It boggles my mind that anyone, outside of the far-right lunatic fringe, is still on that platform. I left months before Elon Musk showed up, because they weren't doing enough to fight misinformation in 2020, and now it's an absolute dumpster fire. I can only guess there's something like the sunk cost fallacy at work here, and that's why people are reluctant to leave.
I remember around Novemeber trying to get my friends to use other platfrom but Twitter as I removed my account, made twitter account only to talk to them because their too lazy to even just use Discord.. it just so damn annoying
Wait, you can’t call, text, email, chat your friends?
Their my internet friends if that makes sense. Also, I don't like to give out my something like my email or phone number unless I know people enough or at least would see them. Most them are in America so seeing them is slim. (I'm British)
You have to shout it publicly across the internet?
No, I can DM Them and it what I mostly did to keep in contract with them.
Ahhh, Internet Friends. I guess I was lucky enough to never be on Twitter, and honestly, can't figure out how to have enough interaction with anyone on Mastadon to become friends with them. Old school forums and Discord seem to work better for me for that. Too bad they're too lazy.
As someone who has been the admin for a lot of email servers over the years and currently relies on it for certain things, email is an outdated mode of communication.
I think a lot of reporters and bloggers got used to it too much and are now totally reliant on it to get their input for the quick articles. And as long as there are still people reading the Tweets and spreading the information, there always will be people making Tweets for easy publicity.
Most of my twitter engagement comes from links on reddit funny enough (usually sports related). There's still a few people im interested in following as well so i'll poke my head in here and there. But yeah i certainly don't blame people for leaving the platform entirely. I just try to steer clear of the toxic stuff (which is very tough if you spend longer than 5 minutes on it)
There still isn't a great competitor for access to certain groups that I followed on Twitter (i.e. legal analysts and real time local news). Thankfully, many of them have migrated to Mastodon, but there is still a bit of a gap and a lot of people are still pointing back to Twitter. I blame inertia more than anything for those groups remaining and it will take some more time for them to fall off of the platform.
That all said, I left the platform after Musk started banning journalists and the flight tracker and I've not really missed it at all.
Exactly, I still use twitter because it is the best news aggregator for me personally. There is no other site where I can see updates from my favorite artists, authors, content creators, game companies... and it's all neat in one place with recommendations for similar content actually making some sense.
If you block politics and don't engage in the social aspect of it, twitter is a very useful tool. Nothing else comes close unfortunately, mastodon doesn't have anyone, tumblr has a few people and reddit is just second-hand news.
I hope it crashes and burns just so people actually move somewhere else, but that hasn't happened yet.
I keep finding myself on Twitter not by choice, but because it is the news outlet for a lot of individuals and other entities. Even if readers like me have largely moved on to other places, there isn't really a one-size-fits-all alternative for microblogging.
Just this last weekend we had weather events disrupting my local Pride festival, and Twitter was the only easy place that they were able to quickly distribute status updates. Bluesky is still in private beta, and Mastadon doesn't really work at all for this particular use-case.
Just this last weekend we had weather events disrupting my local Pride festival, and Twitter was the only easy place that they were able to quickly distribute status updates. Bluesky is still in private beta, and Mastadon doesn’t really work at all for this particular use-case.
oh yeah, that's the other part: it's an acceptable platform for everybody from 13-year old fangirls to the literal, actual president and his staff, and you can find everybody between those groups on the site. just very hard to displace that kind of universality, especially when everybody's already on one place
I left back in 2018 because using it on a regular basis is like taking a chainsaw to your brain. I only keep my account in order to keep track of a handful of nsfw artists, and even a lot of them moved back to old Web 2.0 infrastructure
I have former academic coworkers who use it to promote their publications etc. It's an odd thing because their (very left) politics definitely don't belong on twitter anymore. The only reason I can think of why they stay is because they are still convinced that one day they'll become famous. Twitter really seems to play on the idea that everyone can be a superstar. Sad really.
I have former academic coworkers who use it to promote their publications etc. It’s an odd thing because their (very left) politics definitely don’t belong on twitter anymore.
for mid-level people in a space or community there's really not much better than twitter currently: it has--or, i suppose, had--a good equilibrium of random people and smart or influential people, a unique equilibrium of semi-privacy and public space, and a culture and barrier for entry that's low and overall decent for getting eyes on your work (to a point).
if you're an artist, for example? there's simply not a better platform for your work. dedicated gallery sites are fractal and don't have all the other stuff twitter comes with. (sometimes they don't even have all the art, to extend the example!) probably the closest mass-media to twitter that emulates the benefits is instagram, but instagram also has a different clientele and a very different culture.
in fact i'm actually a pretty good example of this: several politicians and reasonably prominent progressive figures have/had followed me on twitter just because i make interesting posts sometimes and give them useful information they don't have. i can't really think of another space i'd have been able to do that in, and you can sometimes do it with very important or influential people in a way that's just not true of any other place online.
The only thing I'm afraid of is that they'll turn it around before the majority truly understands how bad it is. It'll be just like COVID: the bad times won't last long enough for people to change. They'll just think "it's temporary" and not change a damn thing.
I have the same fear. There is some momentum on moving away from traditional profit-oriented outrage-dependent social media and moving to decentralized technology.
The movement needs succeed to some extent and that traffic needs to move to Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. And for that to happen, Twitter and Reddit (add Facebook for good measure) need to cause a significant exodus to other platforms.
I just hope it isn't another Whatsapp -> Signal migration which failed to cause a significant shift in the end.
If Facebook still exists, Reddit and Twitter are likely too big to fail too. They might not make what they used to at their peak, but as long as the site isn’t fully abandoned they’ll get their revenue
True, Reddit will probably not fail, but becoming a worse place for everyone may still hurt them, and Reddit could lose so much goodwill that it could hurt the "organic" growth of their site. And if good alternatives like Lemmy thrives, I wouldn't care as much.
I think a Facebook competitor's critical mass problem is much harder than then a competitor to Reddit or Twitter's. The appeal to Facebook is that you have all the people you know on there, and you can share updates with the mall and see updates from them all. As the portion of your friends and loved ones drops, it's utility drops proportionally. If everyone uses Facebook, it's a great tool; but if only 10% of your friends do, it's kind of worthless. You don't really want to have to post photos to two or three different sites to really share them. Having one place to connect with everyone in your life is kind of the point of Facebook.
On the other hand, Reddit and Twitter are just random things shared from random people. If you randomly deleted half of Reddit users or Twitter users, I literally wouldn't even notice. There about the containt comma you really don't care about or even really know the actual people.
If that AI isn't open source, it will start spreading nasty rumors about you and making plans with your friends without inviting you unless you pay $14.99 per month and upgrade your "friend" level account to the "good friend" level ("best friend" accounts will refuse to talk to law enforcement about you and pretend to be various references on your resume for job interviewers)
Honestly, I think Twitter and Reddit are both sinking ships. Both of them seem to be run by people who really don't know what they're doing. They kind of deserve it, to be honest.
Mastodon doesn't push content into your face, you get only what you ask for: the people and hashtags you follow. One caveat is that hashtag follow works much better if you are on a larger instance with more users and their follows pulling in more posts for a given hashtag.
For a specific example I am on mastodon.social and I follow a handful of individuals and a few hashtags (#boardgames and #emacs are probably the biggest ones) and I see about 50-80 posts a day which is plenty for me, especially if I dig into their threads.
hey there, this--and your subsequent posts downthread--are really not an acceptable way to start engaging in political discussion on our community. they run afoul of the be(e) nice ethos in a lot of ways and they do not leave any room for serious discussion. we'll be removing them as such.
If this is the case, then you have to make clear what is acceptable, trust me im tame compared to my other conservatives on social media alternatives, i just would appreciate a clear set of rules, do you have a link or screenshot of said rules?
The issue as I see it with modern social media is the way in which rules are enforced. There are many good reasons to itemize specific behavior which is not allowed, but the downside is that extremely specific rules are easy to maneuver around. We’ve all experienced someone who’s a real jerk on the internet but manages to never get banned because they never explicitly violate any rules. I’m not sexist, they’ll claim, but happen to post a lot of articles calling into question modern feminism or criticize the wage gap.
I would say that companies like Black rock, headed by Larry Fink they push E.S.G. or basically Chinese social credit score type things for lack of better words and essentially they are trying to reshape society. They encourage certain things like say, for example, the celebration of pride month, which I actually don’t have a problem with But that’s not really the subject of this conversation. I would say that Black rock and or companies like it that divvy out loans to companies give companies this social credit score like China does to its citizens and if you go against the grain with companies like Black rock, then you don’t get the loan. I feel like Twitter has gone against the grain in a sense, and is now paying the price for better or worse
USA has been using credit scores since the 50s. It's a banking thing. Chinese Social Credit does not work like you think it works.
Blackrock doesn't give a damn about pride, it's just good for business to do not look like a bigot right now. Liberals simply have more money, liberal cities are bigger and better markets. Liberals right now are pro gay rights. IF liberals get transphobic you will see a tarnsphobic Blackrock. They have no moral agenda. They only want to own everything and collect rent. Blackrock makes investments in private equity, stock market and real state. It's not a loaner. Your bank is who will deny you a loan because "computer says no".
Twitter is just bad business dude. It's badly managed. If advertising in Twitter meant more money every corporation would be purchasing adds, but even before Elon backstabed the workers, destroyed the contracts and infrastructure and loaded the company with billions in debt Twitter was shrinking. The presence in the zeitgeist is totally artificial, because celebrities, politicians and journalists are obsessed with it. But Pinterest has more users than Twitter.
“One of the incidents cited by ad executives was the spread of an AI-generated image that falsely suggested there had been a large explosion at the Pentagon.”
Sure do love it every time paid verification comes back to bite Musk in the arse.
Musk set a goal of making half of Twitter's revenue subscription-based, but his revamped Twitter Blue subscription service got off to a slow start. As the NYT report said, reversing the decline in advertising "is crucial because ads have long made up 90 percent of the company's revenue."
Well it looks like he's well on his way to succeeding in that goal if the ad revenue keeps dropping
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