlake 3y agolol unless you're in the business of publishing I'm unclear how this applies to you.
- rpmisms 3y agoWell, you don't have to deal with either, since you don't have the ear of the elites and can't cause damages by talking shit.
- wnevets 3y agoYou think media matters has the ear of the elites and not the multi billionaire with direct ties to the US Government? That is an interesting take.
- rvz 3y agoThen she should be off of all social media, rather than joining into a different sewer location. It always has been for decades, long before Musk bought the company, but again hundreds of millions still use the platform after all the nonsensical predictions of complete shutdown one year ago and the continuing active campaigns to bring it down. There are much more larger global sewers such as Instagram and TikTok that who's algorithms are much worse than Twitter / X, so let us not believe that this 'global sewage' is exclusive to Twitter / X and especially the words of someone who still needs to clean up their own city.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vasvae3 3y ago[flagged]
- agumonkey 3y agoCenturies of Experience
- threeseed 3y agoWhich is a pretty stupid comment to make given they are hosting the Olympics next year. A ridiculous amount of effort has been made to clean up the city even going so far as to make the Seine swimmable by athletes and the general public. Not sure of any major city where that is possible.
- Slow_Hand 3y agoThis is a solid video describing Paris’ strategy for cleaning the Seine before the Olympics. Very cool. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S26CHpcD2zk&pp=ygUSQ2xlYW5pbmcgdGhlIHNlaW5l https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S26CHpcD2zk&pp=ygUSQ2xlYW5pbmc...
- askonomm 3y agoIt's funny how cities clean themselves up only when the rest of the world is looking at them, e.g Olympics, only to fall into disrepair the moment that's gone, because why would the government ever care about its own people, right?
- pixl97 3y agoBecause it costs an epic fuckload of money and effort to perform the cleanup. Quite often the cities are in worse shape as they take no debt to perform said building/cleanups and then are left without the funds to perform the basic level of maintenance they were before the olympics.
- askonomm 3y agoThat's interesting to hear. I thought we paid taxes for that. Or what am I paying half my salary to the government for then? Should I start paying the remaining half as well?
- waynesonfire 3y agoThere is sewage in X, sewage in your city, and sewage in your home. X is what you make it to be. I spend little enough time on it that the small amount of content I do consume from it doesn't offend me. What I have noticed is the vast amount of criticism of X during the FB Threads rollout. Unsurprisingly, it's dead. Threads has no reason to be immune to the alleged dysfunction that's seen on X. My theory is that it would be no different had it been able to attract sufficient market share.
- johannes1234321 3y agoThat is somewhat true for a low-profile account. When mostly reading. It is a lot less true for a high-profile account, which is receiving tons of replies and other interactions, where the sewage swamps out and flows towards you.
- junofan 3y agoI dunno, I have one account with a few hundred k followers and the quality stuff’s in the DMs, same as always. You can’t really keep up with the replies anyways.
- abledon 3y agoThen what is Facebook/Tiktok?
- alumelot 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thowaway91234 3y agoIt was always a sewer.
- johnyzee 3y agoThe free speech thing is a red herring. Musk said 'freedom of speech' but not necessarily 'freedom of reach', which seems reasonable. This is not the problem. The problem is that the algorithms simply don't work. The sewer analogy is good - shit seems to float to the top, rather than the other way around. Places like HN and even reddit nailed this a long time ago, but any given X feed just looks like an append-only list of trash. Or a quick-moving stream of turds, to stay within the analogy.
- davidw 3y agoHN is heavily moderated by very knowledgeable people and that's part of what makes it continue to work well. It's like if you go into a bar and there's a guy screaming a bunch of curse words and racist crap in the corner at everyone near him. Normal people are going to leave if no one kicks the guy out.
- Covzire 3y agoAnyone can unfollow those people. Nobody on my timeline is screaming curse words or racist crap. The real reason X is being attacked is because the Following tab doesn't inject propaganda like every other social media / news website does, other than ads of course.
- rez9x 3y agoI think a big part of the problem is the 'For You' feed, which has been trash since the day it was implemented (on practically every social media platform). I remember it being a big pain to get to the chronological feed years ago when they first implemented the curated feed as a default. It may not have been quite so full of ignorance and hate back then, but it was still full of things I had no interest in. I still use X/Twitter weekly and I don't have any problem with the posts I see. My problem is with comments, which are usually where I will see hate and spam.
- Covzire 3y agoYeah replies are a mixed bag. Some are funny, some are sad, some are just downright scary, but I like being treated like an adult and being able to choose which I spend time with, something that Americans haven't enjoyed from any other social media site in many years now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 654675443 3y ago[dead]
- smeagull 3y agoHow do people even know? You get linked to a tweet, and it blocks you by asking you to log in. Haven't seen any of their content in months.
- minerva23 3y agoReplace the domain name with nitter.net to view content anonymously
- OrvalWintermute 3y agoThere is something I really like about X. If you want to find coverage of the Palestinian position you can read it, and listen/participate in a space. If you want to find coverage of the Israeli position you can read it, and listen/participate in a space. To me it says that X is not practicing viewpoint discrimination for this issue which is actually heavily censored in much of legacy media.
- lolbase 3y agoAnd if you want to find somebody saying that some people should not exist on the planet, you can find the CEO retweeting it, or replying with something like "this is the actual truth".
- stainablesteel 3y agoyou can find comments like this too but they get community note'd for taking things out of context
- knrdev 3y agoHave you really gained or learned anything from this? They just benefit from the conflict between opposing, incompatible viewpoints. Musk especially seems to like it. It's primarily a for-profit enterprise fueled by hate and propaganda, just like those "legacy" things it's supposed to replace.
- systemstops 3y ago[flagged]
- babypuncher 3y agoI've been growing increasingly skeptical of Musk for years now, and his unhinged behavior at twitter has really cemented my negative opinion of him. If he didn't want people like me to start ignoring him, and dismissing whatever nonsense products he wants to shill, then he shouldn't have started attaching his name to bullshit culture wars. Now, it doesn't matter if a claim made about him is true or not, I no longer give him the benefit of the doubt, and I don't have the desire or the energy to thoroughly investigate every stupid little fight he gets in anymore. This is a problem of his own making.
- valar_m 3y agoWhat should we be more skeptical about, specifically? The negative claims I've heard are all easily verifiable. I saw the Elon tweet myself, and the lawsuit against Media Matters fully concedes that ads were being served next to Nazi content. Which part should we not be believing? > Elon Musk has pissed off some very powerful people with his recent comments. Which very powerful people are you referring to, specifically?
- lemmsjid 3y agoI'm a supporter of free speech, and like most free speech supporters I tend to believe the suppression of speech leads to a paradoxical effect: the metastasis of the suppressed ideas. Of course there is a but coming! When twitter launched, I immediately felt like Twitter itself was a distillation of a fascistic impulse: the idea that a curt and pithy phrase, stripped of nuance, is not only a superior way to communicate, but the only way to communicate. (I'm using "fascistic" here not to incite, but for lack of a better term: I think everyone has an impulse towards the safety of political simplicity, and that modern democracy is founded on complexity, i.e. lots of opinions, lots of checks and balances, lots of persuasive argument required to achieve things). I feel that the very structure of throttled meaning is what made Twitter in particular such a platform for mass outrage and negativity. Fast foward a decade, and the twitter model of simplicity is now the normal mode of discourse on social media. If something is not a few seconds long, its reach is quite limited. This means that simple things, like propaganda, are easier to articulate, and complex things that acknowledge the subtlety of actual life get buried. Taken out of political context, a good example is videos of altercations between people (fights, arguments, etc) that become viral. As a viewer, I almost immediately feel outrage and righteous anger against the perceived victim of the altercation. But sometimes some context comes to light: the perceived victim is actually the aggressor, or the situation is much more complicated than it seemed. Putting this back in the political context, I see quick videos getting passed around that do a similar thing: take an event quite out of context in order to manufacture outrage against a particular group. Of course there is a word for this: propaganda. I'm not a technological doomer: I'm quite intrigued as to what is happening, and my impulse is not to shackle it. But what I'm witnessing is that propaganda (or otherwise, events taken out of context) spread like lightning on social media, and I am sympathetic to attempts by platforms to somehow provide context or moderation to that spread. The mob mentality is real. I share the Mayor's concern about Twitter, because even though it was a sewer from the start, in my estimation, by its platformization of epistemological constraint, the fact that it is walking back attempts to staunch the spread of its own demons is concerning. I do think a healthy public debate in a functioning, free speech democracy, is essential to its lifeblood. But for that debate to function, it must be done in good faith, and with some shared understanding of truth and context. While I see that happening in some places on social media, it's generally on well moderated forums in which people accept that bad faith arguers will be banned. Like I said I don't have a clear sense of the solution to all this. State sponsored propaganda was all too effective before social media, and I can see social media undermining the monopoly of the state on the dissemination of that propaganda. But perhaps the pendulum will swing too far to the other side, where blatant bad faith, grassroots propaganda, and untruth successfully steer public opinion.
- paganel 3y agoI take this as a compliment for X and Musk, seeing as this comes from Ann Hidalgo, the lady who brought the Socialist Party to under 5% of the vote at the last presidential elections in France.
- gordian-mind 3y agoAs a Parisian closely following Mayor Hidalgo's activities, her departure from Twitter amidst this controversy doesn't surprise me. The details about her Tahiti trip, costing €60,000 from our taxes, emerged on Twitter, during which she could not perform any official duties but instead visited her daughter and enjoyed a long vacation with her staff. [1] The trip, supposedly for inspecting Olympic facilities even though this was revealed to be impossible due to local conditions, now seems like a gross misappropriation of public funds. This does not sit well with many of us concerned about how our taxes are spent, and there's been a formal complaint by an Anticorruption NGO. [2] When confronted about this she deflected by pointing out that every year her first trip with her whole team is at Auschwitz, and she accused her detractors of not being willing to go there with her next year. The obvious instrumentalization scandalized the opposition. [1] https://www.bfmtv.com/paris/interpellee-sur-ses-voyages-anne-hidalgo-rappelle-son-deplacement-a-auschwitz-et-suscite-l-indignation-de-l-opposition_AV-202311151008.html https://www.bfmtv.com/paris/interpellee-sur-ses-voyages-anne... [2] https://www.lequipe.fr/Tous-sports/Actualites/Une-association-porte-plainte-contre-x-apres-le-deplacement-d-anne-hidalgo-a-tahiti-lie-aux-jo-2024-de-paris/1431808 https://www.lequipe.fr/Tous-sports/Actualites/Une-associatio...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- senectus1 3y agooh come on.. it was ALWAYS a sewer. its just that the nuggets a fewer and far between now and the stream has gotten thinner and slower.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoUsenet became a sewer, too. Yet Google believed it needed to acquire DejaNews. "Social media" was a lame attempt to centralise and commercialise forums through surveillance and "advertising services". Bring back the minitel.
- EA-3167 3y agoBased on the proliferation of smaller Discords for example, I think people are re-learning why being in a public space with all other humans is not desirable. I may want access to observe that public space, but from a distance... with friends I respect and like.
- orwin 3y agoTo be fair to Musk, it isn't his fault. It has been a sewer since 2016+ and the growth period ended. Also he made the team release community notes well ahead of schedule, and this is probably the best feature of Twitter. If that was created in 2017, I probably would still be addict.
- leesec 3y agoX is the best social media there is and hasn't changed much recently.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- hackeraccount 3y agoThe world needs sewers of all types.