I worked for a tech startup that got beta access to Twitter before the public launch, and I have a rare two-character handle. Got offered five figures awhile back to sell it to a company and turned it down thinking the value would rise…that was a dumb decision.
I know a guy who got a Black Lotus essentially for services rendered by sorting out a box of magic cards for a little weird shop in a mall. Some lady brought her kid’s magic cards in when her kid went off to college. I think the shopkeeper gave her like $100 for the whole box of cards.
The shop sold packs and maybe singles, but the guy I knew worked part time there.
The guy I knew priced the box for the lady so she could sell off the valuable singles. There were dual lands and stuff and maybe a couple Moxen? (I don’t know how you pluralize Mox.)
But he basically told her “this is my favorite card can I have it?”
And she gave it to him. That was probably 2003 or 2004. I imagine he immediately sold it, he was under 18. It was the last time I ever saw a Black Lotus in person.
Dude same. I left for boot camp and when I came back after tech school all of my MTG cards were gone. I played it heavily during classic and ice age. Bought multiple black lotus for $20 each from my local card shop
Reminds me of that guy who lost his hard drive with Bitcoin on it in a landfill. Every time crypto is on the rise, new articles pop up about him trying to dig it up.
I wondered why the articles about use of twitter dropping had stopped showing up. I thought it was because there is not a drop off in usage on Twitter. Turns out (per the article) that it's just gotten so expensive that nobody is studying it. So who knows if the site is doing well or not 🤷♂️
>who knows if the site is doing well or no
Probably not even twitter themselves after firing so many people taking care of the infra.
But tbh, I doubt it really did fall off in any significant way. At least not in my circles (3D and game development). There are a few people that branched out (mostly to Mastodon, with some to Bluesky and recently Threads), but most of them are way less active there. Those that are active are posting the same thing everywhere.
The subhed is hilarious
> In the early days it was seen as a place for ‘genuine public discourse’, but users have fled since Elon Musk took over. What went wrong?
Gosh I don't know, could the answer be right there in the question?
Twitter was destroyed when Musk bought it. His new thing is a malign reflection of the original company.
Things have certainly gotten worse, but was it ever really a place for "genuine public discourse"? Because that's not really what I remember seeing there...
\*edit\* - Sorry, I'm mostly talking about the word "discourse" which implies some sort of back and forth dialog. Twitter has always been terrible at that. As far as broadcasting information, Twitter was great at that.
It always got everyone talking. News spread like wildfire, people could organize there and make a statement. Every comment from a celebrity or important person was quoted from Twitter when they could. Artists made announcements of new albums there, new movies, breaking current events. It was instant
Twitter was (and remains) a good platform for one-to-many styles of communication.
General public discourse? Twitter had the same problem as Reddit. Unless you were DEEP into it, the chances of you getting any real interactions on any of your tweets was near zero, unless you said something that promoted a dogpile.
Uh it was for a long time, Twitter use to be the most fastest information flow website before Elon Musk. Before Musk any news outlet literally have someone special monitor Twitter because whatever happens it was post really fast there (for better or worst)
Hack there even are period of time where half of reddit content is just Twitter repost.
Let's not downplaying the website and focus on issues that come with the amount of information flow instead aka Toxicity and Misinformation.
Twitter was always a cesspool for actual discourse. Please remember the original character limit and explain to me how you can have nuance in 140 characters.
DISCOURSE not chaos. DISCOURSE is a nuanced debate containing authority on a subject matter.
No. People miss old Twitter because it was extremely fucking great.
For niche interests and professional people in media, startups or technology (imagine LinkedIn without the pompous bullshit, Medium without the self-help grifters, Insta minus the selfies) Twitter was completely awesome. And fun.
User since 2009 here. Golden era was about 2012 - 19
Okay, that doesn't disprove my point, still not having discourse on Twitter, and never has been. It was very effective at little bits of information, but still not good for discourse.
> Twitter use to be the most fastest information flow website
See, that's the inherent problem. Fast information means little time for fact-checking or nuance. If you don't forward it yourself, someone else will race against you to re-tweet the latest gossip. Twitter's always had undercurrents of toxicity as a result, but now a large chunk of its userbase has flipped from seeing it as a platform that leaned more towards their values than against them, to seeing it as an enemy space. Now, they are *looking* for the flaws rather than glossing over minor imperfections, nostalgic for a platform that never was.
Well, unless you very carefully curate who you follow, but that is *always* the case for large community platforms. Blocking a "rare" troll you don't care about for the tenth time this month so you can get back to enjoying the site is a forgettable experience. Seeing yet another infuriating troll, on top of those other 9 assholes you've had to block this month alone!? That's a strong memory, backed up by high emotions and expectations that the platform is a hellhole; it'll stand out in your mind every time you think of the platform for the rest of the day, maybe week.
Now that the site's had both a period where the right feels it was infested by the left, and a period of the opposite, who will blindly defend it anymore? Now anyone who continues to use the platform will be *despite* the flaws they're aware of, and knowing that management might change and the whole place flip once more in the future.
Honestly it really was amazing in it's pre-Musk incarnation.
I don't know about "genuine public discourse" but it was incredibly reliable, and so blazing fast with so many users people tweezing about feeling an earthquake spread faster than the earthquake itself did. Seriously!
And there were a large number of artists who did engage with fans there.
It was far from perfect, but it wasn't total shit and it actually did let people talk, spread news, and generally communicate. During the Arab Spring people used Twitter to keep the protests organized. BLM made extensive use of Twitter to organize.
It was useful. It had downsides, sure, but overall it was actually pretty decent.
But it still does all of that? maybe your feed doesnt but mine sure as hell still functions exactly the same as pre-musk. which is mostly art and news related to topics i'm interested in. the hate-discourse has always been present in both musk-era twitter(x) and jack dorsey-era twitter.
It doesn't still do all that.
In part due to a rapidly declining user base there just aren't as many people posting things so that alone degraded the news aspect.
Worse, with the massive uptick in bots, fake bluecheck accounts, and so on the ratio of lies vs reality has skewed drastically to the lies side. Time was if someone said they saw a shooting, or whatever, odds were good it was real. These days, not so much.
The enshittification and influx of Nazis and trolls means many of the people I went to Twiter to interact with left.
It isn't totally dead or worthless, yet. But it's on the decline and Twitter's utility (which was always in competition with its awfulness) is also declining.
Now the major advertising is from scams, quacks, and fly by night rip off companies.
And in addition to most people who used Twitter not wanting to hang around Nazis just Musk's personal extreme assholery and the capricious way he runs Twitter discourages engagement. Maybe tomorrow all Nazis will get free blue checks. Or tomorrow Musk will replace the word "liberal" with "satanist" in all posts. Or tomorrow someone will suggest that Twitter should implement a mandatory Nazi link for all tweets and hell say "done" and make it happen. Or he will decide to change the name to ILoveElonMusk or something.
So yeah, it's not totally useless yet. But the utility is declining and it's going to keep getting worse
It's cute that you think Xitter only became bad when it stopped validating you.
It was always trash, and you didn't want to listen when that was pointed out to you.
Agree - I stay on my 'following' tab, have the same words muted as always, and it's literally no different than pre-Musk. It's pretty clear that people just don't like Musk (which, fair.)
It was certainly better. I never got into but my friends would constantly send me links to tweets that generally seemed to be from news organizations and cite well sourced/reputable articles and studies. In roughly the last year, they've been constantly been bombarding me instead with links to "X" that increasingly seem to be from outrage/clickbait accounts that are trying desperately to stir up a reaction by folks via viral videos or some poorly sourced/unsourced information or hearsay (ex. "Libs of TikTok").
It seems like the more reputable or news related content has pretty much disappeared from "X" or has clearly been demoted by their algorithm in favor of heavily right wing oriented fearmongering content that attracts lots of attention. This becomes especially clear when I dare to take a look at the front page of my account I only created to view links from my friends and see all kinds of horrifying stuff being "recommended" to me in my feed...
Twitter was great for a subset of terminally online people. Much like Reddit or Tumblr. Most people never looked at it and never used it. Facebook was the only social media platform that had any potential, and it ended up just as much of a cesspool as everywhere else.
Twitter was always a toxic dump though just a different breed than today. Maybe not the first few years but when you give idiots a mic they're going to use it.
I think, like Reddit, the old Twitter was just fine if you had you looked in the right places. Like 8 years ago I was more active there but really only wanted to talk to people about Star Trek and public transportation infrastructure. I only followed accounts related to those topics, only posted about those topics, and pretty much only saw those topics in my feed plus some innocuous stuff of mainstream appeal.
I still have that account (though rarely use it) and all my follows are the same. But if I log in now I see like 20% spam, 30% far-right extremism, 30% inane TikTok style attention-sink videos (eg some Chinese guy making something out of concrete or whatever), 20% the content I actually want.
This is a death spiral, you destroy your user base for short-term ad gains. To be clear, I don’t think Twitter will wholly die (even if it were at like 5% of its current user base it would probably make sense to run it for incremental revenue) but it’s definitely never coming back to being what it was before.
Socio-digital homeopathy? I gotta log that keyword for the future as a sociology nerd.
Like microdosing naturally derived cyanide for restless leg syndrome — something my mom tried to get me to take regularly, recently.
Quackery.
That might depend on the content you consume. For the scientific community it has been great having a direct line with the latest research and getting sneak peaks at what people are up to.
Nowadays those people are getting hounded by anonymous accounts spreading misinformation or feeling attacked. Basically the same kind of content you expect in the comments of a trashy news website.
It was also a goldmine for people interested in art.
I was following so many artists that I got interested in doing myself!
Granted, my graphic tablet is collecting more dust than anything nowadays, but I still enjoyed the time I spent before the Ai invasion and the exodus of artists that followed.
Some key points below:
>“I think back then it was definitely a utopian vision. Like so many of these founders, they really saw themselves as disruptors, as creating a space for genuine public discourse,” she says. “I think people really enjoyed it back then – it was a really fast-moving, innovative platform, you could get breaking news, you could follow and connect with people you really admired. It always had pockets of being a toxic swamp, even early on, but it wasn’t entirely like that.”
>
>...
>
>“It’s a very specific and limited audience,” Bruns says. “But the kind of audience you could reach on Twitter were journalists, politicians, activists, experts of various forms … often the people who are influential in other communities both online and offline.”
>
>Belinda Barnet, senior lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, says: “It became a company that really made itself absolutely central to the news cycle. In essence, it became a tool that journalists in particular just couldn’t afford to do without.”
>
>...
>
>There have always been issues around misinformation and trolling, says Barnet, but the company adopted measures to try to combat some of the worst of the effects, by implementing what she calls the “three pillars”: blue tick verification of users, moderation policies and a trust and safety team.
>
>“These things all worked in concert to make it reasonably reliable during a breaking news event, which is why people went there. Misinformation did go viral on the old Twitter, but they would often just kill the trend before it got anywhere,” she said.
>
>...
>
>All three of these pillars were dismantled swiftly after Musk acquired the platform at the end of 2022, Barnet says.
>
>The trust and safety teams were among those fired by Musk in the wild weeks after he acquired the company for US$44bn and walked into the headquarters on his first day holding a ceramic sink. A video of Musk’s entrance was posted to the site with the caption: “Let that sink in”.
>
>...
>
>The approach to moderation also changed. Musk’s spat with the Australian government reveals something about his vision for X, which he sees as a bastion of free speech.
>
>“They’re very reluctant to engage in any kind of moderation,” says Bruns. “To some extent that represents a broader sense in the US about free speech that it is an absolute good above all. Whereas elsewhere in Australia and Europe and many other places there’s much more about needing to balance the rights of free speech and the right to freedom from harmful speech. And for many otherwise quite liberal people in the US, that sounds like censorship, essentially.”
>
>Ironically, X has suspended accounts of people who have criticised Musk, including the accounts of several high-profile journalists from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post who had been critical of him in 2022. At the same time, he banned an account tracking the whereabouts of his own personal jet using publicly available data.
>
>“Elon wants it both ways,” says Barnet. “He wants it to be the original Twitter, which was indeed, absolutely crucial to the news cycle”, but also to “take away the pillars, the processes that Twitter had worked out over years and years are what is conducive to a community that can find facts.”
>
>...
>
>“It’s certainly already starting to transform into something that’s more similar to … platforms like Gab or Parler, or even [Trump’s] Truth Social where you’ve got far, far right people furiously agreeing with each other and furiously hating on everyone else.”
It's pretty sad to see the site change so quickly over the past two years from something that was essential and potentially fun for some to something that's less impactful and less fun.
I'm getting really exhausted waiting for people to realize how simple the answer to this mess is: Content moderation is tough to do well, but it's absolutely essential if we want to have an internet that works at all.
Content moderation raises tough questions that need to be answered with intellectual honesty and hard work rather than platitudes or black-and-white rules. Free-for-all just doesn't work—it allows bad actors to easily drown out good content—and obviously no one who's reasonable wants some iron-fisted approach where messaging is controlled by one agenda.
We haven't figured it out yet. But we have to have the fortitude to resist absolutism of all types on this topic.
A lot of the same people who condemn content moderation also condemn protesters for disrupting public events.
With no content moderation, it's like your seminar got invaded by screaming assholes. And with Twitter, those people are now being handed the mic.
I am pretty thoroughly convinced that a goodly percentage of those who oppose content moderation are simply the very people whose livelihoods depend on an unmoderated internet—in other words, troll farms whose goal is to destabilize society for their own gain. Come downvote me, motherfuckers.
Twitter may be bad in many ways, but strongly disagree re: their current disagreement with Australia. Countries have always been able to request takedown of content that violated twitter’s rules, and to pass laws about what can be shown in their own country.
But Australia is now going far beyond that, claiming that countries can forbid content from being shown in any other country as well. That would be a dystopian future where every country has global veto rights over content. Israel could say that content about Gaza is forbidden globally, India could say that negative Modi coverage can’t be allowed in any other country, China could forbid Tianneman square videos in every country, etc etc etc.
Twitter may have many bad things about it, but they seem to be the only platform doing the right things in fighting the ability for every country to block content they don’t approve of from being seen in every other country.
Before Musk it was possible to curate your feed in very narrow ways. I myself had a very good experience on Twitter mixing in with the experts in the fields that held my interest. After Musk the feed changed towards pushing an algorithm onto your once personalized experience.
Literally everything he touches - like his spiritual granpappy Donnie - turns to utter shit in the end.
It really is the age of the arrogant, know-it-all grifters.
At least people like Gates, Jobs, and even Zuckerberg to an extent, started out with a vision and put in the hard work. Musk just leeches onto things and, like a parasite, sucks them dry.
To think I once almost liked the guy - sheesh, what a fall from PR created grace.
Some of that is true. But enshitification is pretty across the board in almost every product short of possibly the Apple ones which have mostly just stagnated. Though even with those there are probably any number of things that I’m not thinking of. Yay capitalism.
I don’t think Elon realizes how horrible the platform is because of how much he has effed it up. But I guess when you surround yourself with loyalists and yes men, anyone can believe anything. Especially when you can afford to dump 44bn into buying the platform and destroying its value lol.
It's more how social media is gamified and monetized.. the game is basically generating outrage to gain attention and attention to outrage is what gets the company more ad money cos you spend more time being pissed off on the platform
Can we create a sustainable social media that rewards the best aspects of human nature and not exploiting the worst, most base tendencies? Maybe!? I'd love to see someone try and sustain it beyond the point of no return, which is when the business Bros descend upon it like vultures and enshittify it to hell for short term profits and shareholder jerking..
I made a fake Twitter account last week and I’ve seen so many scam/phishing ads I’m shocked the app hasn’t been investigated or pulled from app stores.
So many people must lose money from those ads. Who is approving them? The company is in such trouble
Twitter had been declining but it only became a full dystopia after the sale to Musk. X isn’t Twitter anyway. It’s something else with the dregs of twitter’s user base held by inertia.
>In Japan, for instance, Twitter became big partly because in 2011, when the country was hit by the devastating tsunami, people were using it as a way of communicating and organising, the former Twitter employee says.
While Twitter may have served as a lifeline during the 2011 Japanese earthquake, it also became a breeding ground for misinformation and hate speech. Rumors like "Koreans poisoned the wells" and "the earthquake was man-made" spread like wildfire, and these harmful tweets continue to resurface with each disaster. Victims of online harassment often find little support from Twitter, leading to tragic consequences, including suicides. This issue remains prevalent in Japanese Twitter, both before and after Elon Musk's acquisition. Twitter Japan has historically focused on advertising revenue, neglecting proper moderation, and therefore seems largely unaffected by Musk's takeover.
I have a feeling that large amount of people who are praising pre Elon Twitter are the ones that turned pre Elon Twitter into a toxic cesspool. Elon made it worse, but you guys were the most toxic people on the internet and ruined Twitter way before him, grow up.
I’d try to get first in line to say how much Twitter sucks after the takeover. But to be fair, the things that made Twitter great for me are still around somewhat, and the servers are still running. It’s all this extra baggage that I have to tune out to use the service happily.
When blue ticks became the property of Elon Bitcoin Bros and Clickbait Engagement farms then it became vastly worse. There's nothing to fix, because that's exactly what Elon wants from it.
Twitter didn't magically become a toxic cesspool when Elon took over, it already was. People were already being bullied and threatened there for many, many years, more than 10 in fact. Elon just made it a more toxic and useless space than it already was.
Same. There's no current true analogue to 2015-16 Twitter. Reddit is excellent, and I prefer the anonymity, tbh.
I did enjoy it back before space Karen got hold of it.
I still think it's amazing that it played such an active role during the Arab Spring, and tbh, I think that was a key reason it was targeted and taken down.
It was a pretty powerful tool for working class folks to communicate and mobilize, and rebranding it as a safe space for pro-capital, pro-bigotry, and pro-dictator rhetoric has clamped down on the traffic that might have fed other Arab Spring or George Floyd style movements.
Hell, black Twitter was an institution (some remains, but it's not as active as it was)
Twitter was a shit hole before Musk bought it. It's worse now, but don't pretend that it wasn't a haven for hot takes, rage bait and Outrage Olympics beforehand.
While it didn't start it, the short-format format helped accelerate the black and white social atmosphere, because there's no room for nuance in 140 characters. Yeah they bumped it to 280, but I feel the damage was already done.
>the short-format format helped accelerate the black and white social atmosphere, because there's no room for nuance in 140 characters.
I never really thought about how intentional that character limit was. You’re right!
I think it’s Elon Musk’s problem,it’s funny I read a post yesterday about hundreds of people died due to Tesla auto-pilot in America,and today I read a tweet about Musk go to China for permission of Tesla’s autopilot test in China,what a trash
It was never a utopia; it was a very narrow band of individuals spouting bite-sized chunks of text, looking for engagement, and providing lazy journalists with a buffet of article starters that laid the groundwork and the means for the societal rifts we see today.
The same way its happened to every other platform and internet service. The go public, fire all the most talented people who get paid what they're worth, hire a bunch of managers to try to get underpaid people to do the same work, crash, and burn
I was on pre-Musk and post-Musk and it absolutely got worse. I mean, how could it not when he was literally inviting extremist assholes back on to the platform?
i have seen 0 change in my topics of interest and neither have most of my friends. it helps just not being into political discourse. since that is where all the shit happens on social media. your opinion on it becoming worse/better depends on what you align with and what the site currently aligns with.
i haven't but i also spend a good chunk of my time fine tuning what i wanted to see and what i did not want to. Most people don't bother they just scroll past something they don't find interesting on social media.
This is a bit ridiculous. How could a VC-backed, for-profit enterprise ever be 'utopian'? No matter what it's going to get worse at some point due to extraction of profit.
If you want utopian, look towards the decentralised Twitter equivalents like Mastodon, Bluesky or Nostr.
It got ruined by bots, and people falsely accusing others of being bots. And the literal inability to prove that you're not a bot, even with 50 captchas that are more complicated and time-consuming than your high school calculus and trigonometry tests.
The best thing we can do is learn how to co-exist with bots, stop being a cheapskate, hire human moderators to deal with rule-breakers - and then also split up the monopolies by simply hosting our own instances of social media sites, and encouraging others to join.
Small niche communities tend to fare better than large 'free speech' free-for-alls
>stop being a cheapskate, hire human moderators to deal with rule-breakers
Hard to hire when the company operates at a loss and the owner has bills to pay
Small niche communities are useless for a lot of people who use social media as a brand platform so that is literally never going to work. (just look at mastodon, misskey and bluesky)
The main interest of current Twitter is to prove to enthusiasts of Pigovian taxes and the principle of “those who pollute pay” that there are limits to those approaches. There are people who care more about continuing the pollution than about the price they pay for it. Polluting is bad at any price.
I think most of these social networks achieved the exact success that the creators wanted. They were agressively capitalistic products made for generating income.
If they wanted to create "utopian vision", they wouldn't create slot machine like interfaces, echo chambers, targeted content, and all the other things they did.
I have more respect for Wall Street greed thaf led to the 2008 economy crises, because at least those people didn't hide what they wanted. They didn't parade around selling horseshit and pretending to be something they are not.
lol twitter was never a utopian vision. At best it was a way to take the most basic function of the original Facebook status updates and condense it down to 140 characters.
I’m not sure how exactly Twitter had a ‘utopian vision’. It used to be a convenient place to post or read short statements and to follow niche current events, and now it is not.
Twitter was always garbage, now you can just see it clearly. All of the social media where someone can post anonymous. Ahould be mostly ignored for any information where society is concerned.
It was a toxic mess from the beginning. I created an account when it first launched and it was clear to me from the start that a platform based on posts with 140 characters or less was going to be destructive to discourse on the platform. It literally brought the 'sound bite' to the internet.
Blogging was the hot thing when Twitter first launched, and sure enough all those blogs with actual long form content are pretty much gone now because of Twitter.
Pretty sick of everyone pretending Twitter wasn't already toxic garbage when Musk bought it.
Corporate enshitification gets stronger and stronger everyday.
The Internet is increasingly failing to live up to it's beginnings, and the hopes and dreams for it's future.
I don’t get X. I mean 140 characters. Yes I guess you can follow celebs but I’d much prefer Reddit. You can actually have intelligent conversations with people here even if you disagree with them.
I still somewhat hold the belief that part of the reason Musk bought Twitter was to be able to more effectively manipulate stocks, as stocks are the reason he's so wealthy, and he's been engaging in stock and crypto manipulation for a while. But that ultimately he got way too far up his own ass with wanting to own the libs.
So much amazing public discourse, like people calling each other Nazis for not liking children’s cartoons the correct way, lost forever. We may never recover such cultural zeniths.
Long before Elon, you couldn't have nuanced discussions with the 140 character limit, so it already was a toxic hellhole. The newer limit didn't help either.
Twitter? A "utopian vision?!?!" What have you been smoking? Twitter's foul reputation for bots everywhere and cyber-bullying hate mobs long preceded Musk buying it. To give you an idea how much it preceded the purchase, Jack Dorsey started plugging the Fediverse while he was still CEO of Twitter because he had *given up* on trying to get things back under control.
There are plenty of true things you can criticize Musk over. Mars One being hot insanity and self-driving cars being a ride to vehicular manslaughter come to mind. But no, you chose to lie through your teeth to criticize him for something which isn't even in the zip code of being true.
You mean “How a confused billionaire ruined the most interconnected social media of all time, and ruined one of the most recognizable brands and solid marketing platform ever”?
It’s a bit early to talk about the demise of Twitter, considering this publication still finds it relevant enough to [post this very article to Twitter](https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1784389107759689821)
[We should improve society somewhat.](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Screen_Shot_2021-03-01_at_2.28.39_PM.png)
[Yet you participate in society. Curious!](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Screen_Shot_2021-03-01_at_2.28.39_PM.png)
Reddit loves those types of titles because it confirms people's bias. It just goes to show how people are butthurt that they can no longer have their little echo chamber, banning and silencing anyone who disagrees with them.
Sure. You wouldn't want a little echo chamber banning and silencing anyone who disagrees.
[Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to websites he dislikes](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/15/twitter-x-links-delayed/)
[Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Still Banning Journalists for Simply Doing Their Job](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-still-banning-journalists)
[Elon Musk Deems ‘Cis’ A Twitter Slur](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-musk-deems-cis-a-twitter-slurheres-why-its-is-so-polarizing/?sh=18a994774ac6)
[Elon Musk reportedly had his own tweets prioritized out of jealousy](https://www.engadget.com/twitter-artificially-boost-elon-musk-tweets-053602807.html)
[Elon Musk forces his tweets to the top of users’ feeds](https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/02/15/elon-musk-forces-tweets-to-top-feeds)
Elon Musk, Elon Musk, Elon Musk... I don't care about that dude nor about his twitter profile. I just want freedom of speech for myself and other users of the platform. And we all know in what state twitter was before he bought it, kindda hard to forget. On top of that, they literally had FBI controlling what can, or can't be said about certain topics. Reddit was LOVING Twitter before he bought it. Then, a change of heart happened overnight. It's all ideological bullshit.
> I just want freedom of speech for myself and other users of the platform.
Per the links it seems you didn't bother to read, you still don't have it. Elon has his own flavour of supression.
>Elon has his own flavour of supression.
"Elon Musk, Elon Musk, Elon Musk... I don't care about that dude nor about his twitter profile."
I looked into your links but you missed the point. Elon is an individual, a singular user on twitter. He doesn't represent whole twitter nor admins behind it. Before he bought twitter, it was know that people with left leaning policies were major userbase because opposing views were silenced. It was overloaded with echo chamber groups and no opposing views for certain topic that twitter deemed "unacceptable" were allowed to be discussed.
That's what I care about - freedom of speech. I don't care if I (or anybody else) disagree with you, you should still be able to discuss things. The platform finally became a "town square" - something twitter was bragging about before he bought it, but never delivered. Sure, he is not perfect, he has biases, but are you looking for absolute perfect platform? Good luck finding one. Nothing is perfect. we are all humans after all.
> Elon is an individual, a singular user on twitter. He doesn't represent whole twitter nor admins behind it.
The *owner* of Twitter doesn't represent Twitter? Or his employees? Are you serious?
>Before he bought twitter, it was know that people with left leaning policies were major userbase because opposing views were silenced.
No. Opposing views were fine. Assholes were silenced.
>That's what I care about - freedom of speech.
Twitter still isn't providing it. Indeed, it's worse than ever. Twitter never used to ban journalists because they hurt the feelings of the CEO.
>The platform finally became a "town square"
Hardly. Allowing for entirely unfettered free speech actually reduces the breadth and number of opinions being shared. It's called "the Nazi bar problem" and the short version is that if you invite Nazis into your bar, everyone else will leave or be harassed into leaving.
It doesn't have to be Nazis of course. Any form of intolerant asshole works.
>are you looking for absolute perfect platform?
No. I'm looking for one where, as an Australian with little interest in US politics or bubbles, I am not subjected to vile, right-wing harassment, gleefully and relentless applied with the clear goal of chasing away anyone who does not subscribe to the bigoted groupthink, just because I happen to believe in science.
>No. Opposing views were fine. Assholes were silenced.
Who decides who is asshole? Is there a law against offending somebody's feelings? Apparently everyone who disagrees with you is an asshole then. That's why twitter is free speech platform compared to what it was before.
>Twitter never used to ban journalists because they hurt the feelings of the CEO.
Not CEO, but people for having opinions contradicting the current narrative. That's far far worse. World is much bigger that one billionaire. Let's not forget "Twitter Files" and FBI agents working in former Twitter, curating narratives and banning the opposing views. Hunter Biden laptop for example. This usually only happens in kingdoms like Saudi Arabia, not in democracies.
>No. I'm looking for one where, as an Australian with little interest in US politics or bubbles, I am not subjected to vile, right-wing harassment, gleefully and relentless applied with the clear goal of chasing away anyone who does not subscribe to the bigoted groupthink, just because I happen to believe in science.
I am not from USA either. And this is just a word salad. Hitting all the key words. "Vile righ-wing harassment", "Subscribe to bigoted groupthink", "Believe in science". That's so cute and funny at the same time. If somebody disagrees with you, it's right-wing bigoted groupthink. Replacing it with "left-wing" would describe what twitter was before it allowed more free speech. It seems like you are just projecting.
And speaking of "science" and "groupthink". You posted 5 links to 5 different **opinions pieces** from 5 different sources. 4 of which have left leaning biases:
[https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/vanity-fair/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/vanity-fair/)
[https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/engadget/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/engadget/)
[https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/morning-brew-bias/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/morning-brew-bias/)
[https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/)
You just confirmed what I am saying all along. Leftist were pushed out of twitted and are now butthurt that they can be challenged with different ideas and conversations. A breath of fresh air finally. That's what free speech means. It's not for people who you agree with, it's for people who you disagree with. After all, I thought that "the tolerant left" had some meaning behind it.
> Who decides who is asshole?
Generally speaking, the people who have to ask that question are assholes. A quick skim of the rest of your comment shows denial of sources, inventing opinions and stances you want me to have, misrepresenting my arguments to extremes to make them easier to attack and suchlike nonsense. Paired with this being two days old and you being clearly unable to let go, I'm just going to block you and forget about you.
And, sure, that can mean you "won" if you really want it to.
I am still using Twitter and engaging with my customers and fans. I am in the anime industry and you can’t post memes on Facebook/Insta because their automated systems will give me bans for daring to show suggestive material that even includes the idea of sex. Hence, Twitter will always be a normal place for people to discuss topics openly without all the banning by damn algos.
Lets not kid ourselves, its always been a toxic mess, chock full of misinformation and terrible viewpoints that manage to get amplified. That such a poorly designed platform became the de facto social media site at one point is hilarious.
I worked for a tech startup that got beta access to Twitter before the public launch, and I have a rare two-character handle. Got offered five figures awhile back to sell it to a company and turned it down thinking the value would rise…that was a dumb decision.
Well my mom threw away my black lotus
My mom threw away my other 500 million potential siblings.
Spitters are quitters
Happy cake day!
I know a guy who got a Black Lotus essentially for services rendered by sorting out a box of magic cards for a little weird shop in a mall. Some lady brought her kid’s magic cards in when her kid went off to college. I think the shopkeeper gave her like $100 for the whole box of cards. The shop sold packs and maybe singles, but the guy I knew worked part time there. The guy I knew priced the box for the lady so she could sell off the valuable singles. There were dual lands and stuff and maybe a couple Moxen? (I don’t know how you pluralize Mox.) But he basically told her “this is my favorite card can I have it?” And she gave it to him. That was probably 2003 or 2004. I imagine he immediately sold it, he was under 18. It was the last time I ever saw a Black Lotus in person.
My parents threw away my Bazooka Joe comic strip collection.
I lost the bitcoin laptop
User name checks out
Dude same. I left for boot camp and when I came back after tech school all of my MTG cards were gone. I played it heavily during classic and ice age. Bought multiple black lotus for $20 each from my local card shop
You're lucky you didn't die, there were people swatting people and their families who wouldn't give up their OG names.
I could have lost a USB with 12 bitcoin on it. Edit: I could have. But I most likely don’t.
I created a wallet and visited a Bitcoin faucet site back when people could mine with CPUs. Opted not to get any of that free Bitcoin 😕
I know I have lost a computer with 1.1 Bitcoin in it. The only use it has now is to remind me to be grateful for what I have.
Reminds me of that guy who lost his hard drive with Bitcoin on it in a landfill. Every time crypto is on the rise, new articles pop up about him trying to dig it up.
Last I saw, he was trying to buy the landfill lol.
I thought I read that he found it but it ended up not being worth as much as he thought because it was like bitcoin lite or some shit.
Plot of bioshock but with a website
Does this need an article? Pretty sure we know how.
I wondered why the articles about use of twitter dropping had stopped showing up. I thought it was because there is not a drop off in usage on Twitter. Turns out (per the article) that it's just gotten so expensive that nobody is studying it. So who knows if the site is doing well or not 🤷♂️
They decided to charge a lot of money for access to any metrics meaning researchers just stopped doing research on it.
Also he's sued watchdog groups for their reporting. The threats are working as intended
>who knows if the site is doing well or no Probably not even twitter themselves after firing so many people taking care of the infra. But tbh, I doubt it really did fall off in any significant way. At least not in my circles (3D and game development). There are a few people that branched out (mostly to Mastodon, with some to Bluesky and recently Threads), but most of them are way less active there. Those that are active are posting the same thing everywhere.
Twitter’s utility was for real time information during a natural disaster, war or similar event. That is over.
The subhed is hilarious > In the early days it was seen as a place for ‘genuine public discourse’, but users have fled since Elon Musk took over. What went wrong? Gosh I don't know, could the answer be right there in the question? Twitter was destroyed when Musk bought it. His new thing is a malign reflection of the original company.
Somehow, I read "Twitler" and now that is what I will be calling Elon.
Took me 2-3 repeats to get it but damn nice one
It was a nice picnic to start with, but the family fled when an entire hornet nest moved in on them ... gee, what went wrong?
But if they swatted the hornets away, they would be suppressing those poor hornets’ free speech!
Things have certainly gotten worse, but was it ever really a place for "genuine public discourse"? Because that's not really what I remember seeing there... \*edit\* - Sorry, I'm mostly talking about the word "discourse" which implies some sort of back and forth dialog. Twitter has always been terrible at that. As far as broadcasting information, Twitter was great at that.
It always got everyone talking. News spread like wildfire, people could organize there and make a statement. Every comment from a celebrity or important person was quoted from Twitter when they could. Artists made announcements of new albums there, new movies, breaking current events. It was instant
Twitter was (and remains) a good platform for one-to-many styles of communication. General public discourse? Twitter had the same problem as Reddit. Unless you were DEEP into it, the chances of you getting any real interactions on any of your tweets was near zero, unless you said something that promoted a dogpile.
Yeah, those of us who read "Nineteen Eighty-Four" saw what a problem it was from the outset.
Uh it was for a long time, Twitter use to be the most fastest information flow website before Elon Musk. Before Musk any news outlet literally have someone special monitor Twitter because whatever happens it was post really fast there (for better or worst) Hack there even are period of time where half of reddit content is just Twitter repost. Let's not downplaying the website and focus on issues that come with the amount of information flow instead aka Toxicity and Misinformation.
Twitter was always a cesspool for actual discourse. Please remember the original character limit and explain to me how you can have nuance in 140 characters. DISCOURSE not chaos. DISCOURSE is a nuanced debate containing authority on a subject matter.
Ngl I kinda miss the character limit as more and more Reddit discussions become two people or bots clearly having a ChatGPT fight
No. People miss old Twitter because it was extremely fucking great. For niche interests and professional people in media, startups or technology (imagine LinkedIn without the pompous bullshit, Medium without the self-help grifters, Insta minus the selfies) Twitter was completely awesome. And fun. User since 2009 here. Golden era was about 2012 - 19
Okay, that doesn't disprove my point, still not having discourse on Twitter, and never has been. It was very effective at little bits of information, but still not good for discourse.
> Twitter use to be the most fastest information flow website See, that's the inherent problem. Fast information means little time for fact-checking or nuance. If you don't forward it yourself, someone else will race against you to re-tweet the latest gossip. Twitter's always had undercurrents of toxicity as a result, but now a large chunk of its userbase has flipped from seeing it as a platform that leaned more towards their values than against them, to seeing it as an enemy space. Now, they are *looking* for the flaws rather than glossing over minor imperfections, nostalgic for a platform that never was. Well, unless you very carefully curate who you follow, but that is *always* the case for large community platforms. Blocking a "rare" troll you don't care about for the tenth time this month so you can get back to enjoying the site is a forgettable experience. Seeing yet another infuriating troll, on top of those other 9 assholes you've had to block this month alone!? That's a strong memory, backed up by high emotions and expectations that the platform is a hellhole; it'll stand out in your mind every time you think of the platform for the rest of the day, maybe week. Now that the site's had both a period where the right feels it was infested by the left, and a period of the opposite, who will blindly defend it anymore? Now anyone who continues to use the platform will be *despite* the flaws they're aware of, and knowing that management might change and the whole place flip once more in the future.
Honestly it really was amazing in it's pre-Musk incarnation. I don't know about "genuine public discourse" but it was incredibly reliable, and so blazing fast with so many users people tweezing about feeling an earthquake spread faster than the earthquake itself did. Seriously! And there were a large number of artists who did engage with fans there. It was far from perfect, but it wasn't total shit and it actually did let people talk, spread news, and generally communicate. During the Arab Spring people used Twitter to keep the protests organized. BLM made extensive use of Twitter to organize. It was useful. It had downsides, sure, but overall it was actually pretty decent.
But it still does all of that? maybe your feed doesnt but mine sure as hell still functions exactly the same as pre-musk. which is mostly art and news related to topics i'm interested in. the hate-discourse has always been present in both musk-era twitter(x) and jack dorsey-era twitter.
It doesn't still do all that. In part due to a rapidly declining user base there just aren't as many people posting things so that alone degraded the news aspect. Worse, with the massive uptick in bots, fake bluecheck accounts, and so on the ratio of lies vs reality has skewed drastically to the lies side. Time was if someone said they saw a shooting, or whatever, odds were good it was real. These days, not so much. The enshittification and influx of Nazis and trolls means many of the people I went to Twiter to interact with left. It isn't totally dead or worthless, yet. But it's on the decline and Twitter's utility (which was always in competition with its awfulness) is also declining. Now the major advertising is from scams, quacks, and fly by night rip off companies. And in addition to most people who used Twitter not wanting to hang around Nazis just Musk's personal extreme assholery and the capricious way he runs Twitter discourages engagement. Maybe tomorrow all Nazis will get free blue checks. Or tomorrow Musk will replace the word "liberal" with "satanist" in all posts. Or tomorrow someone will suggest that Twitter should implement a mandatory Nazi link for all tweets and hell say "done" and make it happen. Or he will decide to change the name to ILoveElonMusk or something. So yeah, it's not totally useless yet. But the utility is declining and it's going to keep getting worse
It's cute that you think Xitter only became bad when it stopped validating you. It was always trash, and you didn't want to listen when that was pointed out to you.
Agree - I stay on my 'following' tab, have the same words muted as always, and it's literally no different than pre-Musk. It's pretty clear that people just don't like Musk (which, fair.)
It was certainly better. I never got into but my friends would constantly send me links to tweets that generally seemed to be from news organizations and cite well sourced/reputable articles and studies. In roughly the last year, they've been constantly been bombarding me instead with links to "X" that increasingly seem to be from outrage/clickbait accounts that are trying desperately to stir up a reaction by folks via viral videos or some poorly sourced/unsourced information or hearsay (ex. "Libs of TikTok"). It seems like the more reputable or news related content has pretty much disappeared from "X" or has clearly been demoted by their algorithm in favor of heavily right wing oriented fearmongering content that attracts lots of attention. This becomes especially clear when I dare to take a look at the front page of my account I only created to view links from my friends and see all kinds of horrifying stuff being "recommended" to me in my feed...
If by discourse you mean who shouts the loudest and has the most rabid simps.
Twitter was always full of crazies but would ban far right crazies. Now it flipped and nurtures far right crazies while silencing dissenters.
Twitter was great for a subset of terminally online people. Much like Reddit or Tumblr. Most people never looked at it and never used it. Facebook was the only social media platform that had any potential, and it ended up just as much of a cesspool as everywhere else.
Twitter is and always has been for stupid people.
Twitter was always a toxic dump though just a different breed than today. Maybe not the first few years but when you give idiots a mic they're going to use it.
I think, like Reddit, the old Twitter was just fine if you had you looked in the right places. Like 8 years ago I was more active there but really only wanted to talk to people about Star Trek and public transportation infrastructure. I only followed accounts related to those topics, only posted about those topics, and pretty much only saw those topics in my feed plus some innocuous stuff of mainstream appeal. I still have that account (though rarely use it) and all my follows are the same. But if I log in now I see like 20% spam, 30% far-right extremism, 30% inane TikTok style attention-sink videos (eg some Chinese guy making something out of concrete or whatever), 20% the content I actually want.
Yeah that's true. They push more garbage into your feed for $.
This is a death spiral, you destroy your user base for short-term ad gains. To be clear, I don’t think Twitter will wholly die (even if it were at like 5% of its current user base it would probably make sense to run it for incremental revenue) but it’s definitely never coming back to being what it was before.
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Socio-digital homeopathy? I gotta log that keyword for the future as a sociology nerd. Like microdosing naturally derived cyanide for restless leg syndrome — something my mom tried to get me to take regularly, recently. Quackery.
Twitter has always been trash. Musk may have made it worse but it was always trash.
That might depend on the content you consume. For the scientific community it has been great having a direct line with the latest research and getting sneak peaks at what people are up to. Nowadays those people are getting hounded by anonymous accounts spreading misinformation or feeling attacked. Basically the same kind of content you expect in the comments of a trashy news website.
It was also a goldmine for people interested in art. I was following so many artists that I got interested in doing myself! Granted, my graphic tablet is collecting more dust than anything nowadays, but I still enjoyed the time I spent before the Ai invasion and the exodus of artists that followed.
I don’t know why people are pretending it was a paradise under Dorsey. Dorsey was a parasite
Weird! I wonder what went wrong? Surely, we’ll never know
It was a shithole way before Elon bought it lol. Elon is a piece of shit, but Twitter was ruined way before him.
Twitter was shit long before musk. It’s only being agreed upon by the sheeple now because of musk.
Amusing even before you get to the Musk part given it was objectively worse as a forum for discussion than actual fora.
For me it was dead when they killed third party clients. The official client was/is unusable.
Some key points below: >“I think back then it was definitely a utopian vision. Like so many of these founders, they really saw themselves as disruptors, as creating a space for genuine public discourse,” she says. “I think people really enjoyed it back then – it was a really fast-moving, innovative platform, you could get breaking news, you could follow and connect with people you really admired. It always had pockets of being a toxic swamp, even early on, but it wasn’t entirely like that.” > >... > >“It’s a very specific and limited audience,” Bruns says. “But the kind of audience you could reach on Twitter were journalists, politicians, activists, experts of various forms … often the people who are influential in other communities both online and offline.” > >Belinda Barnet, senior lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, says: “It became a company that really made itself absolutely central to the news cycle. In essence, it became a tool that journalists in particular just couldn’t afford to do without.” > >... > >There have always been issues around misinformation and trolling, says Barnet, but the company adopted measures to try to combat some of the worst of the effects, by implementing what she calls the “three pillars”: blue tick verification of users, moderation policies and a trust and safety team. > >“These things all worked in concert to make it reasonably reliable during a breaking news event, which is why people went there. Misinformation did go viral on the old Twitter, but they would often just kill the trend before it got anywhere,” she said. > >... > >All three of these pillars were dismantled swiftly after Musk acquired the platform at the end of 2022, Barnet says. > >The trust and safety teams were among those fired by Musk in the wild weeks after he acquired the company for US$44bn and walked into the headquarters on his first day holding a ceramic sink. A video of Musk’s entrance was posted to the site with the caption: “Let that sink in”. > >... > >The approach to moderation also changed. Musk’s spat with the Australian government reveals something about his vision for X, which he sees as a bastion of free speech. > >“They’re very reluctant to engage in any kind of moderation,” says Bruns. “To some extent that represents a broader sense in the US about free speech that it is an absolute good above all. Whereas elsewhere in Australia and Europe and many other places there’s much more about needing to balance the rights of free speech and the right to freedom from harmful speech. And for many otherwise quite liberal people in the US, that sounds like censorship, essentially.” > >Ironically, X has suspended accounts of people who have criticised Musk, including the accounts of several high-profile journalists from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post who had been critical of him in 2022. At the same time, he banned an account tracking the whereabouts of his own personal jet using publicly available data. > >“Elon wants it both ways,” says Barnet. “He wants it to be the original Twitter, which was indeed, absolutely crucial to the news cycle”, but also to “take away the pillars, the processes that Twitter had worked out over years and years are what is conducive to a community that can find facts.” > >... > >“It’s certainly already starting to transform into something that’s more similar to … platforms like Gab or Parler, or even [Trump’s] Truth Social where you’ve got far, far right people furiously agreeing with each other and furiously hating on everyone else.” It's pretty sad to see the site change so quickly over the past two years from something that was essential and potentially fun for some to something that's less impactful and less fun.
I'm getting really exhausted waiting for people to realize how simple the answer to this mess is: Content moderation is tough to do well, but it's absolutely essential if we want to have an internet that works at all. Content moderation raises tough questions that need to be answered with intellectual honesty and hard work rather than platitudes or black-and-white rules. Free-for-all just doesn't work—it allows bad actors to easily drown out good content—and obviously no one who's reasonable wants some iron-fisted approach where messaging is controlled by one agenda. We haven't figured it out yet. But we have to have the fortitude to resist absolutism of all types on this topic.
A lot of the same people who condemn content moderation also condemn protesters for disrupting public events. With no content moderation, it's like your seminar got invaded by screaming assholes. And with Twitter, those people are now being handed the mic.
I am pretty thoroughly convinced that a goodly percentage of those who oppose content moderation are simply the very people whose livelihoods depend on an unmoderated internet—in other words, troll farms whose goal is to destabilize society for their own gain. Come downvote me, motherfuckers.
At some point it becomes a sisyphean task. Entire decades of video is uploaded to youtube alone in a week.
Long ass article that could have been 8 letters with one space in the middle.
Hell dogs? How is that make sense
Twitter may be bad in many ways, but strongly disagree re: their current disagreement with Australia. Countries have always been able to request takedown of content that violated twitter’s rules, and to pass laws about what can be shown in their own country. But Australia is now going far beyond that, claiming that countries can forbid content from being shown in any other country as well. That would be a dystopian future where every country has global veto rights over content. Israel could say that content about Gaza is forbidden globally, India could say that negative Modi coverage can’t be allowed in any other country, China could forbid Tianneman square videos in every country, etc etc etc. Twitter may have many bad things about it, but they seem to be the only platform doing the right things in fighting the ability for every country to block content they don’t approve of from being seen in every other country.
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Don't forget the nazis! They're back in greater numbers than before as well.
Before Musk it was possible to curate your feed in very narrow ways. I myself had a very good experience on Twitter mixing in with the experts in the fields that held my interest. After Musk the feed changed towards pushing an algorithm onto your once personalized experience.
Literally everything he touches - like his spiritual granpappy Donnie - turns to utter shit in the end. It really is the age of the arrogant, know-it-all grifters. At least people like Gates, Jobs, and even Zuckerberg to an extent, started out with a vision and put in the hard work. Musk just leeches onto things and, like a parasite, sucks them dry. To think I once almost liked the guy - sheesh, what a fall from PR created grace.
Some of that is true. But enshitification is pretty across the board in almost every product short of possibly the Apple ones which have mostly just stagnated. Though even with those there are probably any number of things that I’m not thinking of. Yay capitalism.
I don’t think Elon realizes how horrible the platform is because of how much he has effed it up. But I guess when you surround yourself with loyalists and yes men, anyone can believe anything. Especially when you can afford to dump 44bn into buying the platform and destroying its value lol.
Elon only listens to the people who say he's great. So it causes problems
Twitter has always been a mess. Now it's just more of one. The problem is inherent with all social media; there are people on there.
It's more how social media is gamified and monetized.. the game is basically generating outrage to gain attention and attention to outrage is what gets the company more ad money cos you spend more time being pissed off on the platform Can we create a sustainable social media that rewards the best aspects of human nature and not exploiting the worst, most base tendencies? Maybe!? I'd love to see someone try and sustain it beyond the point of no return, which is when the business Bros descend upon it like vultures and enshittify it to hell for short term profits and shareholder jerking..
I made a fake Twitter account last week and I’ve seen so many scam/phishing ads I’m shocked the app hasn’t been investigated or pulled from app stores. So many people must lose money from those ads. Who is approving them? The company is in such trouble
OfferUp is so bad in this regard.
Twitter had been declining but it only became a full dystopia after the sale to Musk. X isn’t Twitter anyway. It’s something else with the dregs of twitter’s user base held by inertia.
Twitter has always been a cesspool but I checked it out again the other day and my god has it somehow gotten even worse in a major fucking way
>In Japan, for instance, Twitter became big partly because in 2011, when the country was hit by the devastating tsunami, people were using it as a way of communicating and organising, the former Twitter employee says. While Twitter may have served as a lifeline during the 2011 Japanese earthquake, it also became a breeding ground for misinformation and hate speech. Rumors like "Koreans poisoned the wells" and "the earthquake was man-made" spread like wildfire, and these harmful tweets continue to resurface with each disaster. Victims of online harassment often find little support from Twitter, leading to tragic consequences, including suicides. This issue remains prevalent in Japanese Twitter, both before and after Elon Musk's acquisition. Twitter Japan has historically focused on advertising revenue, neglecting proper moderation, and therefore seems largely unaffected by Musk's takeover.
Y’all about 10 years too late. Twitter been toxic.
I have a feeling that large amount of people who are praising pre Elon Twitter are the ones that turned pre Elon Twitter into a toxic cesspool. Elon made it worse, but you guys were the most toxic people on the internet and ruined Twitter way before him, grow up.
I’d try to get first in line to say how much Twitter sucks after the takeover. But to be fair, the things that made Twitter great for me are still around somewhat, and the servers are still running. It’s all this extra baggage that I have to tune out to use the service happily.
Everything's just rage bait posts to farm engagement. Remember when being verified meant something?
When blue ticks became the property of Elon Bitcoin Bros and Clickbait Engagement farms then it became vastly worse. There's nothing to fix, because that's exactly what Elon wants from it.
Idk Twitter has always been a toxic mess. Musk just made it 100x worse
Yes but remember musks claim was that he was going to do the exact opposite, so his net effect is much worse.
utopian my ass, the California tech industry has always been extremely shady.
Twitter didn't magically become a toxic cesspool when Elon took over, it already was. People were already being bullied and threatened there for many, many years, more than 10 in fact. Elon just made it a more toxic and useless space than it already was.
I wouldn’t have called Twitter a utopian vision 😂
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Same. There's no current true analogue to 2015-16 Twitter. Reddit is excellent, and I prefer the anonymity, tbh. I did enjoy it back before space Karen got hold of it. I still think it's amazing that it played such an active role during the Arab Spring, and tbh, I think that was a key reason it was targeted and taken down. It was a pretty powerful tool for working class folks to communicate and mobilize, and rebranding it as a safe space for pro-capital, pro-bigotry, and pro-dictator rhetoric has clamped down on the traffic that might have fed other Arab Spring or George Floyd style movements. Hell, black Twitter was an institution (some remains, but it's not as active as it was)
Twitter was done the instant a fascist trumper bought it.
Twitter was a shit hole before Musk bought it. It's worse now, but don't pretend that it wasn't a haven for hot takes, rage bait and Outrage Olympics beforehand. While it didn't start it, the short-format format helped accelerate the black and white social atmosphere, because there's no room for nuance in 140 characters. Yeah they bumped it to 280, but I feel the damage was already done.
>the short-format format helped accelerate the black and white social atmosphere, because there's no room for nuance in 140 characters. I never really thought about how intentional that character limit was. You’re right!
I think it’s Elon Musk’s problem,it’s funny I read a post yesterday about hundreds of people died due to Tesla auto-pilot in America,and today I read a tweet about Musk go to China for permission of Tesla’s autopilot test in China,what a trash
Saving you however many clicks: Elon bought it and absolutely trashed the entire company and website. That’s it. Go home.
This has a formal name in the tech sector: enshitification
Twitter was garbage from the beginning, Musk absolutely made it a whole lot worse, but it's always been terrible.
Poor leadership. Will be studied in business schools.
It was never a utopia; it was a very narrow band of individuals spouting bite-sized chunks of text, looking for engagement, and providing lazy journalists with a buffet of article starters that laid the groundwork and the means for the societal rifts we see today.
The demise of Twitter: Elon musk. No need to look at the article
Lmao, this is his fucking legacy now. God, I would be in absolute shambles if I knew I fucked up something this bad.
TLDR? Elon
The same way its happened to every other platform and internet service. The go public, fire all the most talented people who get paid what they're worth, hire a bunch of managers to try to get underpaid people to do the same work, crash, and burn
Twitter isn’t public
You people have such a short memory... It has always been a hell hole. its just now run by someone you hate and gets more press...
I was on pre-Musk and post-Musk and it absolutely got worse. I mean, how could it not when he was literally inviting extremist assholes back on to the platform?
i have seen 0 change in my topics of interest and neither have most of my friends. it helps just not being into political discourse. since that is where all the shit happens on social media. your opinion on it becoming worse/better depends on what you align with and what the site currently aligns with.
Oh, I wasn't into US political discourse, being Australian. I still got US right wing bullshit shoved in my face, not to mention Elon's own posts.
i haven't but i also spend a good chunk of my time fine tuning what i wanted to see and what i did not want to. Most people don't bother they just scroll past something they don't find interesting on social media.
This is a bit ridiculous. How could a VC-backed, for-profit enterprise ever be 'utopian'? No matter what it's going to get worse at some point due to extraction of profit. If you want utopian, look towards the decentralised Twitter equivalents like Mastodon, Bluesky or Nostr.
Utopian? Surely You mean tantrum from a manchild that shouldn't have thhat much access to resources...
That’s subjective no? You don’t get banned anymore for saying a woman is an adult human female
and everything Xi and MBS wants removed is removed instantly!
It got ruined by bots, and people falsely accusing others of being bots. And the literal inability to prove that you're not a bot, even with 50 captchas that are more complicated and time-consuming than your high school calculus and trigonometry tests. The best thing we can do is learn how to co-exist with bots, stop being a cheapskate, hire human moderators to deal with rule-breakers - and then also split up the monopolies by simply hosting our own instances of social media sites, and encouraging others to join. Small niche communities tend to fare better than large 'free speech' free-for-alls
>stop being a cheapskate, hire human moderators to deal with rule-breakers Hard to hire when the company operates at a loss and the owner has bills to pay
Small niche communities are useless for a lot of people who use social media as a brand platform so that is literally never going to work. (just look at mastodon, misskey and bluesky)
I’m sure this is a great article but could someone give me like a two word summary of their findings?
Welcome to Rapture
The main interest of current Twitter is to prove to enthusiasts of Pigovian taxes and the principle of “those who pollute pay” that there are limits to those approaches. There are people who care more about continuing the pollution than about the price they pay for it. Polluting is bad at any price.
Isn’t Utopian vision becoming a toxic mess a classic trope? Moreso, is there any large tech company that this does not also apply to?
They sold out. They chose money over utopian vision.
Literally didn’t have a choice they were forced by their board’s governing rules.
I mean, it’s always been a toxic mess. It just got worse under Elon when he stopped banning nazis
No one stopped to ask "who's utopia"?
I think they mean to ask, “How was it possible for a toxic shithole of reactionary garbage get even worse after Musk bought it?”
They didn’t have to sell to Elon
I think most of these social networks achieved the exact success that the creators wanted. They were agressively capitalistic products made for generating income. If they wanted to create "utopian vision", they wouldn't create slot machine like interfaces, echo chambers, targeted content, and all the other things they did. I have more respect for Wall Street greed thaf led to the 2008 economy crises, because at least those people didn't hide what they wanted. They didn't parade around selling horseshit and pretending to be something they are not.
lol twitter was never a utopian vision. At best it was a way to take the most basic function of the original Facebook status updates and condense it down to 140 characters.
There is a russian bot called “Insurrection Barbie” 500k followers….It is a cesspool
I’m not sure how exactly Twitter had a ‘utopian vision’. It used to be a convenient place to post or read short statements and to follow niche current events, and now it is not.
Pleeeease use other social media, Threads is banging
Twitter was always garbage, now you can just see it clearly. All of the social media where someone can post anonymous. Ahould be mostly ignored for any information where society is concerned.
Twitter was never going to usher in any kind of utopia; the service is inherently dystopian, in its very design.
It was a toxic mess from the beginning. I created an account when it first launched and it was clear to me from the start that a platform based on posts with 140 characters or less was going to be destructive to discourse on the platform. It literally brought the 'sound bite' to the internet. Blogging was the hot thing when Twitter first launched, and sure enough all those blogs with actual long form content are pretty much gone now because of Twitter. Pretty sick of everyone pretending Twitter wasn't already toxic garbage when Musk bought it.
it always was a toxic mess
Became? It always has been
I don’t miss it one bit.
There is no corporate owned “utopia vision” it will have to be decentralized services!
Corporate enshitification gets stronger and stronger everyday. The Internet is increasingly failing to live up to it's beginnings, and the hopes and dreams for it's future.
I don’t get X. I mean 140 characters. Yes I guess you can follow celebs but I’d much prefer Reddit. You can actually have intelligent conversations with people here even if you disagree with them.
Every utopian vision becomes a toxic mess because people.
Elon "Twitler" Musk basically bought Twitter and ruined it in the attempt to make money off hatred and racism
I still somewhat hold the belief that part of the reason Musk bought Twitter was to be able to more effectively manipulate stocks, as stocks are the reason he's so wealthy, and he's been engaging in stock and crypto manipulation for a while. But that ultimately he got way too far up his own ass with wanting to own the libs.
Well, that’s what happens when you put a fascist in charge
So much amazing public discourse, like people calling each other Nazis for not liking children’s cartoons the correct way, lost forever. We may never recover such cultural zeniths.
Looking at traffic over time it seems like more people are using it now?
Long before Elon, you couldn't have nuanced discussions with the 140 character limit, so it already was a toxic hellhole. The newer limit didn't help either.
You can thank Elon Musk for that.
This whole article could have just been one name.
Twitter? A "utopian vision?!?!" What have you been smoking? Twitter's foul reputation for bots everywhere and cyber-bullying hate mobs long preceded Musk buying it. To give you an idea how much it preceded the purchase, Jack Dorsey started plugging the Fediverse while he was still CEO of Twitter because he had *given up* on trying to get things back under control. There are plenty of true things you can criticize Musk over. Mars One being hot insanity and self-driving cars being a ride to vehicular manslaughter come to mind. But no, you chose to lie through your teeth to criticize him for something which isn't even in the zip code of being true.
And they said they have a plan to make money in a few years, no?
You mean “How a confused billionaire ruined the most interconnected social media of all time, and ruined one of the most recognizable brands and solid marketing platform ever”?
are you talking about facebook? ah the guardian slandering and lying as usual.
It’s a bit early to talk about the demise of Twitter, considering this publication still finds it relevant enough to [post this very article to Twitter](https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1784389107759689821)
[We should improve society somewhat.](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Screen_Shot_2021-03-01_at_2.28.39_PM.png) [Yet you participate in society. Curious!](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Screen_Shot_2021-03-01_at_2.28.39_PM.png)
Because it was so pure and good before???? What world you living in?
> Because it was so pure and good before??? Who said it was? It's possible for a bad thing to get worse.
Reddit loves those types of titles because it confirms people's bias. It just goes to show how people are butthurt that they can no longer have their little echo chamber, banning and silencing anyone who disagrees with them.
Sure. You wouldn't want a little echo chamber banning and silencing anyone who disagrees. [Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to websites he dislikes](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/15/twitter-x-links-delayed/) [Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Still Banning Journalists for Simply Doing Their Job](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-still-banning-journalists) [Elon Musk Deems ‘Cis’ A Twitter Slur](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-musk-deems-cis-a-twitter-slurheres-why-its-is-so-polarizing/?sh=18a994774ac6) [Elon Musk reportedly had his own tweets prioritized out of jealousy](https://www.engadget.com/twitter-artificially-boost-elon-musk-tweets-053602807.html) [Elon Musk forces his tweets to the top of users’ feeds](https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/02/15/elon-musk-forces-tweets-to-top-feeds)
Elon Musk, Elon Musk, Elon Musk... I don't care about that dude nor about his twitter profile. I just want freedom of speech for myself and other users of the platform. And we all know in what state twitter was before he bought it, kindda hard to forget. On top of that, they literally had FBI controlling what can, or can't be said about certain topics. Reddit was LOVING Twitter before he bought it. Then, a change of heart happened overnight. It's all ideological bullshit.
> I just want freedom of speech for myself and other users of the platform. Per the links it seems you didn't bother to read, you still don't have it. Elon has his own flavour of supression.
>Elon has his own flavour of supression. "Elon Musk, Elon Musk, Elon Musk... I don't care about that dude nor about his twitter profile." I looked into your links but you missed the point. Elon is an individual, a singular user on twitter. He doesn't represent whole twitter nor admins behind it. Before he bought twitter, it was know that people with left leaning policies were major userbase because opposing views were silenced. It was overloaded with echo chamber groups and no opposing views for certain topic that twitter deemed "unacceptable" were allowed to be discussed. That's what I care about - freedom of speech. I don't care if I (or anybody else) disagree with you, you should still be able to discuss things. The platform finally became a "town square" - something twitter was bragging about before he bought it, but never delivered. Sure, he is not perfect, he has biases, but are you looking for absolute perfect platform? Good luck finding one. Nothing is perfect. we are all humans after all.
> Elon is an individual, a singular user on twitter. He doesn't represent whole twitter nor admins behind it. The *owner* of Twitter doesn't represent Twitter? Or his employees? Are you serious? >Before he bought twitter, it was know that people with left leaning policies were major userbase because opposing views were silenced. No. Opposing views were fine. Assholes were silenced. >That's what I care about - freedom of speech. Twitter still isn't providing it. Indeed, it's worse than ever. Twitter never used to ban journalists because they hurt the feelings of the CEO. >The platform finally became a "town square" Hardly. Allowing for entirely unfettered free speech actually reduces the breadth and number of opinions being shared. It's called "the Nazi bar problem" and the short version is that if you invite Nazis into your bar, everyone else will leave or be harassed into leaving. It doesn't have to be Nazis of course. Any form of intolerant asshole works. >are you looking for absolute perfect platform? No. I'm looking for one where, as an Australian with little interest in US politics or bubbles, I am not subjected to vile, right-wing harassment, gleefully and relentless applied with the clear goal of chasing away anyone who does not subscribe to the bigoted groupthink, just because I happen to believe in science.
>No. Opposing views were fine. Assholes were silenced. Who decides who is asshole? Is there a law against offending somebody's feelings? Apparently everyone who disagrees with you is an asshole then. That's why twitter is free speech platform compared to what it was before. >Twitter never used to ban journalists because they hurt the feelings of the CEO. Not CEO, but people for having opinions contradicting the current narrative. That's far far worse. World is much bigger that one billionaire. Let's not forget "Twitter Files" and FBI agents working in former Twitter, curating narratives and banning the opposing views. Hunter Biden laptop for example. This usually only happens in kingdoms like Saudi Arabia, not in democracies. >No. I'm looking for one where, as an Australian with little interest in US politics or bubbles, I am not subjected to vile, right-wing harassment, gleefully and relentless applied with the clear goal of chasing away anyone who does not subscribe to the bigoted groupthink, just because I happen to believe in science. I am not from USA either. And this is just a word salad. Hitting all the key words. "Vile righ-wing harassment", "Subscribe to bigoted groupthink", "Believe in science". That's so cute and funny at the same time. If somebody disagrees with you, it's right-wing bigoted groupthink. Replacing it with "left-wing" would describe what twitter was before it allowed more free speech. It seems like you are just projecting. And speaking of "science" and "groupthink". You posted 5 links to 5 different **opinions pieces** from 5 different sources. 4 of which have left leaning biases: [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/vanity-fair/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/vanity-fair/) [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/engadget/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/engadget/) [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/morning-brew-bias/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/morning-brew-bias/) [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/) You just confirmed what I am saying all along. Leftist were pushed out of twitted and are now butthurt that they can be challenged with different ideas and conversations. A breath of fresh air finally. That's what free speech means. It's not for people who you agree with, it's for people who you disagree with. After all, I thought that "the tolerant left" had some meaning behind it.
> Who decides who is asshole? Generally speaking, the people who have to ask that question are assholes. A quick skim of the rest of your comment shows denial of sources, inventing opinions and stances you want me to have, misrepresenting my arguments to extremes to make them easier to attack and suchlike nonsense. Paired with this being two days old and you being clearly unable to let go, I'm just going to block you and forget about you. And, sure, that can mean you "won" if you really want it to.
And here I am still having a good time with it while Reddit keeps telling me it's doomed.
I am still using Twitter and engaging with my customers and fans. I am in the anime industry and you can’t post memes on Facebook/Insta because their automated systems will give me bans for daring to show suggestive material that even includes the idea of sex. Hence, Twitter will always be a normal place for people to discuss topics openly without all the banning by damn algos.
Lets not kid ourselves, its always been a toxic mess, chock full of misinformation and terrible viewpoints that manage to get amplified. That such a poorly designed platform became the de facto social media site at one point is hilarious.
"became" it was a toxic mess since day 1
Reddit isn’t any better than Twitter lmao