"Sure it basically created cancel culture and fomented the social unrest of the last ten years, but you got to share your shower thoughts and talk to celebrities"
I think your nostalgia for this horrible platform which brought out (or created!) the worst traits of humanity is bordering on ridiculous. Twitter was an insanely negative force for western civilization for reasons you cite, but seem to shrug off.
Fair, but you have to admit your tone in the piece above is pretty wistful for the good:
"But for all its chaotic influence, Twitter was an indispensable tool"
You structure this piece so that the throat-clearing is the bad stuff about Twitter, and then the oration is the good stuff. I feel it should be the other way around. There's a huge rhetorical difference between
"Franco may have overthrown democracy in Spain, summarily executed hundreds, and ruled as an autocrat for 30 years but he kept Communism out and presided over a growth economy." and the same sentence in reverse, right?
I'm in strong agreement with James, at least in terms of Twitter's impact on political discourse. While the changes to the algorithm under Musk have certainly made Twitter even worse, the main harms that emerged from Twitter were always a function of its core structure: the combination of short posts, the endless fragmentation of its threading model, and options for anonymity are almost the perfect formula for driving tribalism, polarization, and incivility. It's why the Twitter clones like BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, etc. are doomed to be as harmful as Twitter. That model inevitably bring out the worst in us.
While I think he gets some things wrong, Henry Farrell has a great post about social media here (https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis), where he equates Twitter to porn. And I think that is the right analogy. Twitter style social media is to political discourse as porn as to sex. While it can be fun as an occasional, guilty pleasure, it's fundamentally something completely different and it degrades the real thing the more it becomes a substitute.
For that reason, I really hope Substack doesn't tilt too far towards Notes, which while useful for discovery can also sometimes make Substack more like Twitter in all the worst ways.
I hope instead Substack leans in the other direction and puts muscle into building better and healthier content sections and a richer Substack community overall. I think there are a number of steps that Substack could take to make that happen, which would help make it an even better alternative to the "traditional" social media ecosystem of Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.
Absolutely. It has always been the worst, and is directly and specifically responsible for so much social and psychological dysfunction we've seen the past decade.
I think Substack Notes has replaced X as the most high-brow social media platform out there.
On Substack, the incentives between the writers and readers are aligned. There’s no ad-driven revenue model aiming to maximize attention. Creators are there to be insightful, and readers are there to consume intentionally. It’s a rare place of peace on an internet that’s drowning in chaos.
X is still where the most important discourse happens - by nature of its scale, cultural importance, and the fact that it’s where the most successful and influential people are - but in terms of pure signal/noise ratio, Substack Notes is now on top.
Underlying the post is the idea that what is happening "right now" is critical. For a tsunami or tornado about to arrive "right now" matters. For policy a thoughtful consideration over weeks or months (and yes Noah I'm thinking of you - years) is what should matter. So much news is "breaking" for example the San Diego plane crash. Unless one lived in the neighborhood or knew the people involved, the important questions are why did this happen and what can be done to prevent this in the future (or in the case of something good, how can we make this happen more often). Getting preliminary answers to these questions a week or two after the event is fine, and getting hopefully durable and correct answers after a few months is sufficient.
Yes all of this can be like watching paint dry, but we do need to let the paint dry before we sit on the bench. So I'm in the camp of better to read a summary of the event a week or two after it happens, even better to read an article which reflects months of consideration and still better to read a book which provides larger context. In terms of showing the "rest of the iceberg" in these posts, consider expanding your endnotes to include "Notes for further reading" with links to deepen the discussion. Now we just need to convince more people to read books .....
I wonder how much of the decline of Twitter can be attributed to The Algorithms breaking our insatiable need for "the latest news"? What I mean is, when I'm on Tiktok or whatever it has no problem showing me things that are days or weeks old. And I mostly don't know or care, since it is "new to me".
Just last night my wife told me she had just seen a news story about some kid who accidentally rubbed laundry detergent in her eyes and almost went blind from it. (Apparently it is so concentrated nowadays that if you get any in your eyes you're supposed to immediately drive to an emergency room.) Anyway, turns out it was a 7 month old news story that had just popped up on her FYP for whatever reason.
So it feels like what counts as "news" has been subtly redefined by the abandonment of chronological timelines.
I can’t see Substack fully replace Twitter (although agreed it can in part). While I love substack, I think it’s fundamentally designed more as a long-form blogger platform. There is also a growing issue of having to subscribe separately to your favorite writers (with increasing costs) that will need to be addressed.
Reddit to me seems like the only viable alternative that has a chance. I learn more from my selective subreddits than anywhere else. I also find the quality of conversation much higher there than elsewhere (other than substack). They’ll need a way to better incentivize breaking news, but I could see a path
Twitter was an absolute godsend during the 3/11 Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan. But I stopped using it after Musk took over, and like you, haven't looked back. And I agree that none of the replacements will ever rise to its prominence: after switching to a newsletter, posting on any short-form social media service feels a lot like corporate welfare, volunteer work to keep someone else's business running. The only reason I haven't deactivated my account altogether is that Japanese-language users seem active as ever, particularly in the pop-culture sphere. It'd be interesting to explore why that is, and how things have (or have not) changed in that space.
The decline of Twitter sounds like the story of every trendy bar/restaurant in America. The young people make something cool, it gets discovered by the older crowd that think they are still cool (but aren’t), some changes get made to appease that older crowd and the younger crowd leaves. Eventually all you have left is the angry and less fun older crowd (that would be me and my friends) and the young people say “this place is starting to suck” so they find someplace else.
Every social gathering place has this lifecycle. I am hoping that bookstore/bars are the next trendy thing that takes off because people actually sit next to people.
I sure hope Substack doesn't pivot into leading in up to the minute coverage. Up to the minute coverage is inherently confusing and unreliable. People should learn to focus on real analysis once things have settled down. The way you stand out is in providing real insight. No shortcut or gimmick to making that happen.
But even then, don’t the people who do the real analysis need a way to get the up-to-the-minute stuff, or at least primary sources they can look at to piece stuff together?
Fair enough but it should have a self-aware bent to being preliminary, like it should be trying to steer anyone reading it to sign up for reading a follow-up story which summarizes everything more coherently once the dust has settled.
Glad I wasn't sipping my coffee when I read "The vice presidency is the Intercontinental title of American politics." The Triad is always the best read of the day.
I’ve paused to answer for you and your marketing guru the burning question, Why Do I Read Noah? Below is not a complete list. It is my top-of-mind response in early a.m. after first coffee, and after having just read your latest on Twitter/Substack. (You wrote beautifully and accurately about what Twitter used to be and I miss it so much!)
1. You are thee most natural writer I’ve ever read. Period. It is a super power. I’m a good test because I’m completely dumb about economics (tho less dumb thx to you) and I don’t THINK I care about economics at all. Yet time and time again, you make me read large quantities of words primarily about economics. And I enjoy and learn from them. But… I’m only enticed in the first place because I like you so much. I want to know what you think. Like a friend at a party or on a long walk on a pleasant day. You always relate annoying econ factoids to real life and things I do care about and then I see and understand. You do this naturally, not like someone searching for clever metaphors. And I believe it’s because you live a real life and care about humanity, and your writing shows how YOU process & integrate intellectual data in your real life.
2. Bunny rabbits.
4. You have a real talent for writing headlines and leads. Again, natural and relatable. They always stimulate my curiosity, catching my eye amidst soooo many emails and notifications.
5. Your chats here on Substack are delightful. I get to see your infectious smile, meet your interesting guests and get interested in subjects I’d never think about otherwise. Just because I enjoy hearing smart, nice people talk about anything and watching how they think while it’s happening. Great line today — ‘like building with cheap cement.’ I told my architect husband, who also reads every line in books and not incidentally, builds really good buildings.
Excellent analysis, now do the dumpster fire that is Reddit next. 😄 so many toxic dynamics there that are largely enabled and inflamed by its unique upvote/downvote system and power hungry moderation that has no oversight
Twitter has really deteriorated since Musk took over, no doubt about it. Right now it's terrible because I just see the same people over and over. I check my profile to look up others and they are tweeting away but I never see them unless I go look for them. Musk rewards those who pay and is doing something with the algo that is making it boring. I'm on less and less.
My experience of X for breaking news is that it's useful for some fast-developing news stories that are less controversial. But for anything remotely contentious, it has become pointless. I found that it was a good resource to keep up with both the South Korean martial law crisis and the Syrian civil war endgame, as long as you were prepared to fact-check and cross-reference.
I put this down to neither of these being that contentious. There weren't too many people out there willing to go to bat for Yoon Suk Yeol or Bashar al-Assad. But for the India-Pakistan conflict it was next to useless and even counterproductive. It was just full of partisans for either side flooding the zone with their (mostly contrived) versions of events instead of what was happening.
Maybe it's a good thing that 'breaking news' slows down somewhat. What difference does it make to me, or the world, if I learn about yet another horrific bombing or Trump drivel within minutes or tomorrow? Rapidity of the news feed does not equate to intelligent policy analysis or wise decisions.
"Sure it basically created cancel culture and fomented the social unrest of the last ten years, but you got to share your shower thoughts and talk to celebrities"
I think your nostalgia for this horrible platform which brought out (or created!) the worst traits of humanity is bordering on ridiculous. Twitter was an insanely negative force for western civilization for reasons you cite, but seem to shrug off.
To be clear, after 2014 or so I thought Twitter was a net negative for humanity, and wrote that many times!
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-shouting-class
Fair, but you have to admit your tone in the piece above is pretty wistful for the good:
"But for all its chaotic influence, Twitter was an indispensable tool"
You structure this piece so that the throat-clearing is the bad stuff about Twitter, and then the oration is the good stuff. I feel it should be the other way around. There's a huge rhetorical difference between
"Franco may have overthrown democracy in Spain, summarily executed hundreds, and ruled as an autocrat for 30 years but he kept Communism out and presided over a growth economy." and the same sentence in reverse, right?
Seriously. I fear that as we move further into the 2020s and beyond, we memory-hole all the awfulness of Peak Twitter.
It gave us Trump twice for God's sake!
I'm in strong agreement with James, at least in terms of Twitter's impact on political discourse. While the changes to the algorithm under Musk have certainly made Twitter even worse, the main harms that emerged from Twitter were always a function of its core structure: the combination of short posts, the endless fragmentation of its threading model, and options for anonymity are almost the perfect formula for driving tribalism, polarization, and incivility. It's why the Twitter clones like BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, etc. are doomed to be as harmful as Twitter. That model inevitably bring out the worst in us.
While I think he gets some things wrong, Henry Farrell has a great post about social media here (https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis), where he equates Twitter to porn. And I think that is the right analogy. Twitter style social media is to political discourse as porn as to sex. While it can be fun as an occasional, guilty pleasure, it's fundamentally something completely different and it degrades the real thing the more it becomes a substitute.
For that reason, I really hope Substack doesn't tilt too far towards Notes, which while useful for discovery can also sometimes make Substack more like Twitter in all the worst ways.
I hope instead Substack leans in the other direction and puts muscle into building better and healthier content sections and a richer Substack community overall. I think there are a number of steps that Substack could take to make that happen, which would help make it an even better alternative to the "traditional" social media ecosystem of Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.
Absolutely. It has always been the worst, and is directly and specifically responsible for so much social and psychological dysfunction we've seen the past decade.
This particular sentence reads as very tongue in cheek, borderline sarcastic. Not sure what makes you think this is an endorsement.
I think Substack Notes has replaced X as the most high-brow social media platform out there.
On Substack, the incentives between the writers and readers are aligned. There’s no ad-driven revenue model aiming to maximize attention. Creators are there to be insightful, and readers are there to consume intentionally. It’s a rare place of peace on an internet that’s drowning in chaos.
X is still where the most important discourse happens - by nature of its scale, cultural importance, and the fact that it’s where the most successful and influential people are - but in terms of pure signal/noise ratio, Substack Notes is now on top.
Underlying the post is the idea that what is happening "right now" is critical. For a tsunami or tornado about to arrive "right now" matters. For policy a thoughtful consideration over weeks or months (and yes Noah I'm thinking of you - years) is what should matter. So much news is "breaking" for example the San Diego plane crash. Unless one lived in the neighborhood or knew the people involved, the important questions are why did this happen and what can be done to prevent this in the future (or in the case of something good, how can we make this happen more often). Getting preliminary answers to these questions a week or two after the event is fine, and getting hopefully durable and correct answers after a few months is sufficient.
Yes all of this can be like watching paint dry, but we do need to let the paint dry before we sit on the bench. So I'm in the camp of better to read a summary of the event a week or two after it happens, even better to read an article which reflects months of consideration and still better to read a book which provides larger context. In terms of showing the "rest of the iceberg" in these posts, consider expanding your endnotes to include "Notes for further reading" with links to deepen the discussion. Now we just need to convince more people to read books .....
I wonder how much of the decline of Twitter can be attributed to The Algorithms breaking our insatiable need for "the latest news"? What I mean is, when I'm on Tiktok or whatever it has no problem showing me things that are days or weeks old. And I mostly don't know or care, since it is "new to me".
Just last night my wife told me she had just seen a news story about some kid who accidentally rubbed laundry detergent in her eyes and almost went blind from it. (Apparently it is so concentrated nowadays that if you get any in your eyes you're supposed to immediately drive to an emergency room.) Anyway, turns out it was a 7 month old news story that had just popped up on her FYP for whatever reason.
So it feels like what counts as "news" has been subtly redefined by the abandonment of chronological timelines.
That's an interesting point!
I can’t see Substack fully replace Twitter (although agreed it can in part). While I love substack, I think it’s fundamentally designed more as a long-form blogger platform. There is also a growing issue of having to subscribe separately to your favorite writers (with increasing costs) that will need to be addressed.
Reddit to me seems like the only viable alternative that has a chance. I learn more from my selective subreddits than anywhere else. I also find the quality of conversation much higher there than elsewhere (other than substack). They’ll need a way to better incentivize breaking news, but I could see a path
Twitter was an absolute godsend during the 3/11 Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan. But I stopped using it after Musk took over, and like you, haven't looked back. And I agree that none of the replacements will ever rise to its prominence: after switching to a newsletter, posting on any short-form social media service feels a lot like corporate welfare, volunteer work to keep someone else's business running. The only reason I haven't deactivated my account altogether is that Japanese-language users seem active as ever, particularly in the pop-culture sphere. It'd be interesting to explore why that is, and how things have (or have not) changed in that space.
The decline of Twitter sounds like the story of every trendy bar/restaurant in America. The young people make something cool, it gets discovered by the older crowd that think they are still cool (but aren’t), some changes get made to appease that older crowd and the younger crowd leaves. Eventually all you have left is the angry and less fun older crowd (that would be me and my friends) and the young people say “this place is starting to suck” so they find someplace else.
Every social gathering place has this lifecycle. I am hoping that bookstore/bars are the next trendy thing that takes off because people actually sit next to people.
I sure hope Substack doesn't pivot into leading in up to the minute coverage. Up to the minute coverage is inherently confusing and unreliable. People should learn to focus on real analysis once things have settled down. The way you stand out is in providing real insight. No shortcut or gimmick to making that happen.
But even then, don’t the people who do the real analysis need a way to get the up-to-the-minute stuff, or at least primary sources they can look at to piece stuff together?
Fair enough but it should have a self-aware bent to being preliminary, like it should be trying to steer anyone reading it to sign up for reading a follow-up story which summarizes everything more coherently once the dust has settled.
Glad I wasn't sipping my coffee when I read "The vice presidency is the Intercontinental title of American politics." The Triad is always the best read of the day.
I’ve paused to answer for you and your marketing guru the burning question, Why Do I Read Noah? Below is not a complete list. It is my top-of-mind response in early a.m. after first coffee, and after having just read your latest on Twitter/Substack. (You wrote beautifully and accurately about what Twitter used to be and I miss it so much!)
1. You are thee most natural writer I’ve ever read. Period. It is a super power. I’m a good test because I’m completely dumb about economics (tho less dumb thx to you) and I don’t THINK I care about economics at all. Yet time and time again, you make me read large quantities of words primarily about economics. And I enjoy and learn from them. But… I’m only enticed in the first place because I like you so much. I want to know what you think. Like a friend at a party or on a long walk on a pleasant day. You always relate annoying econ factoids to real life and things I do care about and then I see and understand. You do this naturally, not like someone searching for clever metaphors. And I believe it’s because you live a real life and care about humanity, and your writing shows how YOU process & integrate intellectual data in your real life.
2. Bunny rabbits.
4. You have a real talent for writing headlines and leads. Again, natural and relatable. They always stimulate my curiosity, catching my eye amidst soooo many emails and notifications.
5. Your chats here on Substack are delightful. I get to see your infectious smile, meet your interesting guests and get interested in subjects I’d never think about otherwise. Just because I enjoy hearing smart, nice people talk about anything and watching how they think while it’s happening. Great line today — ‘like building with cheap cement.’ I told my architect husband, who also reads every line in books and not incidentally, builds really good buildings.
To be continued…
Wow, thank you!
Can we get more cute bunny pictures once in a while?
🐰
If you like Noah Smith, you might also like Scott Alexander, formerly of Slate Star Codex and currently blogging at https://www.astralcodexten.com/ .
I agree with point #3.
oops, I misnumbered. I could insert for #3: you’re one of two writers who makes me understand an occasional chart or graph. JVL is the other one.
Excellent analysis, now do the dumpster fire that is Reddit next. 😄 so many toxic dynamics there that are largely enabled and inflamed by its unique upvote/downvote system and power hungry moderation that has no oversight
Twitter has really deteriorated since Musk took over, no doubt about it. Right now it's terrible because I just see the same people over and over. I check my profile to look up others and they are tweeting away but I never see them unless I go look for them. Musk rewards those who pay and is doing something with the algo that is making it boring. I'm on less and less.
Noah: Twitter is awful and no one uses it now
Also Noah: creates another post analyzing the tweets of the worst people on Twitter.
The Twitter oriented posts are always my least favorite. Hopefully those become fewer and further between as Noah uses Twitter less.
It's not that no one uses Twitter now, but that a lot *fewer* people use it than before.
My experience of X for breaking news is that it's useful for some fast-developing news stories that are less controversial. But for anything remotely contentious, it has become pointless. I found that it was a good resource to keep up with both the South Korean martial law crisis and the Syrian civil war endgame, as long as you were prepared to fact-check and cross-reference.
I put this down to neither of these being that contentious. There weren't too many people out there willing to go to bat for Yoon Suk Yeol or Bashar al-Assad. But for the India-Pakistan conflict it was next to useless and even counterproductive. It was just full of partisans for either side flooding the zone with their (mostly contrived) versions of events instead of what was happening.
Maybe it's a good thing that 'breaking news' slows down somewhat. What difference does it make to me, or the world, if I learn about yet another horrific bombing or Trump drivel within minutes or tomorrow? Rapidity of the news feed does not equate to intelligent policy analysis or wise decisions.
No