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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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."
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.
So in this fragmented environment, I might never know that someone's kid made a map with Long Chile?
"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.