How to destroy Twitter

[sufi]

seems like users are drifting away due to the increasingly toxic atmosphere - that abrasiveness that was sort of fun when it was run by a closeted facist is no longer fun now its run by musk.
There must be ways to move the twitter hive mind more actively, to nudge the mob into a stampede, and trample the algo underfoot

Probably all it takes is the right hashtag?

#@william_kent_forum_declares_war_on_twitter

 

[version]

I don't spend a lot of time on there, but doesn't seem any different to me. I sometimes forget Musk even runs it after all the apocalyptic proclamations about how it was going to collapse any day came to nothing.

 

[sufi]

i notice that there are now "more tweets" listed under whatever tweet you actually chose to look at, generated presumably by the algo, but generally some crap posts that they mus twant to promote - so far whenever i continued scrolling by mistake/muscle memory none of the "more tweets" were relevant or appealing

according to the ft Elon Musk’s Twitter is dying a slow and tedious death

... in the four months since the takeover, Twitter has felt like it has got decidedly worse. It’s not so much, for me at least, that the content has become more offensive, or more aggressive, or more fake. It’s not even about the regular technical glitches — like the broken timeline many users found when they visited the site on Wednesday. It just somehow feels like a less exciting place than it used to be; it just feels a bit . . . boring.
In an attempt to get a sense of whether this view was held more widely, this week I ran a Twitter poll ...
... 2,000 people who voted, only 6 per cent said Twitter had got better since Musk’s takeover, with just over 17 per cent saying they hadn’t noticed any difference. That meant that more than three-quarters of respondents felt it had deteriorated: 31 per cent went for “so, so much worse”, and the biggest group, 46 per cent, said Twitter had got marginally worse.

... Twitter’s total traffic declined by 2 per cent in January on a year-on-year basis. The complete data set for February is not yet available, but in the 28 days to February 25, traffic was down 5 per cent.

 

[sus]

I sometimes forget Musk even runs it after all the apocalyptic proclamations about how it was going to collapse any day came to nothing.

Remember this

 

[sus]

These people literally just make things up. The narratives are fabrications so threadbare they approach transparency.

Musk's Twitter takeover could end in it being the most important/valuable social network in the world, the main source of his wealth. Or in bankruptcy and collapse. None of these "journalists" speculating have a clue—they have no privileged access, no theory of the world, no source that could possibly give them arbitrage advantage in the information market.

 

[sus]

Not clapping/sermonizing at you version just building a general Gellman Amnesia On Crack Cocaine argument against the naive attitudes toward contemporary journalism I see among so many educated liberal peers.

These people no longer have first mover advantage. They don't have a technological advantage. They aren't smarter than us. They are indebted to producing ideological propaganda and clickbait which further hampers their ability to say true things about the world. Their only purpose is as a bandpass filter that raises the floor of disinformation while simultaneously lowering the ceiling on truth. OK for normies, but should be considered completely unacceptable as a source elsewhere

 

[sus]

Their narrative of the tech sector, for instance, is laughably confused, like Congressional Boomer levels of "we can't catch a clue," but because no one here has personal experience with, say, Silicon Valley culture, and isn't sociologically proximate to tech startup space, it becomes the default way people on the board view tech. It's like developing parasitic worms, people start posting things they don't actually care about because the worm cares about it and likes to use their mouth/keyboard to continue spreading its memetic material.

This is what led (for instance) Beiser to quit the board. He's someone who chats with tech founders like Patrick Collision on the reg, had done design work for Apple, worked at several SV startups, is intimately familiar with Valley intellectual culture. He also has a ton of critiques of that culture and in many ways sets himself against it. But all the supposed "problems" that have become mainstream talking points are red herrings for the actual problems. To end up constantly arguing against this nebulous egregoric background narrative, championed passionately by people with seventh-hand experience, gets tiring.

 

[sus]

Anyway, end of / apologies for this rant. Beiser can obviously also be difficult or less than charitable sometimes. But I want this down in the forum archive somewhere, my perspective on what happened there, and why I've taken certain "tech defender" positions in the past.

 

[version]

Not clapping/sermonizing at you version just building a general Gellman Amnesia On Crack Cocaine argument against the naive attitudes toward contemporary journalism I see among so many educated liberal peers.

These people no longer have first mover advantage. They don't have a technological advantage. They aren't smarter than us. They are indebted to producing ideological propaganda and clickbait which further hampers their ability to say true things about the world. Their only purpose is as a bandpass filter that raises the floor of disinformation while simultaneously lowering the ceiling on truth. OK for normies, but should be considered completely unacceptable as a source elsewhere

Yeah, I try to take everything with a pinch of salt. You can see it with something like the response to Hersh's Nord Stream 2 story. I dunno whether he's right, but various people are dismissing him based on the use of anonymous sources who were perfectly fine with anonymous sources when it came to anything concerning the Trump White House.

The generous interpretation is that a lot of journalists are too credulous when a story comes along that confirms their biases, but a lot of them are just cynical. They end up a propagandist either way.

 

[luka]

sufi does literally run a hugely lucrative tech start up fwiw

 

[Leo]

Most of the pushback I've seen about the Hersh article isn't that it's based off anonymous sources, but that he based it off a single anonymous source. That doesn't mean the info isn't true, but lots of major publications require info to be verified (sometimes by at least two or three other sources, anonymous or not).

Again, I'm not saying his article isn't true, just that I believe that's why The New Yorker passed on it, after publishing other blockbuster articles of his in the past.

 

[Clinamenic]

@sus have you gotten into web3 social yet, like Lens or Farcaster? Farcaster was invite-only for a while, but they just opened it up so that people can pay $7 (one time) for a handle. Not sure if the proceeds go toward developers, or to PurpleDAO.

Anyway, t2 is a cool publishing platform which has a Lens integration and an Arweave integration.

Where writers find their niche | t2.world

T2 is a social network where reading pays you back. We capture time you spend reading to cultivate better content and empower subcultures to grow.

t2.world

 

[Clinamenic]

@sufi might like Farcaster - pretty sure you can use it without bothering with the web3 stuff. It has a bunch of clients/platforms, but I don't think its like that federated model we were talking about earlier.

Farcaster | Apps

A protocol for building sufficiently decentralized social networks

www.farcaster.xyz

 

[Mr. Tea]

@sufi You do realise it's not, like, compulsory to go on Twitter, or in fact use the internet at all, right?

Post-Internet

is this a thing yet? can't wait tbh

www.dissensus.com

How to Kill the Internet?

I had an interesting conversation in a hipster espresso joint on the corner by Cambridge Heath with a veteran internet developer, who said they're bearing in mind the possibility of a coming world free of the internet, and worrying abut how the youth who can't even remember life before the...

www.dissensus.com

(I would suggest going outside and 'touching grass', as the kids say, but I accept it'd probably be more like 'touching mud' at present.)

 

[mixed_biscuits]

@sufi You do realise it's not, like, compulsory to go on Twitter, or in fact use the internet at all, right?

Post-Internet

is this a thing yet? can't wait tbh

www.dissensus.com

How to Kill the Internet?

I had an interesting conversation in a hipster espresso joint on the corner by Cambridge Heath with a veteran internet developer, who said they're bearing in mind the possibility of a coming world free of the internet, and worrying abut how the youth who can't even remember life before the...

www.dissensus.com

(I would suggest going outside and 'touching grass', as the kids say, but I accept it'd probably be more like 'touching mud' at present.)

It would be touching 'stools in your case.

 

[Clinamenic]

It would be touching 'stools in your case.

Rubbing fungi