4 ms·

I've only been on Twitter fairly recently. This was plain as day long before then. My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less i

I've only been on Twitter fairly recently. This was plain as day long before then. My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less influenced by it.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less influenced by it. How do you think "the news, media, culture, or politics" are influenced by Twitter except via the people doing the influencing and the people being influenced both being on Twitter? People leaving Twitter does reduce its social impact.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  The influencers are the key, and unless you are a big influencer, leaving twitter as an individual will have negligible impact. The former is big enough that the latter will stay even when all this is happening. It is indeed a medium, but it's a medium becoming more and more compromised, as we've seen over the months So you either need influencers to shift out (which is happening, slowly. But I'm not sure if it'll be enough to "kill" Twitter) or somehow generate a new batch of influencers for a competitor. Both are hard.
- moduspol 3y ago
  It doesn't require regular people to be involved. As long as the journalists, politicians, screenwriters, staffers, celebrities, and other cultural elites continue to use it to signal which issues matter, which ones don't, and how their various tribes respond, it'll continue to underpin the culture. It already got as far as it has in the US with under 20% of the population. That's with >80% not participating. Getting that back to 90 or 95% won't matter as long as the most influential (including most influential OUTSIDE of Twitter) people stay.
tayo42 3y ago
Twitter is made up of people like you. It's entertainment, just like these comments were using now. Politics that effects you doesn't happen in Twitter replies, it's happening between politicians privately and with engaged people on the local level. Even mid tier popular people get over whelmed by interactions and ignore and block them, so they your not communicating two ways. It's just a fire hose of bits of facts. a few thousand likes makes things feel important. A thousand on a local level when towns are made up of 30k people isn't representative of a significant opinion. Tweets are just entertaining noise
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Politics that effects you doesn't happen in Twitter replies, it's happening between politicians privately and with engaged people on the local level. I can't full agree. It may not be as immediately effective as politicians, but politicians are beholden to the people, and people are influenced by influencers. So loud influencers can indeed sway public opinion and even political policy simply by posting on twitter. The largest one being the now owner of the entire site. I agree the comment replies are just the peanut gallery, but I think we're well past the point in society where social media is "just entertaining noise".
- moduspol 3y ago
  Tweets are what determines what ends up in the news, on Saturday Night Live, what you can safely say or not say at your job, what the late night shows are talking about, what questions get asked in debates, what gets printed in the newspapers in the morning, and what's included (or excluded) from popular movies and TV shows. It doesn't do this based on individual politicians taking seriously arbitrary tweets sent to them. It happens because the world's most influential people care about what happens there. And it feeds itself. And it does that with less than 20% of the US population as users. It'd still do it with less than 10%, or less than 5%. As long as the most influential people stay.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The main real world impacts I've seen from twitter are people being canceled after social media outrage and twitter as a backdoor to getting customer service. Twitter doesn't really "make news". People talk about news on twitter and lazy news orgs (desperate for free, zero-effort content) post commentary from rando twitter users about the non-twitter news that sometimes actually matters. Occasionally companies do announce things on Twitter, although most of the time they have a press release or blog post on their own websites that say the exact same thing. That said, there are a few extremely cheap/lazy government officials/offices that use twitter to announce things while failing to provide that information elsewhere and that should really change. Twitter is a whole lot of advertising. The PR teams of celebrities, advertisers that call themselves influencers, and bots drive the platform. Twitter isn't usually where things happen, it's where random people talk about things that are happening elsewhere. The vast majority of twitter is as totally worthless and unnecessary as the hot takes found on facebook or the selfies posted to instagram. If twitter were shut down tomorrow and all that content were wiped off the face of the Earth little, if anything at all, of any consequence would change beyond people wasting more of their time on other social media platforms.

I've only been on Twitter fairly recently. This was plain as day long before then. My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less influenced by it.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> My being off Twitter won't make the news, media, culture, or politics less influenced by it. How do you think "the news, media, culture, or politics" are influenced by Twitter except via the people doing the influencing and the people being influenced both being on Twitter? People leaving Twitter does reduce its social impact.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
The influencers are the key, and unless you are a big influencer, leaving twitter as an individual will have negligible impact. The former is big enough that the latter will stay even when all this is happening. It is indeed a medium, but it's a medium becoming more and more compromised, as we've seen over the months So you either need influencers to shift out (which is happening, slowly. But I'm not sure if it'll be enough to "kill" Twitter) or somehow generate a new batch of influencers for a competitor. Both are hard.
moduspol 3y ago
It doesn't require regular people to be involved. As long as the journalists, politicians, screenwriters, staffers, celebrities, and other cultural elites continue to use it to signal which issues matter, which ones don't, and how their various tribes respond, it'll continue to underpin the culture. It already got as far as it has in the US with under 20% of the population. That's with >80% not participating. Getting that back to 90 or 95% won't matter as long as the most influential (including most influential OUTSIDE of Twitter) people stay.

tayo42 3y ago

Twitter is made up of people like you. It's entertainment, just like these comments were using now. Politics that effects you doesn't happen in Twitter replies, it's happening between politicians privately and with engaged people on the local level. Even mid tier popular people get over whelmed by interactions and ignore and block them, so they your not communicating two ways. It's just a fire hose of bits of facts. a few thousand likes makes things feel important. A thousand on a local level when towns are made up of 30k people isn't representative of a significant opinion. Tweets are just entertaining noise

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Politics that effects you doesn't happen in Twitter replies, it's happening between politicians privately and with engaged people on the local level. I can't full agree. It may not be as immediately effective as politicians, but politicians are beholden to the people, and people are influenced by influencers. So loud influencers can indeed sway public opinion and even political policy simply by posting on twitter. The largest one being the now owner of the entire site. I agree the comment replies are just the peanut gallery, but I think we're well past the point in society where social media is "just entertaining noise".
moduspol 3y ago
Tweets are what determines what ends up in the news, on Saturday Night Live, what you can safely say or not say at your job, what the late night shows are talking about, what questions get asked in debates, what gets printed in the newspapers in the morning, and what's included (or excluded) from popular movies and TV shows. It doesn't do this based on individual politicians taking seriously arbitrary tweets sent to them. It happens because the world's most influential people care about what happens there. And it feeds itself. And it does that with less than 20% of the US population as users. It'd still do it with less than 10%, or less than 5%. As long as the most influential people stay.
- autoexec 3y ago
  The main real world impacts I've seen from twitter are people being canceled after social media outrage and twitter as a backdoor to getting customer service. Twitter doesn't really "make news". People talk about news on twitter and lazy news orgs (desperate for free, zero-effort content) post commentary from rando twitter users about the non-twitter news that sometimes actually matters. Occasionally companies do announce things on Twitter, although most of the time they have a press release or blog post on their own websites that say the exact same thing. That said, there are a few extremely cheap/lazy government officials/offices that use twitter to announce things while failing to provide that information elsewhere and that should really change. Twitter is a whole lot of advertising. The PR teams of celebrities, advertisers that call themselves influencers, and bots drive the platform. Twitter isn't usually where things happen, it's where random people talk about things that are happening elsewhere. The vast majority of twitter is as totally worthless and unnecessary as the hot takes found on facebook or the selfies posted to instagram. If twitter were shut down tomorrow and all that content were wiped off the face of the Earth little, if anything at all, of any consequence would change beyond people wasting more of their time on other social media platforms.