10 ms·

Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Fr

Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.

steveBK123 3y ago
Would agree. Some old school journalists from NYT wrote about that phenomenon. Colleagues doing a lot of stories that were basically the groupthink of their friend group or what they saw on Twitter. Part of it is economics/incentives leading journalists to have to churn out a lot of content. Part of it is laziness as it's a lot easier than going out into the field and actually talking to people.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  One sourcing was this interview with NYT publisher - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a... From this part: Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case. Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - anileated 3y ago
    In the day when a lot happens online, purely sitting in front of a screen it’s possible to produce excellent and deep investigative stories. You do own open-source intelligence, you interview sources, etc., all while in front of the screen. Bellingcat does it on a regular basis, for example. You do not need to step out of your room to spot lies and discrepancies.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Yes & No. Twitter, it is always worth remembering, is not real life. The opinions you encounter as typical there tend to be the very fringe single digit percents of each political faction. Viewing the world through it exclusively is perilous.
      - anileated 3y ago
        When someone publishes a recording that is verifiably Russian bombing of Syria, and claims it to be Israeli bombing of Gaza, it is not a matter of “opinion”. And investigative journalism has nothing to do with Twitter in particular. However, do remember that Twitter (as well as Facebook, TikTok, Hacker News, Mastodon, email, Matrix, WhatsApp, or what have you) is as much part of real life as anything else, online and off, is part of real life. It is not some proverbial Las Vegas where nothing counts.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago
  [dead]
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  That sounds a lot like how "news" were sourced before that, with random interviews at street corners near the newspaper's office, stuff they heard at parties and from friends. I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
  - adolph 3y ago
    “Random interviews” Gregory F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), is a retired[1] American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, best known for frequently being quoted as a "man on the street" in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts from 1995 to the present. He has been quoted in hundreds of articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a "man on the street" rather than a newsmaker or expert). Although he always gives his real name, he has admitted to making things up to get into the paper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Packer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Packer
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    > I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces. Publisher of NYTimes is on the record in a few interviews basically saying that yes, his journalists are putting in less work into their pieces (because they are forced to produce more pieces per day).
- mattmanser 3y ago
  You used to get the same phenomena in broadsheets before that though. I saw it frequently in the Sunday (maybe Saturday?) magazine included in the big UK papers. I remember coming to the realization when reading a fluff piece that the author had basically interviewed their mates and made it a story. I think the specific article was about marrying later, and they'd just interviewed a bunch of uni-educated people of a certain socio-economic wealth. No stats, no experts, just 'gut' feeling about what was happening. And once you saw it, you realized a significant chunk of the non-news stories were like that. This was in the 90s/00s. I think a lot of lifestyle articles have been that way for a long time, pre-internet, it's just that the lifestyle articles are more prominent now.
- rvba 3y ago
  Sometimes those looked like sock puppet accounts of the journalist. 1. Make few accounts on twitter 2. Post some bullshit 3. Quote it
- mckern 3y ago
  In fact, The Economist published a 17,000 word un-paywalled piece [0] recently about the NYT's group think problem. [0] https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yes! I hadn't managed to sit through and read the thing until now, though I've seen a number of interesting excerpts quoted. Two that really stuck out to me was- Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.” Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”.
  - 1over137 3y ago
    Maybe I'm old, but didn't the NYT used to be very right-wing?
    - Robotbeat 3y ago
      20 years ago, when I was right-wing myself (in College Republicans, etc), the AM radio I listened to and people I talked to all thought NYT was very left-wing ("liberal").
      - ruszki 3y ago
        Liberalism wasn’t a question of left or right 10+ years ago.
- jeanchen 3y ago
  As the old saying goes, "news is what happens to the editor."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cogman10 3y ago
I tend to agree. Far too many "journalists" are publishing articles like "here's what one reddit user discovered about xyz".
- yamazakiwi 3y ago
  I've seen websites that automate all article creation from social media posts where they don't even check if the title generated makes sense.
- liveoneggs 3y ago
  at least in that case they credit reddit instead of "Now that everyone..." or "People outraged..."
robotsquidward 3y ago
The article goes into that in depth, and how that hasn't really changed even on newer platforms like TikTok, just gotten harder to follow and understand.
Dig1t 3y ago
Traffic is up on X 22% YoY Not quite death, but certainly agree about news outlets no longer seeing it as okay to say that “The internet is freaking out about X” https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitter-site-traffic-up-22-3-yoy/ https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitte... >Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and his official purchase of the platform, just over one year on from his taking of the reins.
- kurthr 3y ago
  Man, those are some terrible statistics... 142.86% of nothing is still nothing. For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent, while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period. While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely. Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86 per cent.
  - Dig1t 3y ago
    Yeah I had the same thought about the account creation metric, I agree that X is such a new name that increased searches about its name don't really mean much. The overall usage stat does line up with X's own claims about traffic though. i.e. X is saying that traffic is higher than it has ever been and this source suggests the same as well.
- conradfr 3y ago
  These days the only persons who start to follow me, like my tweets or even advertise in my feed are those onlyfans, digital prostitutes or whatever. In fact it's the first time I have to use the block function on Twitter. Is this the growth?
- fo76yo 3y ago
  > Traffic is up on X 22% YoY Bots gonna bot. So far they’ve not caught any of mine I setup this last year. Each bot sticks to a context, simulates some time wasting doom scrolling at random to look human, posts affiliate links otherwise with AI generating the message payload in response to a Tweet by its mark. I love how easy the internet made it to fleece potato brains
paxys 3y ago
Yup, and it was even worse because you could drive any narrative and reinforce any bias that way. Make up a story, search 3 random Tweets that support it, and now you can report on anything to an audience that will eat it up, no real evidence needed. It is still happening of course, but at least now people rightfully look at Twitter with a little more suspicion.
- tqi 3y ago
  This coincided with a reevaluation of the role of objectivity in journalism, and the rise in the number of journalists who also self identified as activists. While I don't think The View From Nowhere was every really possible, I do think that this reflected a shift in norms that resulted in more blatant cherry picking of facts and backfilling of narratives to support predetermined conclusions. [1] https://mediaengagement.org/research/can-journalists-also-be-activists/ https://mediaengagement.org/research/can-journalists-also-be... [2] https://archives.cjr.org/editorial/the_right_debate.php https://archives.cjr.org/editorial/the_right_debate.php
jojojaf 3y ago
This comment uses 'X' as a variable, which I found confusing to parse given the recent rebranding of Twitter to X
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  One of the benefits of being so incredibly unbelievably wealthy, pay no rent to live in many people’s heads AND buy a letter of the alphabet. Personally I would have chosen Z but with the line through the middle. X is too edgey for me. X is associated with sex, drugs, rock and roll and death. Z is my favorite, calm, pleasant to pronounce and rarified. I enjoy seeing it out in the wild when it decides to make a foray. I know he’s owned the domain for a while but still now X is becoming his. Side note; I only started understanding Twitter after musk bought it. Can’t say my life is for the better but I can see some of the use of it. - Z
cbozeman 3y ago
X isn't dead, nor is it dying. Elon Musk took away a bunch of people's status, people who thought they were important somebodies because some nerds in an office met them in person and/or they paid some money to get a verification mark. That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it. Well same fucking thing about Twitter / X. A bunch of journalists - a profession generally and historically associated with the lower and middle class - have been / are being absorbed into the elite social classes of America, and they had a special widdle mark that gave them abilities the rest of the hoi polloi didn't have... and Elon Musk came around and he didn't just take it away from them - he did something worse. Same for the academics. Same for the so-called "thought leaders". He gave it to the common people. He put the elites and the commoners on equal footing... and they freaked the fuck out about it. X is not dying. It just isn't lorded over by the elites any longer. And they can't fucking stand it. Good. The Internet was supposed to be The Great Leveler anyway. We weren't supposed to have gigantic centralized platforms where only approved speech from the Party is allowed. The sooner the rest of these enormous social media platforms either die or radically change, the better. X didn't die, isn't dying, and won't die. The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it. And yes, the "you" in the above refers to me too... a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.
- wharvle 3y ago
  Musk said a couple weeks back that the loss of advertisers will “kill” Twitter, but it’s ok because “the world will judge them” (the advertisers) But maybe he was joking. Sure didn’t seem to be, but who knows. Or he’s wrong.
  - vGPU 3y ago
    Musk has enough money to single-handedly pay for the costs of running twitter for the next few centuries, and nobody in their right mind would actually let twitter be “killed”.
the_doctah 3y ago
"Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's censorship?
- Retr0id 3y ago
  "Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
  - the_doctah 3y ago
    Do you think it is more or less censored than before?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      If that Forbes article is correct, then it's about the same amount of censorship as before.
      - the_doctah 3y ago
        That implies government requests were the sole source of Twitter's censorship.
        JohnFen 3y ago
        Yes indeed. It's only "censorship" when the government demands it. Engaging in voluntary moderation is not censorship in a meaningful sense. It is, in fact, an aspect of freedom of speech that people should not be compelled to engage in speech that they don't want to engage in.
        the_doctah 3y ago
highspeedbus 3y ago
I think this is a bad thing for the way it was implemented. Twitter for a brief moment used to work like a Global Broadcast Radio, where everyone could hang out to get a sense of What Is Going On, even if results skewed towards the interests of terminally online people. Current siloed content feels more like hyper-personalized newspaper. The content is there, but there is limited opportunity or common ground to share and discuss it with friends. That siloing, along with Instagram's discouragement of user generated content, appears to suggest that Big Tech don't want to deal with opposing users (or any user at all) interacting with each other. IMHO.
- emodendroket 3y ago
  They got so sick of hearing about political bias they decided they didn’t want to be news sources after all, is my impression. Too bad they only came to their conclusion after getting news publishers to totally reorient themselves around social media though.
emodendroket 3y ago
So you think that the fragmentation of Web communities is going to lead to people having a LESS blinkered perspective?
- zebomon 3y ago
  Maybe not the fragmentation itself, but the general awareness of that fragmentation, yes. It sounds like a healthy thing for none of us to feel like we have a sense of "the internet" as a whole. I for one look forward to again being genuinely surprised to learn people's batshit insane opinions and theories, as I was in the early 2000s the first time I stumbled upon AboveTopSecret.
dylan604 3y ago
I can't decide if I dislike these more than the articles that just list items on Amazon where they just quote the reviews like they interviewed them. I assume they generate enough money through the link click throughs that make these articles worth while? I find these more repugnant than listicles. But twitter quotes, amazon review summaries, and listicles have to be the top 3 least favorite for me.
kredd 3y ago
The problem I notice is even though we might create niche interest groups online, they're hard to translate into real life. Makes it hard to connect with others when you meet them for drinks, find a movie to watch or some other sort of entertainment. I feel very lucky I was already out of university by the time algo-feeds became mainstream, otherwise it would be hard to chat about "latest episode of Game of Thrones". Or just generally chit-chat about "some stuff that everyone saw online".
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  They are not at all. You just need to establish some inclusion criteria, go through one cycle of rejecting people who don't meet it, and the people who remain following a purge tend to have elevated levels of group loyalty. Astroturfing is not that hard, and there's a lot of literature on how to engineer the outcomes you want.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  20 years ago, we’d talk each Monday about this week’s Simpson or X-Files, and we knew that 95-100% of the people in our group watched it on Sunday. We don’t have that today. I think Sportsball news is the last vestige of “shared culture” you can talk about over beer after work and be reasonably confident 30% or so of your mates can follow along. It’s so weird. 10 people who work together, around the same age, same social and economic class, and nobody can think of a topic that more than one of them know anything about, until someone says “How about those Warriors?”
  - pzmarzly 3y ago
    I knew a lot of people who got into Ancient Aliens craze (paradocumental series on History Channel). Every week they would meet up and talk about whatever conspiracy they aired that week. I was so glad to be missing out. Sure, it's just an anecdote, no perhaps I was unlucky, but I want to show that it's not always a positive thing to have this "shared culture" that you speak of.
    - kredd 3y ago
silexia 3y ago
I argue that Twitter is far superior now to it's previous incarnation. It's no longer controlled by a certain political viewpoint and now encourages all free speech. I find it extremely useful, much more so than any other source now.

steveBK123 3y ago

Would agree. Some old school journalists from NYT wrote about that phenomenon. Colleagues doing a lot of stories that were basically the groupthink of their friend group or what they saw on Twitter. Part of it is economics/incentives leading journalists to have to churn out a lot of content. Part of it is laziness as it's a lot easier than going out into the field and actually talking to people.

steveBK123 3y ago
One sourcing was this interview with NYT publisher - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a-g-sulzberger-on-the-battles-within-and-against-the-new-york-times https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/a... From this part: Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case. Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- anileated 3y ago
  In the day when a lot happens online, purely sitting in front of a screen it’s possible to produce excellent and deep investigative stories. You do own open-source intelligence, you interview sources, etc., all while in front of the screen. Bellingcat does it on a regular basis, for example. You do not need to step out of your room to spot lies and discrepancies.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yes & No. Twitter, it is always worth remembering, is not real life. The opinions you encounter as typical there tend to be the very fringe single digit percents of each political faction. Viewing the world through it exclusively is perilous.
    - anileated 3y ago
      When someone publishes a recording that is verifiably Russian bombing of Syria, and claims it to be Israeli bombing of Gaza, it is not a matter of “opinion”. And investigative journalism has nothing to do with Twitter in particular. However, do remember that Twitter (as well as Facebook, TikTok, Hacker News, Mastodon, email, Matrix, WhatsApp, or what have you) is as much part of real life as anything else, online and off, is part of real life. It is not some proverbial Las Vegas where nothing counts.
AniseAbyss 3y ago
[dead]
makeitdouble 3y ago
That sounds a lot like how "news" were sourced before that, with random interviews at street corners near the newspaper's office, stuff they heard at parties and from friends. I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
- adolph 3y ago
  “Random interviews” Gregory F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), is a retired[1] American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, best known for frequently being quoted as a "man on the street" in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts from 1995 to the present. He has been quoted in hundreds of articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a "man on the street" rather than a newsmaker or expert). Although he always gives his real name, he has admitted to making things up to get into the paper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Packer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Packer
- steveBK123 3y ago
  > I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces. Publisher of NYTimes is on the record in a few interviews basically saying that yes, his journalists are putting in less work into their pieces (because they are forced to produce more pieces per day).
mattmanser 3y ago
You used to get the same phenomena in broadsheets before that though. I saw it frequently in the Sunday (maybe Saturday?) magazine included in the big UK papers. I remember coming to the realization when reading a fluff piece that the author had basically interviewed their mates and made it a story. I think the specific article was about marrying later, and they'd just interviewed a bunch of uni-educated people of a certain socio-economic wealth. No stats, no experts, just 'gut' feeling about what was happening. And once you saw it, you realized a significant chunk of the non-news stories were like that. This was in the 90s/00s. I think a lot of lifestyle articles have been that way for a long time, pre-internet, it's just that the lifestyle articles are more prominent now.
rvba 3y ago
Sometimes those looked like sock puppet accounts of the journalist. 1. Make few accounts on twitter 2. Post some bullshit 3. Quote it
mckern 3y ago
In fact, The Economist published a 17,000 word un-paywalled piece [0] recently about the NYT's group think problem. [0] https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yes! I hadn't managed to sit through and read the thing until now, though I've seen a number of interesting excerpts quoted. Two that really stuck out to me was- Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.” Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”.
- 1over137 3y ago
  Maybe I'm old, but didn't the NYT used to be very right-wing?
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    20 years ago, when I was right-wing myself (in College Republicans, etc), the AM radio I listened to and people I talked to all thought NYT was very left-wing ("liberal").
    - ruszki 3y ago
      Liberalism wasn’t a question of left or right 10+ years ago.
jeanchen 3y ago
As the old saying goes, "news is what happens to the editor."

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cogman10 3y ago

I tend to agree. Far too many "journalists" are publishing articles like "here's what one reddit user discovered about xyz".

yamazakiwi 3y ago
I've seen websites that automate all article creation from social media posts where they don't even check if the title generated makes sense.
liveoneggs 3y ago
at least in that case they credit reddit instead of "Now that everyone..." or "People outraged..."

robotsquidward 3y ago

The article goes into that in depth, and how that hasn't really changed even on newer platforms like TikTok, just gotten harder to follow and understand.

Dig1t 3y ago

Traffic is up on X 22% YoY Not quite death, but certainly agree about news outlets no longer seeing it as okay to say that “The internet is freaking out about X” https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitter-site-traffic-up-22-3-yoy/ https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitte... >Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and his official purchase of the platform, just over one year on from his taking of the reins.

kurthr 3y ago
Man, those are some terrible statistics... 142.86% of nothing is still nothing. For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent, while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period. While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely. Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86 per cent.
- Dig1t 3y ago
  Yeah I had the same thought about the account creation metric, I agree that X is such a new name that increased searches about its name don't really mean much. The overall usage stat does line up with X's own claims about traffic though. i.e. X is saying that traffic is higher than it has ever been and this source suggests the same as well.
conradfr 3y ago
These days the only persons who start to follow me, like my tweets or even advertise in my feed are those onlyfans, digital prostitutes or whatever. In fact it's the first time I have to use the block function on Twitter. Is this the growth?
fo76yo 3y ago
> Traffic is up on X 22% YoY Bots gonna bot. So far they’ve not caught any of mine I setup this last year. Each bot sticks to a context, simulates some time wasting doom scrolling at random to look human, posts affiliate links otherwise with AI generating the message payload in response to a Tweet by its mark. I love how easy the internet made it to fleece potato brains

paxys 3y ago

Yup, and it was even worse because you could drive any narrative and reinforce any bias that way. Make up a story, search 3 random Tweets that support it, and now you can report on anything to an audience that will eat it up, no real evidence needed. It is still happening of course, but at least now people rightfully look at Twitter with a little more suspicion.

tqi 3y ago
This coincided with a reevaluation of the role of objectivity in journalism, and the rise in the number of journalists who also self identified as activists. While I don't think The View From Nowhere was every really possible, I do think that this reflected a shift in norms that resulted in more blatant cherry picking of facts and backfilling of narratives to support predetermined conclusions. [1] https://mediaengagement.org/research/can-journalists-also-be-activists/ https://mediaengagement.org/research/can-journalists-also-be... [2] https://archives.cjr.org/editorial/the_right_debate.php https://archives.cjr.org/editorial/the_right_debate.php

jojojaf 3y ago

This comment uses 'X' as a variable, which I found confusing to parse given the recent rebranding of Twitter to X

salad-tycoon 3y ago
One of the benefits of being so incredibly unbelievably wealthy, pay no rent to live in many people’s heads AND buy a letter of the alphabet. Personally I would have chosen Z but with the line through the middle. X is too edgey for me. X is associated with sex, drugs, rock and roll and death. Z is my favorite, calm, pleasant to pronounce and rarified. I enjoy seeing it out in the wild when it decides to make a foray. I know he’s owned the domain for a while but still now X is becoming his. Side note; I only started understanding Twitter after musk bought it. Can’t say my life is for the better but I can see some of the use of it. - Z

cbozeman 3y ago

X isn't dead, nor is it dying. Elon Musk took away a bunch of people's status, people who thought they were important somebodies because some nerds in an office met them in person and/or they paid some money to get a verification mark. That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it. Well same fucking thing about Twitter / X. A bunch of journalists - a profession generally and historically associated with the lower and middle class - have been / are being absorbed into the elite social classes of America, and they had a special widdle mark that gave them abilities the rest of the hoi polloi didn't have... and Elon Musk came around and he didn't just take it away from them - he did something worse. Same for the academics. Same for the so-called "thought leaders". He gave it to the common people. He put the elites and the commoners on equal footing... and they freaked the fuck out about it. X is not dying. It just isn't lorded over by the elites any longer. And they can't fucking stand it. Good. The Internet was supposed to be The Great Leveler anyway. We weren't supposed to have gigantic centralized platforms where only approved speech from the Party is allowed. The sooner the rest of these enormous social media platforms either die or radically change, the better. X didn't die, isn't dying, and won't die. The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it. And yes, the "you" in the above refers to me too... a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.

wharvle 3y ago
Musk said a couple weeks back that the loss of advertisers will “kill” Twitter, but it’s ok because “the world will judge them” (the advertisers) But maybe he was joking. Sure didn’t seem to be, but who knows. Or he’s wrong.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Musk has enough money to single-handedly pay for the costs of running twitter for the next few centuries, and nobody in their right mind would actually let twitter be “killed”.

the_doctah 3y ago

"Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's censorship?

Retr0id 3y ago
"Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
- the_doctah 3y ago
  Do you think it is more or less censored than before?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    If that Forbes article is correct, then it's about the same amount of censorship as before.
    - the_doctah 3y ago
      That implies government requests were the sole source of Twitter's censorship.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        Yes indeed. It's only "censorship" when the government demands it. Engaging in voluntary moderation is not censorship in a meaningful sense. It is, in fact, an aspect of freedom of speech that people should not be compelled to engage in speech that they don't want to engage in.
        the_doctah 3y ago

highspeedbus 3y ago

I think this is a bad thing for the way it was implemented. Twitter for a brief moment used to work like a Global Broadcast Radio, where everyone could hang out to get a sense of What Is Going On, even if results skewed towards the interests of terminally online people. Current siloed content feels more like hyper-personalized newspaper. The content is there, but there is limited opportunity or common ground to share and discuss it with friends. That siloing, along with Instagram's discouragement of user generated content, appears to suggest that Big Tech don't want to deal with opposing users (or any user at all) interacting with each other. IMHO.

emodendroket 3y ago
They got so sick of hearing about political bias they decided they didn’t want to be news sources after all, is my impression. Too bad they only came to their conclusion after getting news publishers to totally reorient themselves around social media though.

emodendroket 3y ago

So you think that the fragmentation of Web communities is going to lead to people having a LESS blinkered perspective?

zebomon 3y ago
Maybe not the fragmentation itself, but the general awareness of that fragmentation, yes. It sounds like a healthy thing for none of us to feel like we have a sense of "the internet" as a whole. I for one look forward to again being genuinely surprised to learn people's batshit insane opinions and theories, as I was in the early 2000s the first time I stumbled upon AboveTopSecret.

dylan604 3y ago

I can't decide if I dislike these more than the articles that just list items on Amazon where they just quote the reviews like they interviewed them. I assume they generate enough money through the link click throughs that make these articles worth while? I find these more repugnant than listicles. But twitter quotes, amazon review summaries, and listicles have to be the top 3 least favorite for me.

kredd 3y ago

The problem I notice is even though we might create niche interest groups online, they're hard to translate into real life. Makes it hard to connect with others when you meet them for drinks, find a movie to watch or some other sort of entertainment. I feel very lucky I was already out of university by the time algo-feeds became mainstream, otherwise it would be hard to chat about "latest episode of Game of Thrones". Or just generally chit-chat about "some stuff that everyone saw online".

anigbrowl 3y ago
They are not at all. You just need to establish some inclusion criteria, go through one cycle of rejecting people who don't meet it, and the people who remain following a purge tend to have elevated levels of group loyalty. Astroturfing is not that hard, and there's a lot of literature on how to engineer the outcomes you want.
ryandrake 3y ago
20 years ago, we’d talk each Monday about this week’s Simpson or X-Files, and we knew that 95-100% of the people in our group watched it on Sunday. We don’t have that today. I think Sportsball news is the last vestige of “shared culture” you can talk about over beer after work and be reasonably confident 30% or so of your mates can follow along. It’s so weird. 10 people who work together, around the same age, same social and economic class, and nobody can think of a topic that more than one of them know anything about, until someone says “How about those Warriors?”
- pzmarzly 3y ago
  I knew a lot of people who got into Ancient Aliens craze (paradocumental series on History Channel). Every week they would meet up and talk about whatever conspiracy they aired that week. I was so glad to be missing out. Sure, it's just an anecdote, no perhaps I was unlucky, but I want to show that it's not always a positive thing to have this "shared culture" that you speak of.
  - kredd 3y ago

silexia 3y ago

I argue that Twitter is far superior now to it's previous incarnation. It's no longer controlled by a certain political viewpoint and now encourages all free speech. I find it extremely useful, much more so than any other source now.