this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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@Greenpepper I actually appreciate how Musk ruined Twitter. I was never fan of that service anyway. That means alternatives have a chance to grow. :-) Thank you Elon.
If you removed the noise from the signal , the signal was very good. When twitter first started there was a great talk about finding survivors and infornation in an earthquake. it was a great tool for crowdsourcing event ands info. It later gave people closer access to companies and people. But, i do agree, there was a lot of noise. i hope the signal finds home on the fediverse with mastadon or whatever.
The problem was, and is, that Twitter was always a private for-profit company whose business model was tracking users and mining their private data. Yes, it could do good things, and in the hands of some of those opressive regimes it could do some bad things and in between it was built to do some skeezy things because that was how they attracted the venture capital.
Not to mention it was never innovative in what it was offering, there were and are many different avenues to connect people (that is the fundamental feature of the internet) it just created a platform that became popular for various reasons. Earthquake victims and rescuers, anti-government protestors and so on could always use Signal or another app for talking to each other - and should.
One of the real impacts of the cancer of Twitter came when journalists reached a critical mass and decided if something was tweeted about it counted as a primary source and they could write an article about it without having to get out of their chair. It was always lazy journalism and often totally irresponsible journalism and it's no coincidence that the apex of Twitter journalism was the rise of an orange demented sociopathic rapist. All of which was part of the promise of a service that sold views and news by secret algorithm and cash.
Twitter’s effect on politics at least in the UK has been pretty negative in my opinion, it drives journalists towards short-form hot takes rather than journalism.
Right. "Bumper sticker politics"
I've heard very few good ideas which can fit into 160 characters.
Advertisement has ruined journalism. Click-bait and light weight articles that lure people in to see as many ads as they can possibly cram between the lines and around the article, before they sell your reading patterns and digital fingerprint to the highest bidder.
Put words like Elon or Tesla in a headline and you get more clicks than if you didn’t. Bait the headline so people get curious and click in.
Make sure that you fill the top half of the page with generic text and copy-pasta so that you can show a few more ads before you actually come to the point of the article.
Use some AI to generate extra fluffiness or automate writing of sports and finance articles.
Social media certainly didn’t help, but when almost every news outlet wants to participate in the race to the bottom - a race to the bottom it is.
IMO the only way to fix it is a Time Machine. Every news paper linked here, or elsewhere, think they can sell me a subscription just because I followed a link or two. I live in Norway, I’m not going to subscribe to the New York Times just because they had an article I actually wanted to read.
It might not be perfect, but we need a system where journalists and media can be paid for creating quality content that people consume.
Not influencers who knows how to optimize the length of their YouTube videos to maximize income and minimize content.
Real deep journalism is dying. It’s a shame.
Interacting with someone famous was very cool. Asking a musician what something means and getting a reply and then a little back and forth.... Twitter was an amazing thing for awhile.