As someone who has been wanting to return to the old world of privately hosted forums and the blogosphere, much of this hits home and strikes me as insightful, and I'd like to be as optimistic as you are. A few things:
"This effectively led to a social revolution throughout American society. Before social media, society consisted of a collection of more-or-less closed hierarchical organizations — companies, universities, government agencies, churches, professional organizations, and so on. If you had a problem with the way your boss ran things, who would you complain to?"
Your union? If in the US, OSHA? The whole point of post-WWII social democracy was to make it easier to escape unjust demands placed on individuals and families on the part of ossified hierarchies. This is another case of Silicon Valley pretending to have invented the kind of institution present since an older time in human history under the pretext of (at best) scaling it and making it more convenient.
Number two - I find it hard to believe that journalism's dependence on Twitter is a consequence of Twitter's unique effectiveness as much as it is on the fact that (again, at least in the US) journalism in all but the biggest US cities has been torn to shreds over the past two decades. In many rural areas and smaller cities there is effectively no journalism - it is no longer profitable, now that the important news is in important places. Even at bigger papers, why pay journalists to do hard investigative work locally when they can report on internecine Twitter beefs (if the same isn't sourced from WaPo, NYT, AP, etc.) and get just as many clicks? A return to journalism that serves every community at scale would require a model where that kind of journalism is profitable, and I'm not so sure it exists.
"There’s a great unknown world out there again, shrouded in mists, beckoning just over the horizon, filled with strange new subcultures to explore, strange new ideas to understand, strange new people to meet and befriend. We stumble out into the light, and our feet touch grass."
I grew up with techno-utopianism. My parents (who were yuppies with disposable income) bought a home computer in the late 80s before anyone though there was anything useful associated with it. I learned MS-DOS and Netscape from my dad when I was four. And it's definitely true that a fragmented internet could return some of the wonder and discovery that the older internet provided in the 90s and 00s, especially to people in stagnant, conservative communities.
The problem I see is that the internet as it is organized today, with cheap cloud storage and easy access through smartphones at all times, just seems to scale. Twitter may fragment in 2023, but I see no reason why Threads or another app wouldn't replace it given that the only reason that it did is the fecklessness and foolishness of new management.
My uncle has been sober and active in AA for about two decades, and he's always said that alcohol is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. I feel the same way about the internet. You yourself said during the pandemic - "the internet used to be an escape from real life - now real life is an escape from the internet". This relation in journalism has to be reversed.
If you're craving that return I'd highly recommend Mastodon, especially around topics that aren't politics.
I sort of started looking at the fediverse options at the beginning of Summer and one of the things I've noticed is that it has the kind of minimum technical understanding gate that kept blogs feeling pretty good.
It's easier than running a blog was (I ran a travel blog for like six years.). But it's got a sort of small set of gatekeeping factors that do at least keep it to a nerdy-normie quality. It's also kind of engineered in a way to make hate reading and mobbing hard (No Quote Tweets and most instances don't have plain old search relying on tags).
Maybe this is just that I'm making better decisions about what to use a social network for but I get rather good engagement posting about Vegan cooking, Running, Steam deck roleplaying games and pop music.
To your point - one thing I think is interesting is that when Web 1.0 was a thing, a lot of healthy (by today's standards) political discussion happened on the off-topic subforums of websites oriented around a completely different topic or topics. There was a humanization factor present - civility is much easier when you remember that your discussion opponent is also a Denver Broncos fan / Volkswagen enthusiast / vegan chef and therefore a human like you instead of a pseudonymous vessel of the politics you despise. (One of the largest general forums of the 00s that was responsible for much of the culture of early Twitter and which I have been a member of for about 15 years began as a Quake fansite).
One of the unquestioned tenets of 90s techno-utopianism was that communication and connection were intrinsically good things. That ties back to the fact that human beings capital-l Love to express and assert themselves. I remember how exciting I thought it was when one of my neighbors growing up had a letter published in National Geographic (RIP). And what is writing a letter to an editor but analogue posting?
Healthy communication involves nuance, tact, and attention to the other, all of which are to a point incompatible with self-expression and all of which fall away when people are connected and invited to communicate with each other for no reason, as in post-algorithm social media.
The tankies didn't have a lot of political power on their own, but their professional ranks of undeclared Russian agents and sex criminals like Tabbi/Ritter/Maté did have some people I know convinced they were real reputable journalists.
But having an actual war on in Europe exposes their awful foreign policy, especially since Russia is the instigator and "anti-imperialism" was always basically half Soviet propaganda. So now I don't think anyone believes them much anymore.
A funny incident happened recently where Slava Malamud (a Jewish ex-Russian sports journalist born in Transnistria USSR) tweeted a disparaging thread about Soviet ice cream and hundreds of tankies descended on him to scream at him in case he was a CIA plant. The odd part is they all decided he was American on no evidence, then the next time he spoke Russian they declared he was faking it. After about a week they retreated though.
A lot of them seemed to be Western European for whatever reason, although I've noticed there's a lot of uniquely repellent and constantly rude leftists who all live in Brooklyn. Maybe it's the cocaine?
There is and always has been an audience for different flavors of Anti-Americanism in Western Europe for very understandable reasons: 1/ The US as the longtime hegemon can often act in an imperious/fair-weather manner toward its (junior) "European partners" 2/ The US (at least since the late 1970s) has been the fount of the Neoliberal revolution which is greeted with much ambivalence among Leftists and Social Democrats in Europe, flavoring everything American with a politically-regressive tinge 3/ European pacifism can often transition seamlessly into Useful Idiocy with regards to something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, wherein many European are both painfully aware of their proximity to the front lines and any (potentially thermonuclear) expansion of the conflict and would prefer to retreat into geopolitical Realism and Isolationism as a (misguided) method of appeasing Russia and stopping the hot wars.
You can therefore understand where a young European Leftist can become a tankie as a protest against the less welcome influences of the United States on world affairs, while still seeing very clearly how misguided and blinkered it is to default to any such thought-annihilating stereotypes. The world is much more complicated than allowing for only one, single Bad Guy.
Your argument is correct and I can see the effects almost immediately. People are with their peeps. They've given themselves over to algorithm. History tells us we will fragment into coteries. I've gone further in my predictions though -- I think fewer people will be on social media altogether. I spent a week with extended family from all over the US and nobody over 30 is online anymore. Small n but interesting to me. If you don't feel like you *have* to be on Twitter any more and the kids are all TikToking why be anywhere? Note I'm commenting here, not posting on Twitter.
I wonder what will replace the sports part of Twitter. It used to be great for following live sports events and interacting with other fans in real time as a game was taking place. NBA Twitter was a real thing, for example.
You make a lot of good points, I agree with all of them in fact. Well done and thorough. One thing not mentioned that I am concerned about is that I feel like the downside to fragmentation is that people will be even more in their own echo chambers. Twitter is the one place where I see people who disagree with each other really interacting. That doesn't happen on facebook any more, it used to. One thing I like about twitter is that I can follow people I really don't agree with at all and see what they are saying, and watch how they respond to criticism. Right now it feels like people are getting more and more into their own walled off spaces, and the news media is getting that way more as well. Watch Fox vs NBC or even CNN and you are in different realities. Not good.
I've wondered about this. Seems like the Fairness Doctrine worked in an era with very limited media exposure channels, and required broad "Good Faith" agreement around the bounds of reasonable discussion, as well as relatively serious people. In today's culture where maximum outrageousness stirring up predictable outrage responses gets the most clicks and the most profit, I think it might make things worse. Imagine if every story around Juneteenth, MLK Day, and all sorts of relatively settled events the majority of mainstream Americans agree on are subjected to the most offensive "counter" viewpoints (think pro-slavery, pro- N Word, pro lynching, pro-segragation and eugenics) required to be given time and oxygen due to the "Fairness Doctrine II". Our First Amendment protects almost all really reprehensible viewpoints and speech short of violence, so I think our courts would not allow the Government much flexibility to apply the "Fairness Doctrine" to exclude horrifically toxic views that 90%+ of people don't want to see, and all mainstream broadcasts could be vulnerable to co-option by extremist trolls enjoying their new powers to disrupt civil society under a combination of 1st amendment+Fairness Doctrine. It could turn every forum into a Parler clone.
As structured today, these are too toxic for the mainstream. But we should probably have a better dialogue for covering such issues. N-word and lynching could stay too toxic, but eugenics and segregation are real enough that we should have a way to talk about them without launching into ballistic emotionalism.
I'm more afraid of censorship than I am of nasty trolls, which are going to be around in any case. The idea of fighting lies with more speech and not censorship has worked and we should not abandon it.
it's a good question, some form of it might be good if it can be made workable. I guess if we are going to be at each others throats we will no matter what. It is also the attitude of the average consumer of media that is a problem here too. It's like we are going through a big crisis, I don't think it is going to stop no matter what.
Twitter is not as horrible to me as it is to some, yes there is a lot of nastiness but that is not most of my experience. It's a huge exchange of ideas, and a lot of silliness of the day like the stuff going on about Jonah Hill right now.
I think the people who want to leave tend to be liberal and don't like Musk's acceptance of some conservative views. That rarely gets mentioned. But there are just as many whack liberals on there as conservatives. I just put up with it all because I want to hear what people think.
I think it’s useful to distinguish a “filter bubble” (where all you see is people who share your broad viewpoint) and an “echo chamber” (where you and your allies regularly see the opposite side and ridicule them and learn to ignore their arguments). Twitter is the natural home of echo chambers in this sense, while the fragmented media creates filter bubbles, which are relatively easy to pop.
Twitter’s magnetic pre-fragmentation Netflix moment had one huge upside:
The opportunity to learn something valuable, useful or interesting from anyone and everyone including the top experts in their field (who would respond to you!). This was information and interaction you weren’t necessarily seeking out but enriched you just the same if not more. Now unless you’re willing to recreate the aggregation by joining and follow multiple services (which I’m not) that incredible time has passed. That’s the sad part.
yes, who would have imagined I would be in a direct conversation with you, for instance? I read your blog for years back when but twitter makes it so you can actually talk to all these people out there who are thought leaders that you would never otherwise talk to. That is one thing I love about twitter.
I’m sorry Noah but Prighozin and Silicon Valley bank were real news stories, some bet between 2 irrelevant ppl who would be completely unknown if it wasn’t for Twitter and are unknown to anyone who doesn’t use the site, in fact not just the site but that very specific corner of the site, is not news and only because Twitter exists can someone who is otherwise as smart as you usually are consider it to be news, if the death of Twitter is gonna cause journalists to stop treating things like that as if they matter then it can’t come soon enough
A perfect illustration it is. I ignored the Balaji/Medlock part while reading the essay because it was new to me and didn't arouse my interest, but when I read Lee's comment I had to go back and read up on it. I regret the effort I made and I want that time back.
Two things that I appreciated on twitter: (a) being able to follow govt agencies (weather service, fire alerts, etc.) and (b) being able to discover interesting and thoughtful people (like you). It seems like (a) can survive the loss of twitter if the relevant agencies post on all of the various social networks. But I fear we may lose (b) forever, because experts in different disciplines will end up on different platforms.
I think this moment of platform fragmentation is genuinely interesting. I fear that this moment of fragmentation where Twitter's flailing and Reddit is too and I'm having a lot of fun on Mastodon and getting quite a bit of positive social interactions is just a security through obscurity.
Once Threads opens their activity pub integration I fear we will have just reconstituted like 2012 Facebook on Threads and tied the whole Fediverse to that ship anchor. It seems to me the thing that made old social platforms so enjoyable was that they really weren't for everyone. They were for a kind of nerdy person and Mastodon still is that. Like the number of people who follow me who are computer engineers or programmers really high.
I research social media, and I think that you are conflating social medias incredible ability to connect birds of a feather, which is a mixed blessing that doesn't depend on Twitter, with the monoculture created by Twitter's trending topics feed, which is a uniformly bad thing but risks being reproduced on Threads.
You spend a lot of your article explaining how bad it is that Twitter lets a bunch of chaotic randos organize into a mob to promote their ideas or cancel someone. But this isn't a twitter problem. Just a few years ago WhatsApp was used to organize Lynch mobs in India that actually killed people. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/09/whatsapp/571276/ . And this isn't about WhatsApp or twitter. Any social media platform can be used in the same way and will be.
I think this demonstrates that Twitter was not uniquely important in empowering people to listen to other people that they want it to hear. Any social media app does that. But the serious flaw in Twitter was that it forced people to listen to people. They didn't want to hear. The victims of cancel culture who were forced to see abuse piling up in their Twitter feed because Twitter gave them insufficient power to stop it. And I'm pretty sure that within a few months we're going to see exactly the same thing happening on Threads with exactly the same unpleasant consequences. Because people want that full connectivity. They don't want to be limited to their workplace hierarchies or whatever. And since they want it somebody is going to provide it. Social media will only be healthy when they
And I think the only way to avoid this unhappy cycle is for something like bluesky or Mastodon to succeed. Social media needs to be built on a protocol that lets anybody listen to anyone they want to without forcing them to listen to anyone they don't.
In fact, "cancel" has always existed - I grew up with it many years ago in Texas - the difference is that "everyone" knew the "unwritten" rules about what you could do or say or what you could even talk about... The other difference is that the power structure (Baptists and money in this case) was doing the cancelling, not randos fighting back... Social media just amplified the ugly part we have always had (back to witch hunts, etc). BUT as Noah noted, it also gave the "population" a chance to fight back against absurd hierarchies that have existed in the power structure for a long time..
Now, the real question is whether there is a way to balance the ability to talk back to power without turning it into lynch mobs (often not against power, but against other hapless souls - ex. the India example)
Great article. Community Notes predated Musk, and we can’t easily observe ways he likely bastardized it.
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-community-notes-rolling-out-globally-195650660.html
I can attest to the fact that that community notes was basically fully developed in its current state before Musk took over
Huh! Didn't know that!
As someone who has been wanting to return to the old world of privately hosted forums and the blogosphere, much of this hits home and strikes me as insightful, and I'd like to be as optimistic as you are. A few things:
"This effectively led to a social revolution throughout American society. Before social media, society consisted of a collection of more-or-less closed hierarchical organizations — companies, universities, government agencies, churches, professional organizations, and so on. If you had a problem with the way your boss ran things, who would you complain to?"
Your union? If in the US, OSHA? The whole point of post-WWII social democracy was to make it easier to escape unjust demands placed on individuals and families on the part of ossified hierarchies. This is another case of Silicon Valley pretending to have invented the kind of institution present since an older time in human history under the pretext of (at best) scaling it and making it more convenient.
Number two - I find it hard to believe that journalism's dependence on Twitter is a consequence of Twitter's unique effectiveness as much as it is on the fact that (again, at least in the US) journalism in all but the biggest US cities has been torn to shreds over the past two decades. In many rural areas and smaller cities there is effectively no journalism - it is no longer profitable, now that the important news is in important places. Even at bigger papers, why pay journalists to do hard investigative work locally when they can report on internecine Twitter beefs (if the same isn't sourced from WaPo, NYT, AP, etc.) and get just as many clicks? A return to journalism that serves every community at scale would require a model where that kind of journalism is profitable, and I'm not so sure it exists.
"There’s a great unknown world out there again, shrouded in mists, beckoning just over the horizon, filled with strange new subcultures to explore, strange new ideas to understand, strange new people to meet and befriend. We stumble out into the light, and our feet touch grass."
I grew up with techno-utopianism. My parents (who were yuppies with disposable income) bought a home computer in the late 80s before anyone though there was anything useful associated with it. I learned MS-DOS and Netscape from my dad when I was four. And it's definitely true that a fragmented internet could return some of the wonder and discovery that the older internet provided in the 90s and 00s, especially to people in stagnant, conservative communities.
The problem I see is that the internet as it is organized today, with cheap cloud storage and easy access through smartphones at all times, just seems to scale. Twitter may fragment in 2023, but I see no reason why Threads or another app wouldn't replace it given that the only reason that it did is the fecklessness and foolishness of new management.
My uncle has been sober and active in AA for about two decades, and he's always said that alcohol is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. I feel the same way about the internet. You yourself said during the pandemic - "the internet used to be an escape from real life - now real life is an escape from the internet". This relation in journalism has to be reversed.
If you're craving that return I'd highly recommend Mastodon, especially around topics that aren't politics.
I sort of started looking at the fediverse options at the beginning of Summer and one of the things I've noticed is that it has the kind of minimum technical understanding gate that kept blogs feeling pretty good.
It's easier than running a blog was (I ran a travel blog for like six years.). But it's got a sort of small set of gatekeeping factors that do at least keep it to a nerdy-normie quality. It's also kind of engineered in a way to make hate reading and mobbing hard (No Quote Tweets and most instances don't have plain old search relying on tags).
Maybe this is just that I'm making better decisions about what to use a social network for but I get rather good engagement posting about Vegan cooking, Running, Steam deck roleplaying games and pop music.
To your point - one thing I think is interesting is that when Web 1.0 was a thing, a lot of healthy (by today's standards) political discussion happened on the off-topic subforums of websites oriented around a completely different topic or topics. There was a humanization factor present - civility is much easier when you remember that your discussion opponent is also a Denver Broncos fan / Volkswagen enthusiast / vegan chef and therefore a human like you instead of a pseudonymous vessel of the politics you despise. (One of the largest general forums of the 00s that was responsible for much of the culture of early Twitter and which I have been a member of for about 15 years began as a Quake fansite).
One of the unquestioned tenets of 90s techno-utopianism was that communication and connection were intrinsically good things. That ties back to the fact that human beings capital-l Love to express and assert themselves. I remember how exciting I thought it was when one of my neighbors growing up had a letter published in National Geographic (RIP). And what is writing a letter to an editor but analogue posting?
Healthy communication involves nuance, tact, and attention to the other, all of which are to a point incompatible with self-expression and all of which fall away when people are connected and invited to communicate with each other for no reason, as in post-algorithm social media.
The tankies didn't have a lot of political power on their own, but their professional ranks of undeclared Russian agents and sex criminals like Tabbi/Ritter/Maté did have some people I know convinced they were real reputable journalists.
But having an actual war on in Europe exposes their awful foreign policy, especially since Russia is the instigator and "anti-imperialism" was always basically half Soviet propaganda. So now I don't think anyone believes them much anymore.
A funny incident happened recently where Slava Malamud (a Jewish ex-Russian sports journalist born in Transnistria USSR) tweeted a disparaging thread about Soviet ice cream and hundreds of tankies descended on him to scream at him in case he was a CIA plant. The odd part is they all decided he was American on no evidence, then the next time he spoke Russian they declared he was faking it. After about a week they retreated though.
A lot of them seemed to be Western European for whatever reason, although I've noticed there's a lot of uniquely repellent and constantly rude leftists who all live in Brooklyn. Maybe it's the cocaine?
There is and always has been an audience for different flavors of Anti-Americanism in Western Europe for very understandable reasons: 1/ The US as the longtime hegemon can often act in an imperious/fair-weather manner toward its (junior) "European partners" 2/ The US (at least since the late 1970s) has been the fount of the Neoliberal revolution which is greeted with much ambivalence among Leftists and Social Democrats in Europe, flavoring everything American with a politically-regressive tinge 3/ European pacifism can often transition seamlessly into Useful Idiocy with regards to something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, wherein many European are both painfully aware of their proximity to the front lines and any (potentially thermonuclear) expansion of the conflict and would prefer to retreat into geopolitical Realism and Isolationism as a (misguided) method of appeasing Russia and stopping the hot wars.
You can therefore understand where a young European Leftist can become a tankie as a protest against the less welcome influences of the United States on world affairs, while still seeing very clearly how misguided and blinkered it is to default to any such thought-annihilating stereotypes. The world is much more complicated than allowing for only one, single Bad Guy.
Your argument is correct and I can see the effects almost immediately. People are with their peeps. They've given themselves over to algorithm. History tells us we will fragment into coteries. I've gone further in my predictions though -- I think fewer people will be on social media altogether. I spent a week with extended family from all over the US and nobody over 30 is online anymore. Small n but interesting to me. If you don't feel like you *have* to be on Twitter any more and the kids are all TikToking why be anywhere? Note I'm commenting here, not posting on Twitter.
That's really interesting.
I wonder what will replace the sports part of Twitter. It used to be great for following live sports events and interacting with other fans in real time as a game was taking place. NBA Twitter was a real thing, for example.
You make a lot of good points, I agree with all of them in fact. Well done and thorough. One thing not mentioned that I am concerned about is that I feel like the downside to fragmentation is that people will be even more in their own echo chambers. Twitter is the one place where I see people who disagree with each other really interacting. That doesn't happen on facebook any more, it used to. One thing I like about twitter is that I can follow people I really don't agree with at all and see what they are saying, and watch how they respond to criticism. Right now it feels like people are getting more and more into their own walled off spaces, and the news media is getting that way more as well. Watch Fox vs NBC or even CNN and you are in different realities. Not good.
Should we bring back the Fairness Doctrine?
I've wondered about this. Seems like the Fairness Doctrine worked in an era with very limited media exposure channels, and required broad "Good Faith" agreement around the bounds of reasonable discussion, as well as relatively serious people. In today's culture where maximum outrageousness stirring up predictable outrage responses gets the most clicks and the most profit, I think it might make things worse. Imagine if every story around Juneteenth, MLK Day, and all sorts of relatively settled events the majority of mainstream Americans agree on are subjected to the most offensive "counter" viewpoints (think pro-slavery, pro- N Word, pro lynching, pro-segragation and eugenics) required to be given time and oxygen due to the "Fairness Doctrine II". Our First Amendment protects almost all really reprehensible viewpoints and speech short of violence, so I think our courts would not allow the Government much flexibility to apply the "Fairness Doctrine" to exclude horrifically toxic views that 90%+ of people don't want to see, and all mainstream broadcasts could be vulnerable to co-option by extremist trolls enjoying their new powers to disrupt civil society under a combination of 1st amendment+Fairness Doctrine. It could turn every forum into a Parler clone.
𝘐𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘧 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘑𝘶𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘩, 𝘔𝘓𝘒 𝘋𝘢𝘺, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘫𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘷𝘦 "𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳" 𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘴 (𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘱𝘳𝘰-𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺, 𝘱𝘳𝘰- 𝘕 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘥, 𝘱𝘳𝘰 𝘭𝘺𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘱𝘳𝘰-𝘴𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘶𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘴) 𝘳𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘹𝘺𝘨𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘶𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 "𝘍𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘋𝘰𝘤𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘐𝘐".
As structured today, these are too toxic for the mainstream. But we should probably have a better dialogue for covering such issues. N-word and lynching could stay too toxic, but eugenics and segregation are real enough that we should have a way to talk about them without launching into ballistic emotionalism.
I'm more afraid of censorship than I am of nasty trolls, which are going to be around in any case. The idea of fighting lies with more speech and not censorship has worked and we should not abandon it.
it's a good question, some form of it might be good if it can be made workable. I guess if we are going to be at each others throats we will no matter what. It is also the attitude of the average consumer of media that is a problem here too. It's like we are going through a big crisis, I don't think it is going to stop no matter what.
Twitter is not as horrible to me as it is to some, yes there is a lot of nastiness but that is not most of my experience. It's a huge exchange of ideas, and a lot of silliness of the day like the stuff going on about Jonah Hill right now.
I think the people who want to leave tend to be liberal and don't like Musk's acceptance of some conservative views. That rarely gets mentioned. But there are just as many whack liberals on there as conservatives. I just put up with it all because I want to hear what people think.
Yes!
I think it’s useful to distinguish a “filter bubble” (where all you see is people who share your broad viewpoint) and an “echo chamber” (where you and your allies regularly see the opposite side and ridicule them and learn to ignore their arguments). Twitter is the natural home of echo chambers in this sense, while the fragmented media creates filter bubbles, which are relatively easy to pop.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult
Fragmentation, as McLuhan liked to say, has “services (centripetal) and disservices (centrifugal)”
Twitter’s magnetic pre-fragmentation Netflix moment had one huge upside:
The opportunity to learn something valuable, useful or interesting from anyone and everyone including the top experts in their field (who would respond to you!). This was information and interaction you weren’t necessarily seeking out but enriched you just the same if not more. Now unless you’re willing to recreate the aggregation by joining and follow multiple services (which I’m not) that incredible time has passed. That’s the sad part.
Yeah.
yes, who would have imagined I would be in a direct conversation with you, for instance? I read your blog for years back when but twitter makes it so you can actually talk to all these people out there who are thought leaders that you would never otherwise talk to. That is one thing I love about twitter.
I’m sorry Noah but Prighozin and Silicon Valley bank were real news stories, some bet between 2 irrelevant ppl who would be completely unknown if it wasn’t for Twitter and are unknown to anyone who doesn’t use the site, in fact not just the site but that very specific corner of the site, is not news and only because Twitter exists can someone who is otherwise as smart as you usually are consider it to be news, if the death of Twitter is gonna cause journalists to stop treating things like that as if they matter then it can’t come soon enough
Yeah I thought it was very weird to link that bet to the two real news stories.
The point was to illustrate exactly what you guys have pointed out! ;-)
A perfect illustration it is. I ignored the Balaji/Medlock part while reading the essay because it was new to me and didn't arouse my interest, but when I read Lee's comment I had to go back and read up on it. I regret the effort I made and I want that time back.
"No matter where you are right now, there is stuff that’s happening somewhere else." In other words, FOMO will get you unless you let go.
This is a big change. At it's height, Twitter reinforced Damone's delusion in 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High': "Wherever I am, that's where it's at."
Two things that I appreciated on twitter: (a) being able to follow govt agencies (weather service, fire alerts, etc.) and (b) being able to discover interesting and thoughtful people (like you). It seems like (a) can survive the loss of twitter if the relevant agencies post on all of the various social networks. But I fear we may lose (b) forever, because experts in different disciplines will end up on different platforms.
I think this moment of platform fragmentation is genuinely interesting. I fear that this moment of fragmentation where Twitter's flailing and Reddit is too and I'm having a lot of fun on Mastodon and getting quite a bit of positive social interactions is just a security through obscurity.
Once Threads opens their activity pub integration I fear we will have just reconstituted like 2012 Facebook on Threads and tied the whole Fediverse to that ship anchor. It seems to me the thing that made old social platforms so enjoyable was that they really weren't for everyone. They were for a kind of nerdy person and Mastodon still is that. Like the number of people who follow me who are computer engineers or programmers really high.
I research social media, and I think that you are conflating social medias incredible ability to connect birds of a feather, which is a mixed blessing that doesn't depend on Twitter, with the monoculture created by Twitter's trending topics feed, which is a uniformly bad thing but risks being reproduced on Threads.
You spend a lot of your article explaining how bad it is that Twitter lets a bunch of chaotic randos organize into a mob to promote their ideas or cancel someone. But this isn't a twitter problem. Just a few years ago WhatsApp was used to organize Lynch mobs in India that actually killed people. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/09/whatsapp/571276/ . And this isn't about WhatsApp or twitter. Any social media platform can be used in the same way and will be.
I think this demonstrates that Twitter was not uniquely important in empowering people to listen to other people that they want it to hear. Any social media app does that. But the serious flaw in Twitter was that it forced people to listen to people. They didn't want to hear. The victims of cancel culture who were forced to see abuse piling up in their Twitter feed because Twitter gave them insufficient power to stop it. And I'm pretty sure that within a few months we're going to see exactly the same thing happening on Threads with exactly the same unpleasant consequences. Because people want that full connectivity. They don't want to be limited to their workplace hierarchies or whatever. And since they want it somebody is going to provide it. Social media will only be healthy when they
And I think the only way to avoid this unhappy cycle is for something like bluesky or Mastodon to succeed. Social media needs to be built on a protocol that lets anybody listen to anyone they want to without forcing them to listen to anyone they don't.
In fact, "cancel" has always existed - I grew up with it many years ago in Texas - the difference is that "everyone" knew the "unwritten" rules about what you could do or say or what you could even talk about... The other difference is that the power structure (Baptists and money in this case) was doing the cancelling, not randos fighting back... Social media just amplified the ugly part we have always had (back to witch hunts, etc). BUT as Noah noted, it also gave the "population" a chance to fight back against absurd hierarchies that have existed in the power structure for a long time..
Now, the real question is whether there is a way to balance the ability to talk back to power without turning it into lynch mobs (often not against power, but against other hapless souls - ex. the India example)
it's all about control, everyone is trying to control everyone else
So in this fragmented environment, I might never know that someone's kid made a map with Long Chile?
You might never know.
"No matter where you are right now, there is stuff that’s happening somewhere else." In other words, FOMO will get you unless you let go.
This is a big change. At it's height, Twitter reinforced Damone's delusion in 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High': "Wherever I am, that's where it's at."
Solid post, nice one.
Well written as always
As someone who doesn’t use Twitter this reads a little like someone climbing out of a hole they jumped into and praising the value of the sun.
Nice article and I appreciate the viewpoint of a holejumper nonetheless.