9 ms·

What We Lost When Twitter Became X

31 points by LordAtlas 3y ago

Podgajski 3y ago
What we lost? Who is this we?
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  heh, I came in here to say "we lost nothing". people who were addicted to twitter are now addicted to X, people who weren't don't really care.
- mikecoles 3y ago
  Bitter, former Twitter employees.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  It's easy to crap on Twitter, but I found it very useful as a one-stop shop for hyperlocal news and keeping up with the latest work from researchers in my field. Very niche things that managed to coalesce in one place. It's not just Twitter mobs and stupid online fights. X still has all the stupidity but none of the niche value I found in Twitter. Thanks Elon.
  - Podgajski 3y ago
    I’m on Twitter and I have not seen any of my news sources or research sources being diminished after must took over. And the fact that I can actually talk about zinc as being an immuno stimulant now without it being shadow banned is refreshing.
  - scottyah 3y ago
    I'm pretty bummed a lot of people left because of their hate for Elon (or support of their friends who hate Elon). What I'm still looking for is what exactly he did that drove the people away? Was it just the layoffs and his personality? The site seems to be operating mostly the same.
    - jfengel 3y ago
      There are substantial differences in the way the site works. It no longer privileges genuine celebrities; the "blue check" is for sale cheap. And it's heavily used by people with deeply unpleasant opinions, which tend to be more heavily promoted. The network effects of communication mean that your entire experience becomes more filled with that unpleasantness. People left because Twitter was no longer enjoyable to them. The changes shifted the equilibrium that made the community work, and they left. Some of that was just exemplified by Musk himself, who is a deliberately abrasive person, and made changes that amplified other abrasive people. He made a big deal about the right to speak, and so he has it. But he seems to have missed that other people have the right to not listen, and people's fear of losing that right drove them off the platform even before their feeds degraded.
      - Podgajski 3y ago
        > And it's heavily used by people with deeply unpleasant opinions, which tend to be more heavily promoted There’s absolutely zero evidence for this. It shipped to the community all right it shifted it from being biased to being more open. I know people don’t like that, but I would prefer an open conversation rather than one dominated by a particular bubble. There is no right not to listen that exist anywhere. But there is a right to free speech. You can still block people on Twitter all you want are you can even not go onto Twitter. But if you want to be in the public Square and you’re an advocate for free speech, then you can’t tell other people to shut up because it’s invading on your “right to listen“. That has to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard and you’re probably one of the people who left Twitter.
    - Podgajski 3y ago
      In my opinion, it was all organized propaganda. There were people who had very tight control over the narrative on Twitter, because it was not as open to speech as it is now. I discovered the word “zinc“ was being shadow banned during Covid. To me as an amateur researcher that was totally frustrating. But for people who were susceptible to the propaganda anything but the vaccine was a conspiracy theorist. It was really dominated by left-wing, and by left wing I mean people aligned with the Democrats. Those are most of the people who are upset.
infamouscow 3y ago
According to these legacy media outlets, Twitter was supposed to be days from total collapse and permanently going offline over a year ago. And yet, here we are, more than a year later. The legacy media is completely detached from reality. You have to genuinely be in a bubble in a bubble in a bubble (or an idiot) or to not see the propaganda being peddeled. The legacy media will continue giving Elon Musk all the free advertising he needs to finish disintermediating information away from the enemy class, and democratizing the citizenry.
- bigfudge 3y ago
  This is so ludicrously naive. Yes there are problems with legacy media - largely related to their plutocratic ownership. No, centralising control of our public discourse and spaces for debate in even fewer hands won’t help fix that problem. We lose nothing as Musk drives twitter into the ground. We have the potential to gain if federated protocols gain even a small amount of traction because critical mass for their viability may be smaller than we think given the overall increased size of the pie relative to when the first and second mover social media players were founded.
  - synecdoche 3y ago
    Are we expected to take you word, or mainstream media's, for it? I say, no more. It's a fact that it was widely predicted, as near certainty, by mainstream media that Twitter's fall was imminent after Musk's takeover.
  - infamouscow 3y ago
    The principle problem with legacy media is widespread adoption of smartphones changed the advertising business to be unfavorable to investigative journalism. Running investigative stories takes a lot of time and is prohibitively expensive when the advertising business shifts to favor quantity over quality. Right or wrong, the legacy media has not be able to adapt to social media. They've also largely given up doing the kind of investigative work that makes them competitive for the same brands advertising on Instagram, X, and TikTok. CNN+ didn't even last 30 days before they gave up. Fox News was actually holding Tucker Carlson's viewership back significantly. You haven't made any attempt to address the point being made, yet continue to propagate a crock of shit that reminds me of what George Orwell once wrote: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
psunavy03 3y ago
Say what you will about Elon, if he ends up driving Twitter into the ground, he'll arguably have done a public service.
- macspoofing 3y ago
  >Say what you will about Elon, if he ends up driving Twitter into the ground, he'll arguably have done a public service. I don't know ... Twitter as a news aggregator was (could have been) a public good. I think it was probably the least bad out of the group of: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat
  - Miraste 3y ago
    Twitter is the only one that became embedded in corridors of power around the world. Even if it has less misinformation and ragebait than the others (which I doubt), it does more damage because of the people engaging with it.
    - macspoofing 3y ago
      >Twitter is the only one that became embedded in corridors of power around the world. Even if it has less misinformation and ragebait than the others (which I doubt), it does more damage because of the people engaging with it. Can you elaborate? Isn't that a good thing to have those in the corridors of power directly communicating with the global public? I'm not a big fan of the Ayatollah of Iran, or Putin, but I want to know their perspective on current events, even if that perspective is 'regebait' and full of 'misinformation' ... and we had that, for a little bit of time, and we're losing that. What is the alternative? That news is filtered through some cabal of the 'chosen ones'?
      - bunderbunder 3y ago
        You know how we often talk about how publicly-traded companies' executives seem to have a tendency to make incredibly short-sighted decisions whose only clear motive is the immediate-term impact on stock price? It's like that but for politics.
ryanklee 3y ago
I don't know that we lost much; Twitter is was hugely problematic before Musk arrived. (The problems are not native to Twitter, but hip-shot social media in general.) What we gained, though, is better visibility on one of the most toxic, wretched humans currently on our besieged Earth. It should be clear to everyone that Musk is a dangerous lunatic. And for those who are confused on this point, your judgement is very, very suspect.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  > What we gained, though, is better visibility on one of the most toxic, wretched humans currently on our besieged Earth. So it wasn't when he called the diver that was risking their life saving children in a cave a pedophile because said diver said the sub Elon was having built was never going to work? That isn't when we knew he was a terrible person, but when he took over twitter and renamed it?
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    Your tone is snarls, but presumably you agree that better visibility on Musks failings as a human are net beneficial? Maybe we’re late to the party, but OP said ‘better visibility’ not ‘first inklings’
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      I think if you were ok with his pedophile comments but drew the line at twitter that you have your priorities wrong. judging someone in that manner for a frickin' website but giving them a pass for calling someone a pedophile says more about you as a human being than it does Musk.
      - bigfudge 3y ago
        yes, but let’s steel man this: I guess someone might not have been paying attention to twitter spats before and not understood the details and how gross the story was. The X shitshow is so public and obvious as to be unavoidable. And for that I’m grateful.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
A good counterpoint to this is this post by Nate Silver (of 538 fame): https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blob https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo... >Casey Newton hypothesizes that Musk bought Twitter essentially in order to destroy it. And guess what: maybe Musk wasn’t wrong. The Old Twitter kind of sucked, especially if you ever had the experience of dissenting from the consensus. It reinforced the worst impulses of the Indigo Blob, making it more partisan and rendering its institutions less effective. >There were also a lot of great features of Twitter. It was terrific for professional networking, for real-time coverage of some types of events, for cultivating interests in niche subjects, and even for encouraging pithy writing (my brain will forever be programmed to think in 280-character segments). Unfortunately, we probably aren’t getting the New Twitter — er, the new X — that I would want; Musk’s performance has been haphazard and he has a lot of hang-ups that I don’t share. But to the Old Twitter, good riddance.
- mullingitover 3y ago
  If he wanted to destroy it he could've just shut it down. He's making a lot of personal effort and seems personally invested in it not shutting down (see: recent bragging about latest usage stats). He's pretty clearly suffering from a crippling addiction to posting on the site[1] despite it having a massive negative impact on his reputation and legacy. If he had a peer group who truly cared about him they would've staged an intervention by now. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-phone-locked-hotel-safe-stop-tweeting-walter-isaacson-2023-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-phone-locked-hotel...
  - engineer_22 3y ago
    He doesn't want to destroy Twitter, anyone who thinks so is hyperventilating. He's a wealthy capitalist in a society that he sees as having a socialist cancer growing within it. Previous socialist revolutions are reason enough for him to want to control a piece of the mass-communication infrastructure. He wants to be able to broadcast - and so far it's been successful, he can say what he wants now. Making money would be the icing on the cake.
29athrowaway 3y ago
I think the change was positive. It helped revealing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files Community Notes before X, but you can see them being applied everywhere including Musk's posts.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 3y ago
I stopped using it since it required a login, and my experience has been uniformly positive. You really don't have to know what person Y is thinking about topic Z as quickly as possible.
Miraste 3y ago
I'm a New Yorker subscriber. The existence of this editorial and the fact someone there thought it was fit to publish is exactly why I'm so glad Twitter is slowly failing. I hope journalists break their addictions soon. Twitter was a net negative to every event mentioned in the article, and yet here's the author eulogizing it like a martyr. "the [Twitter employees] I knew—they worked hard, their work mattered, and they never stopped trying. Not until the moment their screens went blank.” The three claims in here are all true, but not in a positive way. I expect Twitter to go down in history with Thalidomide or DDT. Many people worked very hard on those with the best of intentions, but ultimately, they were poison.
- baxtr 3y ago
  Interesting take. I can’t imagine a dopamine free world. Twitter/X will be replaced by another social platform. We humans are just wired like that.
  - puttycat 3y ago
    Let's sell more cigarettes and McDonald's then. We humans are just wired like that.
    - baxtr 3y ago
      Exactly. Prohibition didn’t work. McDonald’s is still growing and obesity is the world’s biggest health problem. PS: I wish it was different. But I don’t have the hubris to believe we can change human nature.
      - toastercat 3y ago
        But the rate of consumption of cigarettes has declined in the past 100 years, likely due to public awareness of the health risks. I'm willing to wager as more people realize addiction to social media is against their best interests, companies/governments/people will make changes. We're kind of already seeing that.
    - 3y ago
karaterobot 3y ago
> Twitter users of all stripes speak nostalgically about the platform affirmed what I’d long suspected: many Twitter users hate Twitter the way New Yorkers hate New York—they don’t. Yeah! Or... try this metaphor on for size... like ex-smokers hate smoking. That may be more apt. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, it's bad for me. Yeah, I'd be better off if I never started. Yeah, I miss the feeling it used to give me. Sure, a pathway in my brain, developed over years, misses the hit or endorphins when they aren't available.
cloverich 3y ago
I started using twitter again for the first time in years. It has actually been wonderful. But I've done something I different than my other social media. I only click or read stuff on AI from reputable people. I try to quickly scroll past anything else, no matter how much brain fights it. The result is I get tons of up to date information on AI and basically nothing else. My main complaint is...I have to keep up the fight constantly, which is annoying. It does make me realize though, a curated social media app that _internally_ removes garbage is at least possible, and would be quite nice.
- porkphish 3y ago
  It's the same for me. It's a much different experience now. Especially since I hang out on the "Following" tab instead of the "For you" tab. It's a whole different ball game. Everything on AI, space, and programming up-to-date.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
> What We Lost When Twitter Became X I wonder what fraction of humanity thinks the answer is "nothing", and I have no guess what that fraction might be.
grepfru_it 3y ago
Seem to be forgetting that Twitter unrolled its ludicrous API policy and absurd rates well before Musk took over. I was trying to build a Twitter app using the api for at least a year before musk took over and I was never allowed to sign up. I had to “prove my use case” and wait to hear back from the powers to be [narrator: we didn’t]
toastercat 3y ago
I barely used Twitter before it became X, and I barely use it now. But before and now, I noticed the same thing in the dev circles I'm in (the Node/JS world): * Immense hubris surrounding tech stacks/frameworks of choice, to the point where people outright lie about competing technologies * Framework authors' non-stop boasting and clickbaiting about their tools or new shiney $599 courses (it's marketing, I get it) * Extreme prejudice against people who have differing political views; political arguments are basically unavoidable on Twitter/X no matter who you follow -- and they are never productive * People moral posturing about leaving Twitter/X for Mastodon when Elon took over. Of course, none of these people ever stopped using Twitter/X because it would have cost them their followers. It was pure lip service. I saw really nasty behavior by noteworthy folks in this circle (people who work at Google/Meta/Vercel), and I know these people are smart, but it made me think that Twitter/X just brings out the worst in people, and I don't think Elon taking over really made that much of a difference in the content (at least in my experience).
matteoraso 3y ago
>Communities allowed Twitter to survive and even thrive despite being a money-losing business Um, that's not how businesses work. I know that Elon isn't doing a good job, but the old system was clearly broken as well.

31 points by LordAtlas 3y ago

Podgajski 3y ago

What we lost? Who is this we?

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
heh, I came in here to say "we lost nothing". people who were addicted to twitter are now addicted to X, people who weren't don't really care.
mikecoles 3y ago
Bitter, former Twitter employees.
the_snooze 3y ago
It's easy to crap on Twitter, but I found it very useful as a one-stop shop for hyperlocal news and keeping up with the latest work from researchers in my field. Very niche things that managed to coalesce in one place. It's not just Twitter mobs and stupid online fights. X still has all the stupidity but none of the niche value I found in Twitter. Thanks Elon.
- Podgajski 3y ago
  I’m on Twitter and I have not seen any of my news sources or research sources being diminished after must took over. And the fact that I can actually talk about zinc as being an immuno stimulant now without it being shadow banned is refreshing.
- scottyah 3y ago
  I'm pretty bummed a lot of people left because of their hate for Elon (or support of their friends who hate Elon). What I'm still looking for is what exactly he did that drove the people away? Was it just the layoffs and his personality? The site seems to be operating mostly the same.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    There are substantial differences in the way the site works. It no longer privileges genuine celebrities; the "blue check" is for sale cheap. And it's heavily used by people with deeply unpleasant opinions, which tend to be more heavily promoted. The network effects of communication mean that your entire experience becomes more filled with that unpleasantness. People left because Twitter was no longer enjoyable to them. The changes shifted the equilibrium that made the community work, and they left. Some of that was just exemplified by Musk himself, who is a deliberately abrasive person, and made changes that amplified other abrasive people. He made a big deal about the right to speak, and so he has it. But he seems to have missed that other people have the right to not listen, and people's fear of losing that right drove them off the platform even before their feeds degraded.
    - Podgajski 3y ago
      > And it's heavily used by people with deeply unpleasant opinions, which tend to be more heavily promoted There’s absolutely zero evidence for this. It shipped to the community all right it shifted it from being biased to being more open. I know people don’t like that, but I would prefer an open conversation rather than one dominated by a particular bubble. There is no right not to listen that exist anywhere. But there is a right to free speech. You can still block people on Twitter all you want are you can even not go onto Twitter. But if you want to be in the public Square and you’re an advocate for free speech, then you can’t tell other people to shut up because it’s invading on your “right to listen“. That has to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard and you’re probably one of the people who left Twitter.
  - Podgajski 3y ago
    In my opinion, it was all organized propaganda. There were people who had very tight control over the narrative on Twitter, because it was not as open to speech as it is now. I discovered the word “zinc“ was being shadow banned during Covid. To me as an amateur researcher that was totally frustrating. But for people who were susceptible to the propaganda anything but the vaccine was a conspiracy theorist. It was really dominated by left-wing, and by left wing I mean people aligned with the Democrats. Those are most of the people who are upset.

infamouscow 3y ago

According to these legacy media outlets, Twitter was supposed to be days from total collapse and permanently going offline over a year ago. And yet, here we are, more than a year later. The legacy media is completely detached from reality. You have to genuinely be in a bubble in a bubble in a bubble (or an idiot) or to not see the propaganda being peddeled. The legacy media will continue giving Elon Musk all the free advertising he needs to finish disintermediating information away from the enemy class, and democratizing the citizenry.

bigfudge 3y ago
This is so ludicrously naive. Yes there are problems with legacy media - largely related to their plutocratic ownership. No, centralising control of our public discourse and spaces for debate in even fewer hands won’t help fix that problem. We lose nothing as Musk drives twitter into the ground. We have the potential to gain if federated protocols gain even a small amount of traction because critical mass for their viability may be smaller than we think given the overall increased size of the pie relative to when the first and second mover social media players were founded.
- synecdoche 3y ago
  Are we expected to take you word, or mainstream media's, for it? I say, no more. It's a fact that it was widely predicted, as near certainty, by mainstream media that Twitter's fall was imminent after Musk's takeover.
- infamouscow 3y ago
  The principle problem with legacy media is widespread adoption of smartphones changed the advertising business to be unfavorable to investigative journalism. Running investigative stories takes a lot of time and is prohibitively expensive when the advertising business shifts to favor quantity over quality. Right or wrong, the legacy media has not be able to adapt to social media. They've also largely given up doing the kind of investigative work that makes them competitive for the same brands advertising on Instagram, X, and TikTok. CNN+ didn't even last 30 days before they gave up. Fox News was actually holding Tucker Carlson's viewership back significantly. You haven't made any attempt to address the point being made, yet continue to propagate a crock of shit that reminds me of what George Orwell once wrote: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

psunavy03 3y ago

Say what you will about Elon, if he ends up driving Twitter into the ground, he'll arguably have done a public service.

macspoofing 3y ago
>Say what you will about Elon, if he ends up driving Twitter into the ground, he'll arguably have done a public service. I don't know ... Twitter as a news aggregator was (could have been) a public good. I think it was probably the least bad out of the group of: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat
- Miraste 3y ago
  Twitter is the only one that became embedded in corridors of power around the world. Even if it has less misinformation and ragebait than the others (which I doubt), it does more damage because of the people engaging with it.
  - macspoofing 3y ago
    >Twitter is the only one that became embedded in corridors of power around the world. Even if it has less misinformation and ragebait than the others (which I doubt), it does more damage because of the people engaging with it. Can you elaborate? Isn't that a good thing to have those in the corridors of power directly communicating with the global public? I'm not a big fan of the Ayatollah of Iran, or Putin, but I want to know their perspective on current events, even if that perspective is 'regebait' and full of 'misinformation' ... and we had that, for a little bit of time, and we're losing that. What is the alternative? That news is filtered through some cabal of the 'chosen ones'?
    - bunderbunder 3y ago
      You know how we often talk about how publicly-traded companies' executives seem to have a tendency to make incredibly short-sighted decisions whose only clear motive is the immediate-term impact on stock price? It's like that but for politics.

ryanklee 3y ago

I don't know that we lost much; Twitter is was hugely problematic before Musk arrived. (The problems are not native to Twitter, but hip-shot social media in general.) What we gained, though, is better visibility on one of the most toxic, wretched humans currently on our besieged Earth. It should be clear to everyone that Musk is a dangerous lunatic. And for those who are confused on this point, your judgement is very, very suspect.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
> What we gained, though, is better visibility on one of the most toxic, wretched humans currently on our besieged Earth. So it wasn't when he called the diver that was risking their life saving children in a cave a pedophile because said diver said the sub Elon was having built was never going to work? That isn't when we knew he was a terrible person, but when he took over twitter and renamed it?
- bigfudge 3y ago
  Your tone is snarls, but presumably you agree that better visibility on Musks failings as a human are net beneficial? Maybe we’re late to the party, but OP said ‘better visibility’ not ‘first inklings’
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    I think if you were ok with his pedophile comments but drew the line at twitter that you have your priorities wrong. judging someone in that manner for a frickin' website but giving them a pass for calling someone a pedophile says more about you as a human being than it does Musk.
    - bigfudge 3y ago
      yes, but let’s steel man this: I guess someone might not have been paying attention to twitter spats before and not understood the details and how gross the story was. The X shitshow is so public and obvious as to be unavoidable. And for that I’m grateful.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

A good counterpoint to this is this post by Nate Silver (of 538 fame): https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blob https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo... >Casey Newton hypothesizes that Musk bought Twitter essentially in order to destroy it. And guess what: maybe Musk wasn’t wrong. The Old Twitter kind of sucked, especially if you ever had the experience of dissenting from the consensus. It reinforced the worst impulses of the Indigo Blob, making it more partisan and rendering its institutions less effective. >There were also a lot of great features of Twitter. It was terrific for professional networking, for real-time coverage of some types of events, for cultivating interests in niche subjects, and even for encouraging pithy writing (my brain will forever be programmed to think in 280-character segments). Unfortunately, we probably aren’t getting the New Twitter — er, the new X — that I would want; Musk’s performance has been haphazard and he has a lot of hang-ups that I don’t share. But to the Old Twitter, good riddance.

mullingitover 3y ago
If he wanted to destroy it he could've just shut it down. He's making a lot of personal effort and seems personally invested in it not shutting down (see: recent bragging about latest usage stats). He's pretty clearly suffering from a crippling addiction to posting on the site[1] despite it having a massive negative impact on his reputation and legacy. If he had a peer group who truly cared about him they would've staged an intervention by now. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-phone-locked-hotel-safe-stop-tweeting-walter-isaacson-2023-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-phone-locked-hotel...
- engineer_22 3y ago
  He doesn't want to destroy Twitter, anyone who thinks so is hyperventilating. He's a wealthy capitalist in a society that he sees as having a socialist cancer growing within it. Previous socialist revolutions are reason enough for him to want to control a piece of the mass-communication infrastructure. He wants to be able to broadcast - and so far it's been successful, he can say what he wants now. Making money would be the icing on the cake.

29athrowaway 3y ago

I think the change was positive. It helped revealing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files Community Notes before X, but you can see them being applied everywhere including Musk's posts.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fullshark 3y ago

I stopped using it since it required a login, and my experience has been uniformly positive. You really don't have to know what person Y is thinking about topic Z as quickly as possible.

Miraste 3y ago

I'm a New Yorker subscriber. The existence of this editorial and the fact someone there thought it was fit to publish is exactly why I'm so glad Twitter is slowly failing. I hope journalists break their addictions soon. Twitter was a net negative to every event mentioned in the article, and yet here's the author eulogizing it like a martyr. "the [Twitter employees] I knew—they worked hard, their work mattered, and they never stopped trying. Not until the moment their screens went blank.” The three claims in here are all true, but not in a positive way. I expect Twitter to go down in history with Thalidomide or DDT. Many people worked very hard on those with the best of intentions, but ultimately, they were poison.

baxtr 3y ago
Interesting take. I can’t imagine a dopamine free world. Twitter/X will be replaced by another social platform. We humans are just wired like that.
- puttycat 3y ago
  Let's sell more cigarettes and McDonald's then. We humans are just wired like that.
  - baxtr 3y ago
    Exactly. Prohibition didn’t work. McDonald’s is still growing and obesity is the world’s biggest health problem. PS: I wish it was different. But I don’t have the hubris to believe we can change human nature.
    - toastercat 3y ago
      But the rate of consumption of cigarettes has declined in the past 100 years, likely due to public awareness of the health risks. I'm willing to wager as more people realize addiction to social media is against their best interests, companies/governments/people will make changes. We're kind of already seeing that.
  - 3y ago

karaterobot 3y ago

> Twitter users of all stripes speak nostalgically about the platform affirmed what I’d long suspected: many Twitter users hate Twitter the way New Yorkers hate New York—they don’t. Yeah! Or... try this metaphor on for size... like ex-smokers hate smoking. That may be more apt. Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, it's bad for me. Yeah, I'd be better off if I never started. Yeah, I miss the feeling it used to give me. Sure, a pathway in my brain, developed over years, misses the hit or endorphins when they aren't available.

cloverich 3y ago

I started using twitter again for the first time in years. It has actually been wonderful. But I've done something I different than my other social media. I only click or read stuff on AI from reputable people. I try to quickly scroll past anything else, no matter how much brain fights it. The result is I get tons of up to date information on AI and basically nothing else. My main complaint is...I have to keep up the fight constantly, which is annoying. It does make me realize though, a curated social media app that _internally_ removes garbage is at least possible, and would be quite nice.

porkphish 3y ago
It's the same for me. It's a much different experience now. Especially since I hang out on the "Following" tab instead of the "For you" tab. It's a whole different ball game. Everything on AI, space, and programming up-to-date.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

> What We Lost When Twitter Became X I wonder what fraction of humanity thinks the answer is "nothing", and I have no guess what that fraction might be.

grepfru_it 3y ago

Seem to be forgetting that Twitter unrolled its ludicrous API policy and absurd rates well before Musk took over. I was trying to build a Twitter app using the api for at least a year before musk took over and I was never allowed to sign up. I had to “prove my use case” and wait to hear back from the powers to be [narrator: we didn’t]

toastercat 3y ago

I barely used Twitter before it became X, and I barely use it now. But before and now, I noticed the same thing in the dev circles I'm in (the Node/JS world): * Immense hubris surrounding tech stacks/frameworks of choice, to the point where people outright lie about competing technologies * Framework authors' non-stop boasting and clickbaiting about their tools or new shiney $599 courses (it's marketing, I get it) * Extreme prejudice against people who have differing political views; political arguments are basically unavoidable on Twitter/X no matter who you follow -- and they are never productive * People moral posturing about leaving Twitter/X for Mastodon when Elon took over. Of course, none of these people ever stopped using Twitter/X because it would have cost them their followers. It was pure lip service. I saw really nasty behavior by noteworthy folks in this circle (people who work at Google/Meta/Vercel), and I know these people are smart, but it made me think that Twitter/X just brings out the worst in people, and I don't think Elon taking over really made that much of a difference in the content (at least in my experience).

matteoraso 3y ago

>Communities allowed Twitter to survive and even thrive despite being a money-losing business Um, that's not how businesses work. I know that Elon isn't doing a good job, but the old system was clearly broken as well.