[HN Gopher] Current thoughts on social media
___________________________________________________________________
Current thoughts on social media
Author : mcp_
Score : 131 points
Date : 2023-11-02 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (martinfowler.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (martinfowler.com)
| gfodor wrote:
| It seems like fan out social media will just be in a cycle of
| consolidation and then a shock event eventually breaks it up a
| bit. Given that Twitter/X seems to have survived this shock, most
| likely to me in 5 years or so the next reconsolidation will be
| people migrating back there to access the network in the usual
| kinds of feedback loop. There was a window where this wasn't
| assured (bluesky had a pretty clear opportunity to disrupt here
| imo) but that phase seems over and the next cycle seems pretty
| locked in.
| riffic wrote:
| I've been around long enough to see X's trajectory. It's headed
| here (List of defunct social networking services, Wikipedia):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
|
| side note but Fowler's organization runs an employee Mastodon
| instance. This is the "correct" model that should have been
| applied to social networking from the beginning
| (interoperability, not silos)
|
| https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Did any of these ever have 300 million users?
| riffic wrote:
| without doing any further research I assume AOL Instant
| Messenger got pretty close.
|
| Windows Live Messenger, on the list, had 330 million active
| monthly users
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger
|
| India TV claims Orkut was exactly that popular (300 m)
|
| https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-orkut-
| farewell-m...
| scythe wrote:
| Orkut didn't really die a natural death, though. It was
| cannibalized to juice Google+, which subsequently
| collapsed.
|
| "X" is definitely running right into a similar problem
| that Google+ faced: a good name can't save you but an
| awful name can sink you. I've never heard even the most
| ardent Musk fans defending the name change. It's
| ridiculous.
| abid786 wrote:
| Google+ had 540 million active users
| drcongo wrote:
| Active is very debatable there, I think Google counted
| anyone who was signed into Google.
| omoikane wrote:
| Google+ had a lot of active users, which is especially
| observable if you join the right communities. The demise
| of Google+ marked the loss of those communities, which I
| still sorely miss to this day.
|
| Those communities, plus stable infrastructure, great
| integration with photos, publicly viewable profiles
| without requiring sign-in, transparent moderation that I
| never knew I missed until I joined Diaspora, and no ads.
| It was a real shame.
| cma wrote:
| They removed google chat and replaced it with Hangouts
| locked behind Google+. A majority of users might have
| been just using that.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| "active"
| esalman wrote:
| Per Elon Musk, those are mostly bots.
| evilduck wrote:
| Did Twitter?
|
| Even Musk was trying to argue it was all bots before he got
| stuck with the bill.
| gfodor wrote:
| Mastodon can't scale and centralizes too much power into the
| largest home nodes, Bluesky is a much better, more 'correct'
| approach as you put it.
|
| But ultimately it doesn't matter, I don't think your first
| point is correct - the window of opportunity for this cycle
| is behind us for a decentralization of social media imo. The
| network effects of X are too strong, eventually people will
| come back.
| mariusor wrote:
| You're viewing the Mastodon vs. Bluesky problem from very
| different temporal points of observation, so your
| conclusions are not really meaningful. Mastodon is
| installed on hundreds of servers, how many instances of
| Bluesky are there? Until it's adopted more widely it can't
| be "more correct".
| esalman wrote:
| I think the amount of money that was bankrolled into Twitter is
| sustaining the impression of survival.
|
| For me the most useful part of Twitter was real time news
| trends. I don't even open that tab anymore.
|
| Next most useful thing was the network of scientists from my
| field. It is also non existent now. I saved a lot of tweets
| about new papers over the years. When I went back to read them
| during literature review for my dissertation, I found most of
| them gone and accounts deleted.
|
| What has increased drastically is verified accounts spewing
| either sensationalism without any care for engagement, or
| outright misinformation, sometimes taken down hilariously by
| community notes.
| gfodor wrote:
| Right so what I'm suggesting is the current situation is not
| a stable state. If I'm right, what you should expect is that
| those people will, slowly, return to posting their content on
| X. If I'm wrong, you should expect more and more people
| migrating off of X and less and less active users on there.
| The reason I think I am right is because the size and
| connectivity of the X social graph.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _There was a window where this wasn't assured_
|
| You're living in a fantasy bubble if you think anything in this
| comment is insightful or representative of the current state of
| Twitter.
|
| The only thing that was in doubt during the various recent
| Twitter changes was how rapidly it would decline - people have
| underestimated network inertia, which is why Mastodon and now
| Bsky have failed to capture sufficient impressions to convince
| everyone they're the "next Twitter". Which ultimately brings
| people back to Twitter - noone is going to Twitter because
| Mastodon/Bsky don't work, they're coming back because with each
| migration they overestimate the finality & are disappointed.
|
| Ultimately though, slow as Twitter's decline is, it is
| continuing to decline steadily & will inevitably cross the
| critical threshold where one can consider it first irrelevant
| (Facebook's currenly approaching this state, a process which
| has been slow), then eventually "defunct".
|
| TL;DR: declines always take longer than everyone predicts, but
| ultimately still happen. Comebacks generally speaking don't.
| cma wrote:
| Mastodon has no algorithm, if one guy posts 30 things you get
| them sequentially so it is dominated by who types the most
| until they eventually annoy you enough to unfollow them. No
| algorithm also means you don't filter out their meal photos
| etc. based on clicking not interested.
|
| Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how many
| times you click not interested on hard right content, street
| fights, etc. it just forces it on you. They have stop letting
| you adjust aspects of your feed.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Twitter is maybe even worse now though, no matter how
| many times you click not interested on hard right content,
| street fights, etc. it just forces it on you.
|
| I have literally never seen this stuff in my feed. Are you
| commenting on or reposting far right content or street
| fights? Even if you're commenting or reposting to say how
| awful the content is, that still counts as "engagement" and
| will cause the algorithm to give you more of it.
| raincole wrote:
| Anecdotally I've never seen these before. However it
| keeps pushing AI related posts to me (I never comment or
| reposting them). I feel it just push a specific topic to
| a specific account for a while and see if it 'clicks'.
| cma wrote:
| I clicked not interested every time until I gave up and
| left the site. I never engage with it with likes or
| comments.
| escapedmoose wrote:
| It's not just that person! I logged back into my long-
| unused Twitter within the past year (to delete my
| account) and was presented the same type of content they
| mentioned above. This despite the fact that my ancient
| account was dedicated to Animal Crossing memes and
| whatever books I was reading at the time, never used for
| anything political. The feed pushed a whole slew of far-
| right "thinkers," which was pretty shocking to see.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _Mastodon has no algorithm_
|
| This isn't about whether Mastodon is better or any other
| existing alternative though: people as a group are less
| interested in individual rational concerns like these and
| will ultimately go where the network is, and wherever it's
| going to (yet to be decided) it's clearly moving away from
| Twitter. Slowly, but surely.
| gfodor wrote:
| "Comeback" vs "decline" is just a rhetorical frame.
| Ultimately what I see is that Twitter has a unsurpassed level
| of social graph in terms of metcalfe connectivity, and that
| the value of the network itself seems to provide a
| significant force for people to come back. It's not hard to
| understand why: Fowler's post shows it. The fact he can't
| sever his connection to X because there are people on there
| shows that this is an unstable state. The question is which
| way things will tip given that networks inevitably
| consolidate. The next stable state of consolidation is either
| some new network with dense connectivity or an existing one.
| So, you have to be able to point at what that network is to
| say if you're making an actual alternative prediction.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _you have to be able to point at what that network is_
|
| You don't really. In fact, historically, migrations away
| from a large declining platform don't tend to have a
| unified destination. Consolidation doesn't happen directly,
| it's usually a later stage of any given social network
| (immediately preceding decline).
|
| e.g. people didn't move from MySpace to Facebook en masse.
| They went to LastFm, Bebo, Orkut, many other places. It
| wasn't until long after Myspace's decline that Facebook
| started to be a singular dominant force (at which stage
| Snapchat/Vine/Instagram/others started seeping in).
|
| > _The next stable state of consolidation_
|
| This "stable consolidation" tends to follow mass
| abandonment of a network to disparate places, it doesn't
| precede it.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I love seeing normal people flock Twitter because of the Muskover
| but avoid Mastodon because it's nothing but blue haired techies.
|
| Guess they'll have to settle for Instagram where they value
| privacy and personal rights, oh wait...
| screamingninja wrote:
| tl;dr
|
| > The reason I'm posting on Mastodon is because the future I want
| is one that's based on interoperability. I want to see an open
| protocol that isn't dependent on a tech-lord's whim. ActivityPub
| is currently the one that looks most developed. Bluesky's AT
| Protocol may become important in the future, so I'm also keeping
| an eye on that.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| He also continues to post on X because that's where he gets
| actual engagement.
| pphysch wrote:
| Telegram has by far the best UX for me out of these "social
| media", largely because it is not based on an ad-driven
| algorithmic feed.
|
| I wish X had a proper UI like Telegram. The "Following" feed is
| pathetic. The problem is, of course, that I would spend 90% less
| time on X if there was such a feature. Really drives home that
| You Are The Product.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Telegram is one of the best software out there. Not just the ux
| but also the speed and the technical brilliance is superior to
| anything from Google Twitter Facebook etc.
| swader999 wrote:
| The only issue is how to find more channels or even the best
| channels for a particular interest or topic. But yeah TG is
| by far superior in many ways.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Serious question: how do you do discovery of good channels?
| Downloaded TG over a year ago because I read that a lot of
| interesting on the ground Ukraine reporting was happening
| there.
|
| But after I downloaded, I quickly realized the discovery
| experience was non existent. I was googling for good TG
| channels, which is crazy in my opinion!
| pphysch wrote:
| Some of the channels I follow are moderately active and
| they do lots of re-posting, which links to the related
| channel. It's not the best discovery feature, but it does
| work for me.
| rvz wrote:
| Well, it has finally been admitted that 1 year later after the
| layoffs that forecasts of the complete collapse of Twitter/X were
| somewhat delusional and remains stickier than thought.
| Unsurprisingly.
|
| Twitter/X should have been shut down 6 months ago maximum
| according to such prophecies like this one [0] by many HNers
| here. For example, even with predictions of Threads to 'to hollow
| out twitter in extremely rapid fashion' [1] giving them just
| months after launch. Not even that happened, let alone the other
| dramatic changes to the platform.
|
| We have given the doom-mongers plenty of time for Twitter/X to
| shut down or completely collapse and go permanently offline but
| all we got was the alternatives like T2 shutting down [2] due to
| Threads crushing and killing off the rest of the smaller
| competitors (Spill, Post.news, Substack Notes, etc) and some
| Mastodon instances shutting down to recentralize to
| Mastodon.social, the most centralized and one of the only viable
| instances that has enough funding to be sustainable.
|
| We are slowly realizing that the completed takeover that happened
| 1 year ago, lots of emotions and hysteria took over by a small
| minority begging for the collapse that never happened.
|
| [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-
| ho...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669
|
| [2] https://pebble.is/gabor/status/340649
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| To me, Twitter/X is still running purely because Musk and the
| banks he used to finance the purchase REALLY don't want to
| admit to a failure. Musk is very high-profile, with many
| government contracts, Neuralink coming in hot, and Tesla under
| a lot of fire over the Cybertruck. He really doesn't need the
| bad press right now that he pissed away $44bn. Reporting a
| valuation of $19bn even now is him slowly ripping off the
| bandaid to prevent too many eyes focusing on his other
| projects.
|
| - US web traffic down 19%
|
| - Ad portal traffic down 16%
|
| - Mobile traffic on iOS/Android down 17.8%
|
| - Granted, all social traffic was down around 3-4% globally,
| but we can see the anomaly that is Twitter's traffic.
|
| To me, it's all rubbernecking at a car burning on the side of
| the road. We'd rather see it burn down while we're there,
| rather than watch it on the news.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| The forecasts were overblown and X/Twitter is definitely
| stickier than people thought, but pointing at cherry-picked
| hyperboles to state that the criticisms were just emotions and
| hysteria is just ridiculous. Twitter did quite indeed suffer a
| lot from the Musk takeover, just by looking at ad figures,
| engagement, and the actual content on the site.
|
| Anecdote: I used to be a daily twitter user, and I barely use
| it now because you can pay to traffic terrible content (not
| ads)
| LouisSayers wrote:
| The simple fact is that Elon's a smart and ballsy businessman,
| and most of us aren't.
|
| People will shout "agile" from the rooftops, but when it comes
| to actual change, people are (as they've always been)
| uncomfortable with it.
|
| In the case of running a business it comes down to Profit =
| Revenue - Expenses. The purchase of Twitter brought in and will
| continue to bring in change that aligns with this formula.
|
| People can be upset that a bunch of people got fired, or that
| new changes have happened, but as they say, it's not personal,
| it's just business.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| You're right, it's been a roaring success, with massively
| tanking revenue, more fraud/spam, brand destruction, and
| declining user base! You really showed 'em.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| tl;dr: Martin Fowler on why he is getting less retweets
| hasoleju wrote:
| Yes, I thought the headline would be about more than just
| talking about the good things of different social media sites.
|
| What I noticed is that even with all that happened, it's
| surprising that the number of people interacting with his posts
| hasn't really changed. The network effect seems to be holding
| things together.
| huhuli wrote:
| Silicon Valley is the single most destructive source of
| censorship on the planet
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| "Some people are critical that I still use X"
|
| So, was Musk wrong or not lol. Let's hope Fowler won't get
| cancelled.
| trowawee wrote:
| The Facebook aside was interesting. I've been back on FB
| periodically this year to try to sell some stuff after years off
| it and it cannot be overstated how terrible the basic experience
| of browsing the feed is, at least on mobile. It's a minimum of
| 3-4 ads per actual post from a human I chose to friend, and the
| ads are just the stupidest, trashiest stuff imaginable.
| pokstad wrote:
| How about the fact that most ads have better content than your
| FB friends? Thats more sad to me.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Are those ads?
|
| I think there are 3 things on Facebook: friend posts, short
| videos from content farms, and actual ads. The first are what
| I want to see, the third... well, obviously I don't like
| them, but they pay the bills, right? The second are, I guess,
| like things Facebook puts there to hide the fact that nobody
| posts anything to Facebook anymore.
| asah wrote:
| I use the web interface and it's also surprisingly bad, e.g.
| basic HTML bugs that interfere with engagement, e.g. text
| editor selection and editing bugs.
| guiseroom wrote:
| I got back on Facebook just to use Marketspace and it was the
| worst experience I've ever had. Nothing but scams and idiots.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| FB marketplace has zero authentication for sellers. No point
| in buying anything from there.
|
| If you must buy something from Facebook, use specialist
| groups that are moderated and preferably private.
| guiseroom wrote:
| What was so infuriating was how, if buying, I could limit
| my search to a local radius, but you can't do that when
| selling.
| taude wrote:
| Weird, I've had lots of success with Marketplace as both a
| buyer and seller. I only do local transactions, which is
| the same I would have done in the past with Craigslist, but
| I think Marketplace is miles-better than Craigslist.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| If you're willing to go local and meet the seller and
| check the stuff, Marketplace might work.
|
| It's still filled with obvious scams and reporting them
| does nothing. Meanwhile FB's AI Algorithm bans legit
| posts for selling prohibited items :D
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I'd say Craigslist has even less authentication for sellers
| and it's pretty solid most of the time. I've sold a ton of
| things on there and honestly never run into scammers at
| all.
|
| Also, I quit Facebook before they added marketplace so I
| can't make a comparison. I'm just going off of this thread
| mostly. I also know people who sell things on marketplace
| fairly regularly / successfully.
| haunter wrote:
| >Marketspace
|
| Marketplace
|
| That aside it's funny because I have the exact opposite
| experience. It's the best place to buy and sell locally. Not
| every place has Craigslist (for better or worse) so it's good
| to have at least an OK digital alternative. I use it pretty
| much every day.
| neutronicus wrote:
| Yeah here in Baltimore Marketplace is definitely the place
| to buy and sell used stuff. It's like a mildly less
| annoying Craigslist. Except for the peppering of ads to buy
| shit online. No, Facebook. I came to you because you're
| Craigslist now, if I wanted Amazon I would have gone to
| fucking Amazon, you lost this fight, surrender, please for
| the love of God. Just show me shit I can drive and exchange
| cash for today!
| basisword wrote:
| Exact same thing here. Had to sell some stuff, hadn't done it
| in years, and was told Marketplace is the thing these days.
| Within 5 mins I have half a dozen messages all following the
| same format and all saying they would send x relative to
| collect. Took all my ads down and went back to Gumtree which
| has been flawless so far.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Just wait until your account gets hacked and you realize
| there's a bug with the "click here if you didn't make this
| change" links in the security email making it impossible to get
| your account back.
|
| Then navigate to Facebook.com/hacked as directed by the help
| docs and have it reject any attempt to recover your account
| because it only works with currently used email addresses and
| phone numbers which the hacker has removed and updated to a
| value which you cannot know.
|
| Does anyone work at FB or knows if they have a public facing
| bug tracker or ability to contact their developers? This is a
| pretty bad bug.
| buffet_overflow wrote:
| This, on top of how frustrating it is to report the hacked
| account to Facebook. Several family members have had their
| profiles compromised, including the email and phone number
| updates you mentioned.
|
| Myself and many many other people attempt to help the
| situation by reporting the old profile as a hacked
| impersonator, only to be promptly closed by Facebook, as they
| cite they see no rule breaking. They reach this opinion
| despite the profile being massively changed, from an English
| speaking father of two, to a woman persona now posting
| obvious scam links and new family photos in a different
| language (and country) entirely.
|
| Even as we admit defeat on recovering the old account, often
| tied to a small business page, and eat the cost of starting
| over, the old profile still masquerades under the old name,
| but with reputation damaging and clearly fake content.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I wonder if the BBB can be leveraged. I can't find Meta on
| there but I did find an Instagram entry and they have a
| rating of F [1] Maybe we should post the BBB page for Meta
| to the front page of HN and let people voice their
| frustrations?
|
| [1] https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/menlo-park/profile/internet-
| servic...
| echelon wrote:
| What would that do? Facebook doesn't sell anything to
| users. They sell marketing tools to marketers.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Hasn't Yelp mostly replaced the BBB as the standard
| company that aggregates reviews of businesses? You could
| try leaving Facebook a 1-star Yelp review.
| saghm wrote:
| While I definitely am in favor of having businesses
| listed there if nothing else to let other people with the
| same issue feel some solidarity, doesn't the fact that
| Instagram already has such a low rating not motivating
| any changes make it unlikely that anything would change
| if the parent company were listed as well?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Also the ease with which you can get banned from the
| marketplace is ridiculous, with no way to appeal. We ordered
| some new kitchen cabinets a year ago and due to some very
| annoying shipping hijinks the shipment got lost. They made a
| second batch and sent them to us, and the initial shipment got
| miraculously found, so we had a second set of kitchen cabinets.
|
| I made a Facebook account solely for the purpose of selling
| this extra set of cabinets on the marketplace, made no other
| posts about anything anywhere on Facebook, and my account got
| banned within a week. They asked me to send them a scan of my
| id to get it unbanned, which I did and they unbanned me. It was
| then permanently banned a week later with no explanation and no
| option to appeal.
| cooperadymas wrote:
| You created an account and immediately posted a high priced
| item for sale on the marketplace, with no other indication
| that you're a real person?
|
| That's classic scam-bot behavior right there.
|
| This isn't a criticism of you - what you did makes perfect
| sense. But I'm not surprised at all that you got caught by a
| ban algo.
|
| The only surprise is that you were ever unbanned.
| samtho wrote:
| Without siding with Facebook here, that was extremely
| suspicious behavior.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Fwiw, I think this is somewhat of a self-reinforcing
| phenomenon. I go through periods of actual interaction with
| others on Facebook (for various reasons) and the feed seems to
| improve when I'm interacting with posts I actually want to see.
| But, when I'm not using it all that much, the feed devolves
| back into noise.
| thomasahle wrote:
| Just checked my own feed, and it was
|
| [friend post, promoted/ad, friend post, recommended group,
| friend post, promoted/ad, group post, friend post]
|
| So not quite as bad as your experience.
|
| At first I didn't see any ads, but that was because of adblock.
| trowawee wrote:
| Yeah, on web with extensive adblocking it's not as miserable
| (or routing my phone back through my pihole install). But
| most people aren't adblocking, and the "normal" user
| experience was jarring.
| dgudkov wrote:
| FB on the web is basically unusable without Social Fixer - a
| browser extension.
| monksy wrote:
| I honestly don't understand why he would want to stay on
| Twitter/X. It feels like from his writeup his only reason is
| "well I'm addicted to it" and "I see some people on it".
|
| Twitter has shown anti-user behavior over and over again. (From
| the encouragement of putting conflicting users together, to
| boosting toxic users, to unbanning the worst of the worst, also
| throwing people who disagree with their government in the wood
| chipper [there are ME countries that will follow through with
| legal and fatal consequences for opposing them in the platform].
| raincole wrote:
| Because he has 350k followers.
| Yhippa wrote:
| Google Reader with sharing content to a "feed" and having friends
| comment on it was peak social media for me. I'd argue that
| today's social media is no different from mobile games. Designed
| to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about you as
| possible.
| rapind wrote:
| > Designed to extract as much time, money, and knowledge about
| you as possible.
|
| Potential irony? Wasn't this model, at least in part,
| popularized by the Facebook game Farmville?
| taude wrote:
| Yeup. I wish we all went back to blogs and posting stuff to our
| own sites. There was a barrier to entry for doing this,
| naturally, but it kept the riff-raff off. There was also a few
| years of early Twitter days before the general public came on,
| and it was pretty amazing and useful
|
| I'd rather just have a feed-reader that I manage, and manually
| subscribe to people's content. Something like how Spokeo or
| FriendFeed back in the day.... FriendFeed was also awesome. I
| wish we'd go back to those days.
| manicennui wrote:
| RSS feeds and del.icio.us were great.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| Agreed about Google Reader. It's the experience I keep trying
| to recapture.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Musk has it right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Nf56srwcA.
|
| Social media is now less town square ("Speakers Corner") and is a
| information weapon. I think Musk hoped to use blue checkmark
| attribution as a means of putting posts to the attribution test,
| and I believe he underestimated the appeal of bias enforcing
| anonymous posting. The tension between freedom of speech and dog
| whistling is unresolvable and I would argue different times call
| for different approaches. Its clear state and state-sponsored
| actors are abusing social media liberalism to the great detriment
| of Western values and stability. Its clear these same actors do
| not permit the freedom of communication they abuse elsewhere.
|
| By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so
| tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+
| friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network
| effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group likely
| to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed oppressors.
|
| We live in very interesting times.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| "By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so
| tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+
| friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network
| effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group
| likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed
| oppressors." - Interesting. I never considered network effects
| role in this "strange bedfellows" phenomenon, thinking this was
| primarily due to intersectionality i.e. all the "oppressed"
| unite against all the "oppressors."
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"
| raincole wrote:
| > By way of example, its fascinating the LGBT+ community is so
| tightly allied with radical Islamic voices against the LGBT+
| friendly country of Israel. Its fascinating because of network
| effects that drive this apparent alliance, whereby a group
| likely to be outlawed (or worse) identifies with its avowed
| oppressors.
|
| I don't know what you think network effects do here. There is a
| very clear reason why LGBT+ community is allied with radical
| Islamic, and everyone knows it.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Actually, it makes no sense. It would be one thing to
| identify with the Palestinian people, but its altogether a
| different thing to identify with Hamas, or any radical
| Islamist group. Candidly, its quite possibly a sign of
| childhood mental illness now manifesting in young and full
| adulthood. Specifically, the loneliness of being unfairly
| outcast in youth manifesting as projective identification of
| an oppressed group, and with their oppressors -> Hamas. Yes,
| Hamas are the oppressors.
| mariusor wrote:
| I think you're making some weird assumptions here, just
| because two groups of people have similar opinions about
| the same thing, does not make them "tightly allied". I dare
| you to produce messages of support for the extremists from
| anyone in the LGBT community.
|
| [edit] Actually I'll recant somewhat, you can probably find
| racists in any community, but I dare say that those
| messages come from individuals being assholes rather than
| individuals expressing community opinions.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Dare accepted. Here ya go: https://twitter.com/search?q=i
| srael%20lgbt&src=typed_query
|
| Its really difficult to browse through these. Some of the
| most wonderful people I know are Lesbian and Gay people
| my age, and while not a single one of them identifies
| with Hamas, its clear the younger generation does. Its
| madness.
| mariusor wrote:
| I don't feel like you fulfilled your promise, that link
| is useless. I want to see where you get this "clarity"
| about the younger generation, with specific examples, not
| hand waving and "do your own research"...
| antod wrote:
| "tightly allied" sounds like either a fallacy or a bad faith
| argument.
|
| Even ignoring the current situation, criticizing something
| doesn't necessarily ally you with someone else criticizing the
| same thing. The "enemy of my enemy is not my friend" etc.
| superhumanuser wrote:
| The best part of the Muskover of Twitter/X is that it's no longer
| being moderated by the Executive Branch of the US Government.
|
| Balk all you want, it has been proven that the US Government had
| an illegal relationship with Twitter in part to their censoring
| of free speech. Especially speech critical of the COVID-19
| "vaccine"; many of which turned out to be true!
|
| This is bigger than muh social media community and more on the
| scales of massive societal control by government.
|
| I'm thankful to Elon for proving and rooting this out.
| coolbreezetft22 wrote:
| lol
| foderking wrote:
| based
| neuronic wrote:
| Is this a satire account?
| superhumanuser wrote:
| Nice retort
| luzojeda wrote:
| I feel it is not being moderated _at all_ now.
| notpachet wrote:
| Freedom of speech isn't baked into the fabric of the universe.
| It's an ideal that we as a society have to continually
| negotiate for ourselves, and weigh against our other collective
| values in cases where they are in opposition.
|
| Society is ever-evolving so it's understandable that our
| definition of "free speech" will necessarily need to evolve
| along with that. Is it freedom of speech to defame people in
| the press? Is it freedom of speech to mislead people about the
| results of an election? Is it freedom of speech to use AI to
| mimic the voice or appearance of others?
|
| How do we balance the freedom of speech of individuals versus
| the freedom of speech of corporations? Especially in cases
| where the corporation is providing a public utility in all but
| name? (eg, Cloudflare, Twitter)
|
| We are still trying to figure out the right balance between
| these tensions. I'm definitely not arguing that we've gotten it
| right so far (far from it, in many cases). And I'm not
| discounting the risk of, as you put it, "massive societal
| control" -- we've seen that, too.
|
| I just get irritated when I see people acting as if these are
| easy questions with clear answers. They're absolutely not. That
| sort of conviction is deeply unattractive because it shows that
| you're not seeing the world and its complexities in a clear
| light. I don't understand how anyone can look at the situation
| and not come away being impressed by the fundamental difficulty
| of trying to navigate the middle path.
|
| As a demonstration of this point, the exact issue you're
| describing -- whether a company like Twitter has the right to
| block certain types of posts on their platform, especially when
| they may be pressured to do so by the government -- is on the
| Supreme Court docket as we speak. It's far from settled law.
| The case that I believe you're referencing ("illegal
| relationship") was appealed, and its ruling put on hold:
|
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23a243_7l48.pdf
| azangru wrote:
| I've always used Twitter in read-only mode; but shortly before
| the Muskover, Twitter, probably in a desperate attempt to
| increase the number of its active users, became quite hostile to
| non-logged-in readers like me; and this has only become worse
| since Musk. A pity.
|
| Nitter helps; a bit. In fact, Nitter is like an ideal Twitter;
| without all the javascript bloat; but because of that, it does
| not support Twitter's rich media such as spaces; and it also
| sometimes cannot connect to the api. And it isn't clear how long
| its api key will last.
| clutchdude wrote:
| The fact so many government organizations use Twitter as a
| primary means of communication on alerts/events is frustrating
| to no end in the post Musk days.
|
| The profile/tweet history is downright unusable.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Sometimes I think about evangelizing the Fedi to local
| government officials since I am sure a lot of them are
| disgusted with Musk. (I live in one of the most liberal
| counties)
| syncbehind wrote:
| What concerns/thoughts do you have that prevent you from
| doing so?
| RF_Savage wrote:
| The European Union runs their own Mastodon instance.
|
| https://social.network.europa.eu/explore
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Nitter does not use the official API, so there is no API key to
| expire.
|
| The "sometimes cannot connect to the API", is because the APIs
| they use (which IIRC are the APIs the official twitter website
| uses), changes from time to time and is not a stable API and
| probably because Twitter wants to make it harder to "abuse" the
| API like nitter does.
| hanniabu wrote:
| I'm surprised the API endpoints aren't CORS protected
| itslennysfault wrote:
| CORS only works on browsers. From nitter FAQ "All requests
| go through the backend, client never talks to Twitter"
|
| So they are proxying the calls to Twitter servers.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Is it worth just considering that in 15 years of social media,
| the whole culture has changed and there isn't enough openness or
| trust for it to be an _effect_ those values again? (the way it
| was the first time around)
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yes I think this is the answer. Twitter at one point captured a
| type of user and part of the zeitgeist, when users earnestly
| wanted to meet others on the then small internet and were open
| to just having conversations. That internet was mostly nerds.
| Today's web (yes I changed the word from internet to web, as
| most people rarely use the internet outside of the web these
| days) is a very different experience. Today's web has everyone:
| it has your parents, it has your kids, and it has people from
| very different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds.
|
| The brief period when Twitter started was the start of a
| transition from a nerd-only internet to a general-use web. It
| was a single moment in time when everyone still felt open to
| internet socialization. Nowadays, niche interest and groups
| form insular groups the way they used to in the pre-internet
| days. The stuff I read on the more social HN threads could be
| interchangeably posted on IRC channels, Matrix rooms, or
| Mastodon posts. There's a more definite sense of "FOSS-y tech
| tribe" than I feel there used to be 15 years ago.
|
| In that, it's just a return to form. Nerd groups were often
| niche groups in the past and now that _everyone_ is on the web,
| they have returned to being niche groups. It is sad that we
| lost a brief moment of openness, when groups were interested in
| cross-pollinating. But it was just a moment in time, a mere
| blip in the development of social culture, rather than a
| lasting change.
| li2uR3ce wrote:
| Hostility, it turns out is "engagement" which is profitable.
| We went from people organically paring themselves to
| algorithms steering people towards "engaging" encounters.
| Where we used to say "don't feed the trolls" we should now be
| saying "don't feed the algorithm."
|
| I suppose we shouldn't feed either one but right now "the
| algorithm" is the bigger threat. I mean, I can usually get a
| troll to work for me with a bit of patience and
| perseverance... algorithms? They'll only work for me if it's
| profitable for someone else. It's so soulless.
| adolph wrote:
| > For social media now, the main reason I read it is to know
| about new events from people I'm interested in, especially
| interesting articles.
|
| RIP Google Reader
| seydor wrote:
| Feed-based social media were never meant to work with too many
| users just like usenet before them, but the companies went to
| great lengths to ban enough users and generate enough mindless
| clickbait that they kept people around for years. As a reader who
| has no problem with Musk, i still have lost interest on twitter,
| or even mastodon anymore. Everyone has an opinion, but opinions
| are like buttholes. If it's something important it will surface
| on my lemmy feed. I don't need to learn everything the moment it
| happens, but i like to be able to search for it. I think we ll
| end up returning to non-aggregated forums. (Sorry reddit, you ve
| screwed up beyond repair)
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| Not sure what the author's intention is but I reckon that he will
| never give up his Twitter account with 350.000+ followers
| regardless of who owns Twitter. Having this many followers is a
| vehicle for exercising power and generating money.
| isodev wrote:
| Used to be the case... not now taking a closer look at one's
| followers list shows that a large chunk had ghosted the place
| or haven't posted in months.
| akkartik wrote:
| Not to mention these sites thumbing the scales on your
| distribution to your own followers. Follower count is
| increasingly a vanity metric.
| manicennui wrote:
| He makes it pretty clear that he doesn't rely on Twitter for
| that sort of thing, and given who he is and how well known his
| books are, I can't see this being an issue for him.
| ranqet wrote:
| When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about
| 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as
| well. No one replies to anything.
|
| As far as the problems people complain about on X, I don't see
| them. Twitter was always buggy at times, and that hasn't really
| changed. After the exodus of those who just can't stand Musk, I
| see far less political posts than I did in recent years, which is
| an improvement tbh. When I see something I don't want to see, I
| mute it or block the account, just like I always have.
| lapcat wrote:
| > When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching
| about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor
| as well. No one replies to anything.
|
| That's not my experience at all. Who are you following?
|
| In my niche, Apple platform software development, the community
| has almost entirely migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and it's
| now as active and thriving as ever.
|
| IMO the Mastodon experience is even better than the Twitter
| experience was, because there are a lot fewer random trolls on
| Mastodon.
|
| My little niche was the reason I originally joined Twitter back
| in 2008, so frankly, I don't really miss the millions of other
| people. I was never interested in following celebrities.
| alexsereno wrote:
| Yea mastodon has been totally incredible in my experience
| following mostly Swift developers. I'd also argue that the
| slightly higher barrier to entry is more of a feature than a
| bug since it inherently keeps low effort users out. Lastly I
| am old enough to remember early Reddit where it was very
| "technical and confusing" for a lot of people.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It depends who you follow and how.
|
| The "explore" feed on mastodon.social is absolutely toxic
| because it shows the most boosted and favorited posts and
| unfortunately this is people angry at politics, people who get
| a thrill out of dehumanizing people, etc. There's a story that
| "two sides" drive each other crazy on Twitter but my take is
| that "one side" can conjure the presence of the other side and
| drive themselves every bit as crazy and there is that
| subculture on Mastodon.
|
| I block the names of most Republican politicians and certain
| words used by people who aren't comfortable in their own skin
| and don't want me to be comfortable in mine. If I ever see
| angry words in an image (screenshot, image meme, whatever) I
| block the poster immediately.
|
| Thus I get to meet the "silent majority" of nice and mature
| people on Mastodon. I've found my flower photos get a lot of
| engagement, though I wish there was more enthusiasm for my
| sports photos that I put more effort into. Here is my profile
|
| https://mastodon.social/@UP8
| sigmar wrote:
| >When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about
| 'how bad' X is.
|
| Have you tried to follow different people? Wouldn't that solve
| this issue since 100% of mastodon posts in your feed are people
| you follow (unlike on twitter that has ads and such).
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Twitter was always buggy at times
|
| I call BS. Twitter was rock-solid for the approximately 8-year
| window bookmarked by retiring the failwhale and the disastrous
| Twitter Blue launch.
|
| Twitter was the place people would go to complain about _other_
| platforms being down.I could rely on their availability
| dashboard, the UI was stable and there were no subsystem
| brownouts of the kind I 'm seeing now (e.g. "Tweet not
| available" until you refresh several times)
| ulrischa wrote:
| As he said for me the diversivication of social networks is also
| really too much. Where should I read? Where should I post? Also
| WhatsApp started Channels now ... and so on. There will be a
| critical mass for the splitting then it will roll backwards (to
| what ever social network that evolved). Because without many
| people in one network it is not working and ads do not reach
| enough people.
| seydor wrote:
| That s good to hear. The internet was built as a decentralized
| thing, not the centralized firehoses of social media. We are
| not meant to discover all of it, and it is meant to be vast,
| just like the real world.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > I first started using social media (in some form) in the late
| 1980's with Usenet.
|
| I wonder what the definition of social media is which includes
| Usenet, but not email or BBSs, which presumably Fowler used to
| some extent as well. To me, social media by definition has some
| level of participation by users who are not posters or responders
| --i.e. an upvoting mechanism, a sharing mechanism, or an
| algorithm based on usage--which changes the prominence of the
| content in some way. Maybe that's just the definition I've
| cobbled together in my head.
| wnevets wrote:
| Martin is forgetting that by next year twitter will not just be a
| social media website. Twitter will be the everything app, it will
| do banking, dating and everything else you can think of! Buy a
| blue checkmark now to get on the ground floor!
| seydor wrote:
| banking and having followers is a deadly combination though.
| Imagine Buterin impersonators, with real payment buttons.
| "Everything app" goes well with a chat app
| manicennui wrote:
| Hilarious.
| adverbly wrote:
| > avoid any feed that involves the platform trying to figure out
| what I might like. Instead I pick selected feeds to follow and
| organize them into a handful of lists to read according to my
| current context.
|
| This is such a great litmus test for responsible internet use.
| Who picks the content? Is it you? Is it curated by one
| individual? Is it determined by a voting system? Is it determined
| by an engagement algorithm? Is it determined by a content
| corporation?
|
| Realistically, the healthiest way to consume content would
| probably be to feed it to yourself. And the unhealthiest diet
| would involve being fed by engagement algorithms.
|
| I might start thinking about more things this way.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| "Social media" as a concept is pretty much dead. Nobody is
| posting life updates on Facebook. People still post, but it's
| mostly memes and mini-blog-posts ("how about them Eagles?").
| Instagram likewise is 50% memes and reposts.
|
| The internet today is like one big web forum, we all use our real
| names, but nobody knows us.
| davidw wrote:
| I've pretty much landed on Threads. It's not as good as Twitter,
| but after some of the really awful things the owner of X said, I
| just can't anymore. I'd rather be on an inferior platform that's
| growing than see some of the garbage on X at this point.
| nunez wrote:
| It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or
| site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible.
|
| I miss quite a few things about the Old Internet, and one of them
| is how easy Pidgin, Trillian, and the like made talking to people
| on Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, or whatever. I
| think I even used a social media aggregator at one point so I
| could stay current on Facebook and Twitter at the same time.
|
| I don't think that's possible anymore. Talking to people cross-
| platform is definitely not possible without something like Beeper
| (which is buggy, but not because of Beeper)
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