Twitter… what happens next

[Jace, Extat]

1 minute ago, Ran said:

Academic mailing lists are a thing and still exist, as I'm sure you're aware! Private FB groups, Discords, IRC, Substack and Medium, Telegram, etc. etc. -- Twitter is just a thing that came out at a certain time and "everyone "used it, just as for a certain span of time Tumblr or MySpace were. It's not some indelible future watercooler. If it goes away, there will be other things to fill the niche. Where Vine went, Tik Tok followed. Where Twitter goes, others will no doubt follow.

Tsk tsk tsk 

The very first thing you ought to learn about evolution is how jealously it defends its cul-de-sacs. 

Evolution is like the Karen of universal functions. Very resistant to change, but very accommodating of force. 

That's how societies produce Trumps.

[Ran]

People in marginalized areas are increasingly using things like Telegram for that. They will only "lose" it for as long as it takes for them to get the Telegram app and so on.

I just don't see anything about Twitter that is irreplaceable. If it goes away tomorrow, there'll be a month of confusion and a year from now everyone who was on Twitter will be plugging away at something else, while most of the world will fail to notice that anything actually happened.

[JGP]

5 minutes ago, Week said:

Staying on brand (and on platform) -- he's tweeting through it. It's not going well.

 

 

 

My favorite response lol

High Point: Fuck that.

[Wade1865]

25 minutes ago, Firebrand Jace said:

A corporate ID, though? Y'all're'll so enthusiastic about giving your names, money, and information (including your heart rate and caloric intakes!) to gratifying applications. This is a logical exploit of an illogical mass.

Firebrand Jace -- fascinating, and the world seems to be going in that direction, at least in the West. Amazon is pushing a holistic smart-home product, and I'll admit it's appealing to me. Who wouldn't want a roving drone to patrol their McMansion? I would!

On Twitter, would Elon be able to turn it into a super app, which seems to be a consolidation of single-purpose apps (e.g., WeChat, Alipay; paytm; Grab; goto; et al.)? Asia seems to have innvoated beyond what we've seen in the US. I didn't even know there was such a thing until 5 minutes ago, and it sounds like something I'd use, satisfying my need for digital minimalism.

[JGP]

Eh, FB figured the super-app direction was the wave of the future, ergo META.

FB is down like what, 600 billion or something since? No one wants everything everywhere from one thing, unless it's on their phone.

[dog-days]

I have two Twitter accounts, a personal one for fun stuff like archaeology, languages, A Week in Tory, and bird conservation, and a work account mostly focused on digital accessibility. One of the current problems of Mastodon is that it's not as accessible as Twitter – blind and low vision people have said they can't even use it. 

I do think a new platform can rise to fill the role of Twitter, one that isn't inaccessible and is easier to use for the less internet-savvy and doesn't have a complete POS as its generalissimo, or at least not for a while until it becomes huge and attracts the attentions of faux-intellectual plutocrats and the cycle repeats; at the same time, I'll be sad to lose what I have now. I love my Twitter feed. It's full of clever people sharing fascinating, beautiful things, or linking to great articles, and whatever there is in future it won't be quite the same. (I had a LiveJournal in my teens/early twenties. Sure, there're way more options now, and given LiveJournal's Russian owners it's good that most people have moved on, but I still miss what LiveJournal was to me at the time). 

[Jace, Extat]

11 minutes ago, Wade1865 said:

Firebrand Jace -- fascinating, and the world seems to be going in that direction, at least in the West. Amazon is pushing a holistic smart-home product, and I'll admit it's appealing to me. Who wouldn't want a roving drone to patrol their McMansion? I would!

On Twitter, would Elon be able to turn it into a super app, which seems to be a consolidation of single-purpose apps (e.g., WeChat, Alipay; paytm; Grab; goto; et al.)? Asia seems to have innvoated beyond what we've seen in the US. I didn't even know there was such a thing until 5 minutes ago, and it sounds like something I'd use, satisfying my need for digital minimalism.

That's the problem with industrious souls such as yourself: you see a need and you fill it with a tool 

No mind for art- the origin of lesbianism.

[Kalbear]

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

People in marginalized areas are increasingly using things like Telegram for that. They will only "lose" it for as long as it takes for them to get the Telegram app and so on.

I just don't see anything about Twitter that is irreplaceable. If it goes away tomorrow, there'll be a month of confusion and a year from now everyone who was on Twitter will be plugging away at something else, while most of the world will fail to notice that anything actually happened.

That is absolutely one possibility, though I'll point out it takes a lot longer to replace things. Vine went away and tiktok replaced it 3 years later. When balkanization happens it takes a while to reform and get market share. Honestly Twitter dying is the best bad outcome. 

It being used for abuse is more concerning. 

[felice]

6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I had a look at Mastodon a while back, but my first impression is while it might work for certain in-groups it won't replace twitter in any usefully mass way because even aside from several other problems, actual and potential, people are raising (community moderation and user-run servers is a nice idea in principle, but it leaves you at the mercy of 'local'  moderators and server owners,

Being at the mercy of Twitter's moderators/automated systems isn't that great either! And if you're not happy with your local moderators on Mastodon, you can move.

6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

and also since your account is tied to a specific server you (1) run the risk of losing it if the server shuts down with little notice

I believe you can backup your account and preserve the list of who you follow etc to import into a new one in case your current server disappears. You do lose your followers if that happens; the old server needs to be online to confirm your change of address to get them automatically switched over, otherwise you'll need to manually let them know where you've moved to. But I'm not sure how common servers disappearing without warning actually is in real life.

Hopefully at some point there'll be a way to validate your identity on a new server and share it with the whole network even if the old one is gone - some kind of public/private key thing?

6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

(2) I don't know the process exactly but I gather a server owner can decide which other servers are linkable to the one you're on, making it difficult/impossible to crosspost/converse across them)

As I understand it, by default any server can talk to any other server, and owners are only going to actively block another server for a reason. If you don't link your current server's policy, it's relatively straightforward to move somewhere else.

6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

it just looks too complicated for casual user to get into. Or, not even complicated necessarily in the end, but with a high bar for entry by social media standards. I mean, there's a learning curve to twitter, but it's very low. With Mastodon it asks you to choose your instance before you even start up, and how the fuck is just a random person looking to browse supposed to know where to start? And once you're in, even the most supportive accounts suggest it's tricky to figure out how to find people to follow etc.

It's offputting if you're venturing into Mastodon on your own, yes. More so at the moment with so many restricting signups due to high demand. But once you're there, you can just invite people you know to join the server you're on, which eliminates the whole problem for them.

Mastodon itself isn't necessarily the best way to find people to follow on Mastodon. You can find interesting people on the local feed, if your server is a good match. But I'd expect the main way to find people would be to encounter them elsewhere and see links to their Mastodon profile; it might not be that common right now, but with any luck over time it will grow to be as ubiquitous as links to people's Twitter profiles are now.

[Jace, Extat]

1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

That is absolutely one possibility, though I'll point out it takes a lot longer to replace things. Vine went away and tiktok replaced it 3 years later. When balkanization happens it takes a while to reform and get market share. Honestly Twitter dying is the best bad outcome. 

It being used for abuse is more concerning. 

Huzzah!

Huzzah! Huzzah!

And once more, huzzah! 

Twitter is beyond saving and must be allowed to die. That is why I've put Fear Toxin in all of the video embeds. 

"We will fulfill Ra's al Ghuls legacy!"

[felice]

16 minutes ago, dog-days said:

One of the current problems of Mastodon is that it's not as accessible as Twitter – blind and low vision people have said they can't even use it.

Huh. I saw a blind user on Mastodon talking about how good it was for accessibility just today. Were the complaints you saw recent? It's not an area I know much about myself.

[Ran]

3 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

It being used for abuse is more concerning. 

It's already used for abuse, so I assume you mean "used even more for abuse". I assume that if the service actually degrades for people, the end result is that more people will leave it, which will make it less appealing, which will lead to even more people leaving it, etc., until it's gone.

 

[polishgenius]

Classy and dignified


It is also hilarious to me that he arrived at the $8 figure after he thinks Stephen King told him 20 was too much (that is of course not what King was saying at all, but big smart Elon interprets things his own unique way).  

[dog-days]

1 minute ago, felice said:

Huh. I saw a blind user on Mastodon talking about how good it was for accessibility just today. Were the complaints you saw recent? It's not an area I know much about myself.

Yes, today and yesterday. I noticed because it was a  change from complaints about no-alt-text. I'll see if I can dig them up. I didn't look much at them when I saw them, so can't remember the details of what the problems were. 

[Jace, Extat]

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

It's already used for abuse, so I assume you mean "used even more for abuse". I assume that if the service actually degrades for people, the end result is that more people will leave it, which will make it less appealing, which will lead to even more people leaving it, etc., until it's gone.

 

Such capitalistic sequence of thought. 

Good Boy

[Kalbear]

8 minutes ago, Ran said:

It's already used for abuse, so I assume you mean "used even more for abuse". I assume that if the service actually degrades for people, the end result is that more people will leave it, which will make it less appealing, which will lead to even more people leaving it, etc., until it's gone.

 

Yes, I was saying being used for more abuse. 

And you're right that that would likely have it start the decline, much like we are seeing with Facebook. And much like Facebook it probably would take a while and cause a lot of damage on its way out. 

Given musk's current rate of setting the company on fire that is appearing less likely but it still remains a possible bad outcome. It still will suck to not have the good parts of it for a while, but it isn't the end of the world - it is merely highly topical. 

 

[felice]

10 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Yes, today and yesterday. I noticed because it was a  change from complaints about no-alt-text. I'll see if I can dig them up. I didn't look much at them when I saw them, so can't remember the details of what the problems were. 

https://dragonscave.space is apparently a particularly good server for blind users.

[Ran]

9 minutes ago, Fire and Jace said:

Such capitalistic sequence of thought. 

Good Boy

In Marxist thought, degradation of service is merely a byproduct of the failure of the proletariat to serve the public weal and therefore the beatings must continue until morale improves.

[Varysblackfyre321]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

I think Musk is planning on using some crypto digital token to replace ID as a verification method in the long term, that ties in heavily to plans to monetise the platform and synergies it with payments. Like most crypto stuff it’s probably all bullshit but that seems to be the direction 

This would point to his calls for making Twitter more open, accessible, and the town square being bullshit.

Unless he thinks people should have to pay a fee to even go to the town square. Which is bealiblbe actually.

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

I really don't get why people are spending so much time worrying about it. Did people freak out about MySpace going under? Yahoo's collapse?

Because on those platforms coups and treason were not called for, and planned to, bring down legitimate elections and governments.  On twitter, they are.  There wasn't howling anti-semitic crowds on those platforms.  There wasn't you name it, all of which goes on bigger and bigger on twitter.  MySpace didn't have a POTUS who declared a global pandemic a hoax, told people to take horse worm medicine and NOT get vaccinated.  We can go on.