5 ms·

This is nice in theory. I haven't used any twitter alternatives but others seem to report that their content is more or less the same as twitter's.

by nomilk 3y ago

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
We're all sharing the same links, articles, jokes, memes, ideas, cat pictures. What differentiates a place is its sense of community, not its content. It's easy to forget that because Twitter long ago stopped being a community.
- nomilk 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - tga_d 3y ago
    >The Elon era seems to emphasise truth over sensitivities I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition--Musk infamously gutted that department, and I've seen plenty of claims at least from journalists and the EU that the problem is now worse. Anecdotally, I left Twitter not for ideological reasons, but because my timeline become filled with algorithmic noise from what were clearly bots I wasn't following. Do you have evidence to back up that claim? >some suspected (but couldn't prove) being shadow banned for having contrarian viewpoints. I would think we would have seen actual indication of that by now if that were true; given all the "Twitter files" and whatnot that turned out to be a nothingburger, if there was a there there, employees were certainly motivated to air it after the acquisition, if not before. In any case, it's certainly indisputable that Musk has been more than willing to artificially inflate accounts he wants to promote (the latest I know of being the Mr. Beast debacle), which, outside of expressly labelled advertising, I don't remember being a thing before, though again, I'm open to the possibility of being wrong about that.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition Twitter Japan's recommendations feed was inundated with political bullshit nobody cared about. Musk came in, fired everyone at Twitter Japan, and the recommendations feed changed to anime, manga, visual novels, games, music, and other such pop cultural subjects that everyone cares about. Japanese Xers love Musk for cleaning house. The change was obvious to all, and personally I finally could justify making an account to better manage the handful of accounts I always kept tabs on (news postings from games I play, new art from illustrators I like, etc.).
    - lobocinza 3y ago
      Community notes are great and an important tool to fact check disinformation from politicians and VIPs to which traditional fact checkers often turn a blind eye. I say this from Brazil so your YMMV. While I'm not familiar with the Mr. Beast debacle on Twitter he and his content are extremely popular so it's natural for his content to be recommended. What wasn't "natural" was Twitter recommendations prior. Though there are many other reasons for not using Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
      - anileated 3y ago
        I can’t stress this enough, for anyone who (like myself) for some reason didn’t think this was possible: Twitter’s community notes are no different from tweets in their ability to spread misinformation. What makes them worse than tweets (at least the original immutable tweets) at combatting intentional disinformation is that Birdwatch notes 1) are visually formatted to communicate an impression of absolute ground truth, and 2) don’t reflect any controversy or edit history. A trending tweet with a false “correction” (such as the one that claimed a video of Xinjang police brutality against an Uyghur was showing Taiwanese police) would be viewed by millions of people, 99% of whom would read that note completely uncritically, before it would get corrected. The people who are equipped to recognize the lie, and who care to fight to get it corrected, are few compared to the army of internet trolls spreading that lie. Eventually the note may get rewritten—but at that point the tweet is no longer trending; the operation was a success and no one even knows that it took place. Since the note gets rewritten with no history maintained, the only evidence of the original malicious, false correction would have to be in that updated note, which is obviously an unpopular choice because it makes the new note harder to read and makes future readers do extra work to untangle what happened there. (Incidentally, one of the things that could reliably be used to combat bias—labeling tweets from accounts that are known to be associated with governments or such—was nuked by Elon right away.)
  - lukan 3y ago
    "many were banned for saying things that were unpopular but true" Can you cite one confirmed example?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - nomilk 3y ago
      There's sifting to be done, but a scan over the top few pages of results (of 35,000,000 news articles total) shows a handful of bans for true but unpopular stances and opinions: https://www.google.com/search?q=banned+from+twitter+-trump+before%3A2022&tbm=nws&n=100 https://www.google.com/search?q=banned+from+twitter+-trump+b... Given only a fraction of account bans make the news, the problem was probably much bigger than the news indicates. Maybe 10-100x (what's the ratio of newsworthy to regular folks?). Also, when a prominent user is banned, others see that and clam up on the topic lest they face the same fate; they tread on egg shells, which doesn't constitute a healthy community for them.
      - lukan 3y ago
        Google provides different results for different users, skimming over my result list, I found nothing. Something concrete please?
        nomilk 3y ago
        George Hotz gives a good example [1]: > Cloth masks are ineffective against covid, that's a true statement, every doctor in 2019 knew it, and now I'm banned on twitter for saying it? Interesting. Keep in mind for every famous ban, there might be a few orders of magnitude more bans of small accounts we don't hear about given Twitter "use(d) Artificial Intelligence to identify posts" "that are misleading enough to cause harm to people" [2]. Also keep in mind this is one topic of thousands that could get an account banned, there is no shortage. Please keep in mind my broader point is simply Twitter might have felt like a community for some, but not for everyone. If someone's banned for stating hard truths, that's frustrating to say the least, and I think to some extent makes the individual feel like it's a not a welcoming/fair community to be part of. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJg0hAKtzt8&t=243s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJg0hAKtzt8&t=243s [2] https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-health-business-media-0ebae275423fc33a707235c67a0e71b2 https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...
  - the_why_of_y 3y ago
    The Elon era seems to emphasize hypocrisy and censorship at the command of authoritarian regimes, while Elon himself posts disinformation about election laws in the US. https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-orders/ https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/15/once-again-free-speech-absolutist-elon-musk-caves-to-authoritarian-censorial-bullies/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/15/once-again-free-speech-a... https://popular.info/p/musk-uses-megaphone-to-promote-misleading https://popular.info/p/musk-uses-megaphone-to-promote-mislea...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
rakoo 3y ago
Speaking for the fediverse only, the experience is what you make of it. Stay on the largest, averagest instance and your experience will be bland; get on an instance with people who share your values, an instance that connects with other instances OK with you, follow accounts posting content you want to see and the experience will be much better.
1shooner 3y ago
Mastodon reminds me of 2007 Twitter, and it would be great if it stayed that way.

This is nice in theory. I haven't used any twitter alternatives but others seem to report that their content is more or less the same as twitter's.

by nomilk 3y ago

This is nice in theory. I haven't used any twitter alternatives but others seem to report that their content is more or less the same as twitter's.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

We're all sharing the same links, articles, jokes, memes, ideas, cat pictures. What differentiates a place is its sense of community, not its content. It's easy to forget that because Twitter long ago stopped being a community.

nomilk 3y ago
[flagged]
- tga_d 3y ago
  >The Elon era seems to emphasise truth over sensitivities I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition--Musk infamously gutted that department, and I've seen plenty of claims at least from journalists and the EU that the problem is now worse. Anecdotally, I left Twitter not for ideological reasons, but because my timeline become filled with algorithmic noise from what were clearly bots I wasn't following. Do you have evidence to back up that claim? >some suspected (but couldn't prove) being shadow banned for having contrarian viewpoints. I would think we would have seen actual indication of that by now if that were true; given all the "Twitter files" and whatnot that turned out to be a nothingburger, if there was a there there, employees were certainly motivated to air it after the acquisition, if not before. In any case, it's certainly indisputable that Musk has been more than willing to artificially inflate accounts he wants to promote (the latest I know of being the Mr. Beast debacle), which, outside of expressly labelled advertising, I don't remember being a thing before, though again, I'm open to the possibility of being wrong about that.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >I've never heard anyone claim that misinformation went down with the acquisition Twitter Japan's recommendations feed was inundated with political bullshit nobody cared about. Musk came in, fired everyone at Twitter Japan, and the recommendations feed changed to anime, manga, visual novels, games, music, and other such pop cultural subjects that everyone cares about. Japanese Xers love Musk for cleaning house. The change was obvious to all, and personally I finally could justify making an account to better manage the handful of accounts I always kept tabs on (news postings from games I play, new art from illustrators I like, etc.).
  - lobocinza 3y ago
    Community notes are great and an important tool to fact check disinformation from politicians and VIPs to which traditional fact checkers often turn a blind eye. I say this from Brazil so your YMMV. While I'm not familiar with the Mr. Beast debacle on Twitter he and his content are extremely popular so it's natural for his content to be recommended. What wasn't "natural" was Twitter recommendations prior. Though there are many other reasons for not using Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
    - anileated 3y ago
      I can’t stress this enough, for anyone who (like myself) for some reason didn’t think this was possible: Twitter’s community notes are no different from tweets in their ability to spread misinformation. What makes them worse than tweets (at least the original immutable tweets) at combatting intentional disinformation is that Birdwatch notes 1) are visually formatted to communicate an impression of absolute ground truth, and 2) don’t reflect any controversy or edit history. A trending tweet with a false “correction” (such as the one that claimed a video of Xinjang police brutality against an Uyghur was showing Taiwanese police) would be viewed by millions of people, 99% of whom would read that note completely uncritically, before it would get corrected. The people who are equipped to recognize the lie, and who care to fight to get it corrected, are few compared to the army of internet trolls spreading that lie. Eventually the note may get rewritten—but at that point the tweet is no longer trending; the operation was a success and no one even knows that it took place. Since the note gets rewritten with no history maintained, the only evidence of the original malicious, false correction would have to be in that updated note, which is obviously an unpopular choice because it makes the new note harder to read and makes future readers do extra work to untangle what happened there. (Incidentally, one of the things that could reliably be used to combat bias—labeling tweets from accounts that are known to be associated with governments or such—was nuked by Elon right away.)
- lukan 3y ago
  "many were banned for saying things that were unpopular but true" Can you cite one confirmed example?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nomilk 3y ago
    There's sifting to be done, but a scan over the top few pages of results (of 35,000,000 news articles total) shows a handful of bans for true but unpopular stances and opinions: https://www.google.com/search?q=banned+from+twitter+-trump+before%3A2022&tbm=nws&n=100 https://www.google.com/search?q=banned+from+twitter+-trump+b... Given only a fraction of account bans make the news, the problem was probably much bigger than the news indicates. Maybe 10-100x (what's the ratio of newsworthy to regular folks?). Also, when a prominent user is banned, others see that and clam up on the topic lest they face the same fate; they tread on egg shells, which doesn't constitute a healthy community for them.
    - lukan 3y ago
      Google provides different results for different users, skimming over my result list, I found nothing. Something concrete please?
      - nomilk 3y ago
        George Hotz gives a good example [1]: > Cloth masks are ineffective against covid, that's a true statement, every doctor in 2019 knew it, and now I'm banned on twitter for saying it? Interesting. Keep in mind for every famous ban, there might be a few orders of magnitude more bans of small accounts we don't hear about given Twitter "use(d) Artificial Intelligence to identify posts" "that are misleading enough to cause harm to people" [2]. Also keep in mind this is one topic of thousands that could get an account banned, there is no shortage. Please keep in mind my broader point is simply Twitter might have felt like a community for some, but not for everyone. If someone's banned for stating hard truths, that's frustrating to say the least, and I think to some extent makes the individual feel like it's a not a welcoming/fair community to be part of. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJg0hAKtzt8&t=243s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJg0hAKtzt8&t=243s [2] https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-health-business-media-0ebae275423fc33a707235c67a0e71b2 https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...
- the_why_of_y 3y ago
  The Elon era seems to emphasize hypocrisy and censorship at the command of authoritarian regimes, while Elon himself posts disinformation about election laws in the US. https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-orders/ https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/15/once-again-free-speech-absolutist-elon-musk-caves-to-authoritarian-censorial-bullies/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/15/once-again-free-speech-a... https://popular.info/p/musk-uses-megaphone-to-promote-misleading https://popular.info/p/musk-uses-megaphone-to-promote-mislea...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

rakoo 3y ago

Speaking for the fediverse only, the experience is what you make of it. Stay on the largest, averagest instance and your experience will be bland; get on an instance with people who share your values, an instance that connects with other instances OK with you, follow accounts posting content you want to see and the experience will be much better.

1shooner 3y ago

Mastodon reminds me of 2007 Twitter, and it would be great if it stayed that way.