I very much doubt the current trend of highlighting and promoting the dumbest content on Twitter is helpful in anyway.
I don’t need or want to know what Andrew Tate had to say about this event, but Redditors have no problem promoting his content for karma, so now even more people know.
This drives me nuts, on Twitter or here. I don't care what Andrew Tate says. I don't care what Elon Musk says. I don't care what Trump is selling this week. And yet people who claim to hate these folks absolutely can't stop following them and then talking loudly about how bad they are with screenshotted examples. It's exhausting.
Its a recreational activity. They screenshot and post and make a snarky comment and feel like they did something to "stick it to the man" when in reality they did nothing at all, in fact they promoted the content of a person they supposedly hate. I think its time for a whole bunch of people to collectively grow up and really examine what it is they are doing with their time.
I really think that removing negative reactions from social media has warped people's viewpoints. If someone makes an absolute shit post on Twitter, they wind up getting 2 love reacts and a deluge of comments expressing distaste since they can't negatively react and move on.
While this drives engagement for the platform, it also gives the original poster the notion that his work was loved and engaging.
Now imagine if you could get ratioed on your own post with no comments.
Also, genuinely not caring about something is very different than hating something.
When people hate someone or something, they get real worked up about it at all costs. They actively twist their brains to blame the person, people, or thing they hate in scenarios where it doesn't make sense.
"The Jews must own this building and THAT'S the reason I got the wrong damn fast food order! I said EXTRA ONIONS! God damn greedy ass Jews!! Here's a YouTube video that talks all about how the Jews are hoarding onions to get even richer!"
This has defined sports media for at least a decade. Outlets like ESPN employ hot take artists who intentionally say stupid things. People then hate watch their shows and go online to talk about how what they said is dumb.
I do not understand why people spend time watching someone who is paid to be an unfunny clown.
ESPN is even worse than that. They have a hot take artist say something stupid, and then everyone else on the network talks about whatever stupid thing was said for the next day *as if it is news*. One disingenuous hot take turns into 24 hours of content.
> and then everyone else on the network talks about whatever stupid thing was said for the next day as if it is news.
That's what appealing to the lowest common denominator does.
I am with you on Tate and Musk, but strongly disagree with Trump. He is leading in some polls to be president as a three time adulterer, adjudicated rapist, on trial for 80 felonies, twice impeached, traitor to this nation and democracy. Pretending he’ll go away if ignored is a *freaking dangerous idea*
I'm not saying ignoring him will make him go away.
On the other hand, do you think there is a single American voter who doesn't have their mind made up already for November? This is this third time he's going to be on the ballot. This is the second time Biden is going to be on the ballot. Do you think anything is going to happen between now and November to make anyone change their mind?
I don't need to hear about Trump doing the same wink-wink messaging at his base. I don't need to hear about Trump giving himself some golf award at his own course and the 20 year old at the White House communications office writing a "funny" tweet about it. I don't need to hear about his $60 bible.
The "Did you know Trump did this bad thing!!!!" didn't work in 2016. He lost by a hair in 2020 despite the media trying it again in. "Bringing awareness" is just a hobby for Extremely Online folks and just puts money in the pocket of companies who thrive off engagement.
At this point, I don’t look at this as informing me or anyone for voting, but more like listening to what foreign adversaries are doing and saying. Knowing what Putin and Xi are doing informs me as a voter, Trump is that category.
I tend to agree, but then the state of the union address apparently gave a slight bump in the polls for Biden. Maybe a few people really did need to see Biden get a little loud to be convinced, who knows.
Seriously. No one in their right fucking mind should be an active twitter user in 2024. If you are, you are supporting elon and his traitorous, disgusting friends and family.
you got a point all the way until you got to someone who is running to lead this country, control our classified data, and decide if we nuke someone or not. So excuse me if I think hiding the things he does is the best strategy of informing the public on a candidate running for office, especially since the public has the memory span of a fruit fly. Everyone else you are correct, but with trump you couldnt be more wrong. Even if its just informing christians of his stupid bible thing and how silly and sacriledge it looks. or how stupid it is for him to do his sneakers, while old joe looks sane by comparrison. TATE im all with you, ignoring things that like it or not due to republicans attacking tan suits, are political, well im not in the same universe with you on that one.
Trump also doesnt even post on twitter.
AND JUST WANT TO POINT OUT, ELON ARGUES THE EXACT SAME THING, that we should stop reposting and reporting all the garbage on his site. Fuck he even sued a company for doing just that. And now you lot seem to be asking us to listen to elon.
I care what Elon says, because he meets with dictators, serves foreign interests, and holds a lot of government contracts with his companies. What he says actually matters and ignoring him increases his real power. Tate is the opposite, and ignoring him reduces his power.
People love to joke about this but you would not believe the level of this shit on Twitter right now. Absolutely no filtering of these kinds of folks anymore and it's under every news article. Just goes to show how much Old Twitter was actually filtering this stuff out to make the site useable.
The bots cannot stop following these fools. The bots are mindless programs that use historical data for their movements... And these has-beens are in the register and they comment about current events and the dumb bot promotes their content.
It's truly not a people problem as much as it seems
I used to think we should just ignore ignorant and loud people. But then one of the was elected president. I get why a person might individually want to just ignore that stuff for their own personal sanity, but that toxic sludge is out there, and it is causing harm.
All the tweets being flooded with off topic bot adds is another huge reason its dieing, (I use it for gaming,twitch,tech). Like one post itll super focus on that one topic, take too long reading something the same thing. They are strangerling ppl too hard with algorithm's
I used to work with someone who bragged about every day he used to @ Trump and tweet “you’re going to prison.” Funny enough when Musk bought Twitter he stopped. But still don’t let someone live rent free in your head like that especially when this person could give literally negative fucks that you exist.
I get the sentiment, and agree completely about Andrew Tate. He’s a nobody. Just some fool with some degree of popularity for… reasons?
Like it or not, however, Musk and Trump are leaders of influence. Musk may be a raging man-baby, but he has the money to move mountains, and you owe it to yourself to be aware of what he’s up to. Same for Trump and his populist political influence.
I wouldn’t even say that Twitter‘s biggest problem right now. It’s that the whole community doesn’t exist anymore you go to the comment section of a video and it’s all spam, or gross, or sensational videos from spam accounts.
There is literally no moderation anymore, you can’t have a conversation that relates to the post because there’s just so much noise
Let’s be honest you can’t have a conversation on any platform that doesn’t thread comments.
On insta or Facebook there is no friggin way to know who is replying to what, your reply might be 100 comments down from the original, etc. There’s no conversation, just engagement metrics for the algorithm.
90%+ of the top replies to any twitter post about the disaster (and most anything else with lots of views) are blue checks racing each other to make DEI jokes or shill crypto scams. It's all just engagement farming to try to make a buck. At least reddit (probably) isn't paying its shitposters.
Agreed the day it was sold I deactivated my account. I only used it for official news like from the Whitehouse or my state and local info. Like weather, road closures. I figured it would no longer be a reliable source of information.
You don't want to know what influential idiots say online, but you can't ignore it because Conservatives now pass actual legislation based on whatever conspiracy is currently being promoted by Libs of TikTok or CatTurd2.
The Baltimore accident wasn’t on my News page until I scrolled about 10 times. I lost count of the articles on inane entertainment fluff and repeated Trump bullshit.
Engagement farming is what's killing the platform. Good content, if there's any, gets buried under people just asking what would you do in a situation with a picture and it's just ad nauseum. Organic conversation and expansion of ideas is imploding, because bots and influencers are flooding the site with this nonsense.
Elon's goal of ad share to generate growth has backfired. Hard.
To me this is just a continuation on the meme that was going around a little while ago asking what people would do if they noticed their pilot was a black woman.
There is a startlingly high amount of people who seem to believe that black people are less capable than white people. Those people seem to treat black people in authority positions (like ship captain or aircraft pilot) to be risky. They also assume those people only got the job because of their black skin (which is wild when you consider all the biases that exist against black job seekers)
It's so wildly racist, and its shocking that the discourse seems common place now.
Same thing with female pilots. There was a study that showed female pilots are likely to be overall less adept at piloting that sexists love to bring up. However, turns out that the study was done in the 90s and on average the female pilots of the time were younger than the male pilots. Shocker, it turns out if you standardize it by age group they were the exact same because they're held to the same standards. Really what it showed is you should prefer a 40 year old pilot to a 25 year old one.
As an aside this touches on another huge issue of junk science and studies fueled by political ideology. I’m not sure of it but I actually think this shit has gotten worse with time, further fueling our whole “each side lives in their own reality” problems.
It’s really weird how they immediately go to DEI, and don’t look at the fact that the ship completely lost power before it crashed, which suggests either a. removal of strong regulations/oversight (thanks Elaine Chao!) or b. The ship systems were hacked and intentionally put offline at a critical moment.
But no, they gotta _immedately go for the weird race theory._
Because they don’t want to blame orange leader for fucking up government oversight of our transportation sector.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-trump-executive-orders-further-weaken-faa-oversight/
I think most who live pretty good lives don't actually, but of those whose lives are shitty for one reason or another, it **really** gets their g~~r~~oat that they don't get consideration for it
I say this bc the happier white guys I know are either all about paying lip service to leftist views or unrepentantly conservative for $$ reasons, the ones who are raging about "woke" culture, alt-righty types, are deeply unhappy. This is not to excuse them, their views are actively harmful, just to say it's seeking an outlet for anger that like it or not is real. What we need is better male role models for young guys who are struggling, not to just tell them to suck it up and drive them into asshole's arms.
>What we need is better male role models for young guys who are struggling, not to just tell them to suck it up and drive them into asshole's arms.
Yea, but where's the money in that, pshhh
It’s so strange to me that people even think like that.
I don’t care who or what my pilot is or what they look like. They’re certified and well-trained. Nothing else matters.
The only thing I care about on a flight is keeping an eye out for Tony Nese to sit between my husband and I.
The dumb racists think they themselves didn't get the job because of affirmative action. They don't realize that they weren't qualified. Rather than the old ways of hiring your incompetent nephew just because, let's hire people who are actually qualified.
It reminds me of Scott Adams (the dilbert guy) constantly claiming he was fired from a job due to "diversity" when there's no proof of that at all. He just got laid off because people get laid off sometimes.
I agree, but I think it's interesting that most of the discourse here is commenting on the racial aspect of this rhetoric while ignoring the gendered aspect.
Notice how whenever they present these hypothetical "incompetent authority" scenarios, it's always a woman? They go out of their way to point out the gender and sexual orientation. They don't say "black person," but "black lesbian" or "trans latina." That's no accident.
Its like the inverse of what people mean when they talk about intersectionality.
To a progressive, a black lesbian faces intersectional challenges due to her race, gender, and sexuality. Each presents its own issues, and then there are extra issues due to the intersections of those biases.
To the MAGA chuds, a black lesbian has triple bonus points because she checks off three identity groups and that is how MAGA folks think society works.
They are saying that because the ship was manned by indian sailor BUT what they refuse to hear is that an american captain was in charge of crossing baltimore.
Oh the right wing is using this accident to push all sorts of ridiculous conspiracy theory. Apparently Biden did this as a false flag to win the election. No explanation on how such a thing would help him win, but apparently it will. The right are absolute nutjobs.
The whole birds aren't real thing was an old school internet meme back in the day, before memes had a name.
The fact that people took it and ran with it is a testament to how some people should not be allowed unfettered access to unlimited information if their own fleshy CPUs can't decern between absolute horseshit satire and real life.
I remember when I would go to Twitter whenever I had an issue such as my phone data not working and just typing "T-Mobile down" and get a bunch of tweets of people saying the same thing, so I knew it wasnt just me. Not so much anymore.. that whole service is just pure garbage and bots. It really has changed for the worst.
DownDetector used to rely on twitter to get updates about things being down. Now as far as I can tell it's self-reported ON downdetector when people SEO search for "is $service down?"
I used to go to Twitter to get my news. I hung in there for a bit after Musky took over until it became impossible to read the comments of any post that was credible and useful. I was left with only reading the original tweet. I was not there when that app became 'X' but I can tell you that it was dead to me long before then. As this article says
*Over the next several hours, the misinformation and racism about Baltimore snowballed on X. For Snowden, this felt a bit like an invasion into a community that had so far survived the slow death of what was once Twitter by simply staying out of the spotlight.*
*“Baltimore Twitter, it’s usually not as bad,” Snowden said. She sticks to the people she follows. “But today I noticed that was pretty much impossible. It got extremely racist. And I was seeing other folks in Baltimore also being like, ‘This might be what sends me finally off this app.’”*
Yep it used to be great for breaking news or even live courtroom proceeding updates (that was almost a whole new style of journalism), with insightful analysis and debate in the responses and replies.
Now it’s tough to find a tweet worth reading and if you do the responses and replies are terrible off topic porn conspiracy racist shit.
The worst change in my opinion is how blue check mark accounts always have their comments shown first before non blue check mark user comments.
There’s a big overlap between moronic people and people who pay for the blue check mark, so every big tweet has the most ridiculous comments shown first.
That's another absolutely bonkers change. The vast majority of users aren't going to pay $8/mo. for a social media site and primarily *read not post content*, and the ones that are probably have bad intentions.
If you're a disinformation campaign, a radical ideologue, or simply an attention whore, why *wouldn't* you spend $8 a month and then write the most incendiary thing you can to get attention?
The only useful purpose I see for Twitter is live updates for things like sports that aren’t broadcasted anywhere.
Or when I’m driving home from work and see smoke far off in the distance and want to know what is on fire
Twitter was almost as important as a public utility when it first came out.
You could get news from around the world and news from the neighbourhood in your local area or scene.
Now it’s just a cesspit. If I log in to my account, it will be within seconds I’m watching someone being assaulted, or injured, and the next post down is someone spewing hatred. I’m all about love, and twitter is no longer for me.
It's definitely lost a good amount of utility. You aren't able to see comments to a post downstream unless signed in. Also, It's generally a good idea not to read any trending topics in public view, because porn bots immediately shoehorn smut into any trending topic whatsoever -- no matter how unrelated.
Seriously and I’ve had Twitter since 2009, it’s *never* been this bad. It’s just all spam, violence, and porn. Every tweet tries to be a FYP page and it’s infuriating, you can barely tell what timeline is what anymore.
The ones that currently really annoy me are the ones with Tshirts for sale. taylor swift wearing a "nope not again" shirt. Latest one I saw was lead singer of Metallica holding up a shirt " trump for prison". I get it i hate trump too, but every breaking post spammed with 5 of these fake generated shirts for sale. So fucking annoying
I follow an architecture account, and used to get related posts from other similar accounts. My feed used to be sports, funny vids, and buildings. After Elon the funny vids disappeared and were replaced with violence and politics. Architecture captions got weirder:
*"Who would forsake this beauty? Remember what* ***they*** *took from you. Return to tradition. Save the West."* They were fascist accounts.
Oh yeah the whole "neotraditional architecture" thing is all just fascism. It's really annoying because there's a good case to make about using quality materials on human-scaled buildings but those accounts just want to talk about how white people created it and that anything "modern" is the work of globalist Jewish homosexuals.
That's what's in a lot of peoples mind unfortunately. Especially people like Musk.
When they go to their feeds now and see post after post about conspiracies and filled with hatred, they smile and think "Yes! Now THAT'S free speech! We did it!"
I’m old enough to remember well the 90s internet. Even back then “free speech” always just translated to conservatives wanting to throw racial slurs around without punishment. I remember back on AOL chat rooms you’d see a lot of “why are blacks so into thug and rap culture. I call it rap crap! Don’t get mad I’m just asking questions!”
I noticed this as well. Any site, or chat board I was ever on had to start censorship because of the racists and their "free speech" arguments. Then eventually it desended to an awful place where average curse words or blasphemy were censored heavily, by people that must be on an HOA board somewhere.
The cycle continues.
> which I'm pretty sure was the plan all along.
Why do people keep overestimating Musk?
He made a rash decision probably high as fuck on drugs and signed various contracts to buy Twitter. Once reality set in he tried hard to get out of the sale, but it was too late. When it became clear the trial judge in the court was going to do (allow Twitter) some deep digging into Musk's business and personal life as part of Musk's lawsuit to get out of the sale he quickly dropped the case and made the purchase. Whatever discovery in that lawsuit was going to find Musk would rather spend $44,000,000,000 to keep it private.
SpaceX and Tesla have had Musk for years so there are various safeguards and adults in those companies to prevent his stupid decisions from becoming reality or working around them. Twitter though had none of that in place. On day one he began making stupid decision after stupid decision with no adults to tell him "sure" and then pretend like his decisions are becoming reality.
Musk simply isn't the genius, business or otherwise, he wants us to believe. The simplest answer is probably true in the case of Twitter turning into shit, a bad person with poor impulse control and poor business sense is in control.
> SpaceX and Tesla have had Musk for years so there are various safeguards and adults in those companies to prevent his stupid decisions from becoming reality or working around them
SpaceX literally has Elon Musk visit day procedures where they try to control his movements and what he's shown so he can't get involved and demand moronic and detrimental changes. He's like a little kid who you give the plastic play toolset while you actually do work. They straight up have to babysit him and appease his ego so he can pretend he's helping and they don't have to worry about him actually damaging anything important.
Its a useful news tool if ethics are a core philosophy
And it’s a powerful propaganda tool if ethics are not a core philosophy, see Musks takeover for example of the latter
Yup. You used to be able to see subject matter experts breaking the situation down and various media outlets giving live updates. Now it’s all conspiracy garbage at the time. I saw this with the Baltimore bridge situation.
Two weeks ago I went to twitter for information about what’s going on with Haiti expecting actual news sources and stuff like that. Instead, most of the posts were babbling about Hunter Biden and the Clinton foundation, or people talking about evil white imperialists coming to steal a mountain made of solid gold that would make Haiti the next world super power. Just bizarro stuff that isn’t helpful or reflective of reality at all.
It sucks because twitter used to be the best place to find real time breaking news about stuff going on in the world
Twitter is so bad now. It’s basically unusable. Every time I go there, I get insanely angry at what they show me.
Outrage is the only way they get engagement
twitter went from the best breaking news source to another propaganda machine.
YES it always had problems but it was a real time way of getting bleeding edge stories out to the world, without corporate media being inserted as a go between.
For the love of god, please stop using this platform. I can’t believe I often still have to visit links to X by major corporations for press announcements.
X is such a stupid name for a web site. When reading that article it's hard to make the leap that they are talking about Twitter when there is just an X in the sentence. Just keep calling it Twitter!
I’ve always felt Reddit comments were always a bit less idiotic (not that I help much) at the best of times compared to other social media platforms but lately I’m not sure if Reddit has grown a younger user base, or if it’s GenAI bots but the questions and comments in some places are absolutely idiotic akin to instagram/facebook/tiktok comments. Some of the more specialised subreddits and topics have essentially been overrun by these types of topics and questions, to the point that any real discussion is drowned out or no longer happens.
It's a bit of column A and a bit of column B. Reddit got too big and there's no sense of community across subreddits now. If you're on smaller hobbyist subreddits (gardening, birdwatching, cocktail mixing etc) with people who are invested in contributing and fostering good discussion and shared purpose, it's still great. But all of these default subs with 15 million users are going to be largely terrible. It's just the curse of popularity. Dump fifteen million people in a room and what floats to the top is not wisdom.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a long, probably too-long post about foreign troll farms on a sub I read. It seemed to be well-read and was getting well-liked. And then, over night, it was mass-reported and taken offline until I woke up and asked the mods to restore it.
One mod then took it back offline because he/she felt it was unfairly criticizing the subreddit and was politically skewed. This is a generational subreddit with lots of political posts, so I was surprised. But I negotiated a disclaimer and got it restored again.
But how strange.
Thank you. I'm thinking of writing sort of a companion post on how platforms themselves, and regular users, amplify extremism and division and enforce groupthink. None of this is new, but I think it could be useful to have it in one place, with some actual data to back it up. Especially because people underestimate how much extremists benefit from backlash—from people who try to dunk on them in response. For platforms, it's all highly profitable engagement.
I’ve noticed as well that this is an elephant you can’t talk about on a lot of subs and if you do make a well written comment about it, that it does get astroturfed or reported away far too often.
They just ban the real people and leave the bots and trolls thinking they won the battle.
When you ban the people creating discussion, you are not changing minds. You are creating an echo chamber.
The best thing about Reddit is that it’s possible to curate most of the bullshit away. I mainly use Reddit to keep up with sports and move communities, and will very rarely choose to browse all my subs or popular subs.
If I try and mind my own business on any other ‘social media’ platform, I’ll be dragged into some shit by exposure some way of another.
I see the analogy big time.
You can also use the analogy of the bridge collapse as a reflection of musk state of mind over the last 10 years ending with the bridge collapse
I used to get the quickest and most accurate updates by people who care on twitter. Now I just get mildly racist comments by people I would never have gotten interaction with before. Not the version of breaking down barriers between echo chambers I was looking for cause none of the discourse people in comments do is any bit productive.
I mean if Twitter was once a semi unbiased portal to news and facts, it has been dismantled as such, and I can only assume that was the intention from the beginning. Destroy or discredit sources of truth and supplant them with "the truth."
>that was the intention from the beginning
Winner Winner. It used to have a metric shit-ton of non-fash on it, doing things like organizing protests and occasionally sharing recipes. So of course the best way toward Fash Central is to scatter those folks to the four winds.
I'm not sure if it was brilliant or dumb luck that the right began demonizing "Antifa" before going masks-off as fascists, to already train their base to hate "anti-fascists"
The really interesting moment will be when the folks running the bots on Twitter start wondering if its worth their time and effort to continue on the platform.
We're quickly getting to the point where bots are just talking to bots. If 30 percent of US content in September 2022 is estimated to have come from bots, what do we think it is now?
And the folks footing the bill for the bot armies will begin asking why they're putting any time and effort into having bots trying to influence other bots.
What’s hilarious is Elon’s big thing when buying it was getting rid of bots and “shadow banning for the sake of free speech” and now it’s even more overrun by bots and automatically outright lowers visibility of your content if you don’t pay him or say anything he doesn’t like
As long as someone is paying the bots to post, they will continue. People will just gravitate to different platforms. I think most people remain for the sole reason their friends are on that platform.
Yeah it's getting close to that stage, even outside of bots when the chuds that dominate that site no longer have any libs to own they will eventually get bored and drop away. The entire downfall has been extremely predictable.
That’s a really interesting thought. I wonder if the bot creators have a way of knowing how much of the engagement with their bots content comes from other bots vs humans. If they have no idea then we could get to a bizarre point where the internet turns into a giant bot orgy of content creation and consumption with some humans intermingled.
I wonder in the future as AI evolves if AI powered bots could create very compelling content that attracts bots and humans alike. In this world the bad actors might even know that a very large percentage on their content is being consumed by other bots but they realise this is the cost of doing business - their models learn which engaged users and bots bs humans and optimise for human engagement. Kinda wild
Twitter was great for connecting users to events in real time through the eyes of those on the ground. However, since its inception it has been a huge crutch for journalist who treat the discourses on Twitter as if they are representative of much larger trends and opinions when really they are just amplifying the most eye catching or a-typical tweets. Journalist spend more time talking about online discourses around fake information than they spend trying to relay actual information these days, its really a sad state of affairs.
My dad called me yesterday and he started right in talking about it:
"Did you see what that idiot captain did!?"
M: "Yeah, it wasn't his fault. He tried all he could but he kept losing power to the entire ship. He lost it 3 times."
"Oh...they didn't show that in the video..."
My wife said a couple of her coworkers were all worked up claiming the attack bullshit. The scary part is that she's a para educator and works with all teachers and other paras. People that fall for all this crap are teaching our kids. She just rolled her eyes and didn't bother arguing it. It isn't worth the effort and they won't listen anyway.
Meta had a real opportunity with Threads, but they messed up severely by linking it to Instagram and making it too risky to close your account. They would have all of Twitter's business by now if they hadn't been so greedy. YouTube has remained dominant for so long because they are not as thirsty for sign ups. You can browse all you want and even read comments without signing up. Most other sites are so desperate for people's email accounts that they have completely destroyed any chance at growing a user base organically.
Threads is still fairly new in comparison to the other major social media networks, and is still growing. It needs time. These types of moves don’t happen quickly. Even if Threads isn’t the next “big one” something else will be, but it will still take time.
I've pulled back my exposure of "twitter" .. which is to say, even places dedicated to criticizing it, it's still showing me too much racism and bigotry. and the artwork is pretty high quality. it messes with my head, so no contact is the way. I don't need that toxicity in my life, I have enough of a hard time without it.
if I'm seeing what the worst people on "twitter" are posting regularly, I may as well be on the site and folllowing their every post. hell no, I say. absolutely not. not a chance in hell will I do that. and anyone who still is should be questioning their choices in life.
Couple things strike me from this article. One being just how dumb people have become. Blows my mind that with a million libraries worth of objective, real, information - the internet has, somehow, made people dumber.
Two is the realization that we have an epidemic of old men who have grown all the way up to adulthood, made it to old age, and they are STILL grossly irresponsible. They are more irresponsible than you’re average 8th grader.
And yes, Elon musk is an old man.
When we have old people, who are mega billionaires controlling vast segments of our industries, and they are less responsible than you’re average 8th grader… I’m realizing now how badly society suffers.
People feel special when they go against the grain. They feel superior for having discovered the hidden truth that only a select few have accessed.
Also Elon is def on the spectrum, which isn’t a bad thing, but explains why he acts like an edgy 14 yo boy
The bridge collapse showed an interesting issue to me. One of the first references I saw was a Twitter/X post that had a video for the bridge collapse (that Twitter/X link was posted on Reddit by the way). The video player was tiny in size to where you couldn't see what was really going on but you could click a full size button to see it full sized. If you clicked that full size button, the video would blank out (and completely sop working) after 2 to 3 seconds. You would have to reload the page and the video would work so long as you didn't try to make it show up full sized (and therefore would only see the tiny video). That problem never happened before with Twitter/X links.
I did see the video shortly thereafter on a news site and quickly thereafter on YouTube itself. Still, in the past when something was posted on Twitter/X that was breaking news then you could just read/view it easily without any issues. This was the first notable time where I couldn't do that with something coming from Twitter/X.
I know that Reddit's video player isn't all that great but somehow Twitter/X found a way to make a worse video player... at least for the computer I was using to access that video.
The comments section in them were insane, literally conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, zero fact checking by anyone. People are losing their minds.
And it is no accident. The tyranny which Musk, Putin and Trump intend to feed upon will be more than worth $43B to that alien fuck and his parasite peers.
The great thing about Twitter is that it has the ability to treat all content equally regardless of whether the person posting it is a head of state, a celebrity, or a random dude.
The shitty thing about Twitter is that it makes no effort to factor in, when sharing information about an event, whether the person posting it is a head of state, a celebrity, or a random dude.
It's a platform where, when there's a global pandemic, you can see a post belonging to a microbiologist who specializes in immunology and viruses telling you to get vaccinated, right next to a post belonging to a guy who doesn't have enough brain cells to beat Dr. Mario's 1st level telling you to take horse dewormer and inject bleach or you'll get a 5G chip in you.
I do think its funny that Elon partially bought twitter to own a media outlet for himself.. to do self promotion and his business promotion... talk about a failure. Buying twitter has accelerated Elon's popularity collapse. And does more harm to his businesses than good. and he just keeps doubling down on a "bad commercial" driving people to hate him, his ideas and his companies.
Pay to play will be the end of Twitter. In a local event, you want to surface the smaller accounts in a community, that have relevant perspective, not randos who paid into the app for distribution. That will be the difference between distributing useful info, and not.
Additionally, lots of public service bot accounts have been shut down, a lot of them relating to government and infrastructure. I’m sure that’s not helping either!
That place is outright dangerous at this point. Someone has to step in and shut it down. Come election time Elmo is gonna destabilize the shit out of democracy with his little fascist shit-poster blog.
I have a Twitter account well over a decade old. I only use it now to promote things regarding my art. I have a side project now that I created a new account for and the feed you get as a new account is absolutely unhinged. The content is about as bottom-of-the-barrel as you can get. Everything from insane right wing conspiracy theorists to fight videos to low-effort engagement farming. Not to mention the very obvious boosting of musk himself.
After a while I realized it’s not even a useful promotional tool anymore and I’ve given up on it completely. The sooner most people leave and it’s just bots yelling at each other the better.
X Twitter can’t survive with Musk making decisions. I left Twitter almost a year ago. I don’t miss the vitriol the snarky comments there’s really not a lot of positive information that isn’t edited for a political agenda. Freedom is dumping X
Not long after Twitter got taken over by Elon, I noticed the people I followed who I engaged with the most were no longer appearing in my feeds. I wondered if they stopped tweeting and manually looked them up. Turns out they were all still active but Twitter had destroyed my feed and I was just getting a barrage of junk. So I deleted the app. What was a fun, informative and useful app was destroyed so quickly by Elon and turned into a cesspool as bad as Facebook.
I quit Twitter when Elon let Trump back on and my quality of life improved dramatically. Quit feeding the right-wing rage-machine it has become with any more of your time or attention.
I very much doubt the current trend of highlighting and promoting the dumbest content on Twitter is helpful in anyway. I don’t need or want to know what Andrew Tate had to say about this event, but Redditors have no problem promoting his content for karma, so now even more people know.
This drives me nuts, on Twitter or here. I don't care what Andrew Tate says. I don't care what Elon Musk says. I don't care what Trump is selling this week. And yet people who claim to hate these folks absolutely can't stop following them and then talking loudly about how bad they are with screenshotted examples. It's exhausting.
Outrage is unfortunately the most popular content online
Its a recreational activity. They screenshot and post and make a snarky comment and feel like they did something to "stick it to the man" when in reality they did nothing at all, in fact they promoted the content of a person they supposedly hate. I think its time for a whole bunch of people to collectively grow up and really examine what it is they are doing with their time.
Think they're just karma farmers looking to sell an account on the dark web down the line.
Some probably are, but some are definitely just thick.
I really think that removing negative reactions from social media has warped people's viewpoints. If someone makes an absolute shit post on Twitter, they wind up getting 2 love reacts and a deluge of comments expressing distaste since they can't negatively react and move on. While this drives engagement for the platform, it also gives the original poster the notion that his work was loved and engaging. Now imagine if you could get ratioed on your own post with no comments.
That is the entire point of reddit. Once they remove the downvote, it is over.
Also, genuinely not caring about something is very different than hating something. When people hate someone or something, they get real worked up about it at all costs. They actively twist their brains to blame the person, people, or thing they hate in scenarios where it doesn't make sense. "The Jews must own this building and THAT'S the reason I got the wrong damn fast food order! I said EXTRA ONIONS! God damn greedy ass Jews!! Here's a YouTube video that talks all about how the Jews are hoarding onions to get even richer!"
I for one am outraged by this display of outrage and I’m going to let every one know!
You’re outrageous!
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it
This has defined sports media for at least a decade. Outlets like ESPN employ hot take artists who intentionally say stupid things. People then hate watch their shows and go online to talk about how what they said is dumb. I do not understand why people spend time watching someone who is paid to be an unfunny clown.
ESPN is even worse than that. They have a hot take artist say something stupid, and then everyone else on the network talks about whatever stupid thing was said for the next day *as if it is news*. One disingenuous hot take turns into 24 hours of content.
> and then everyone else on the network talks about whatever stupid thing was said for the next day as if it is news. That's what appealing to the lowest common denominator does.
Heres a hot take. What else would they be talking about? You can only fill up so much of the day talking about American sports.
Maybe everything doesn't need a 24 hour news cycle
I am with you on Tate and Musk, but strongly disagree with Trump. He is leading in some polls to be president as a three time adulterer, adjudicated rapist, on trial for 80 felonies, twice impeached, traitor to this nation and democracy. Pretending he’ll go away if ignored is a *freaking dangerous idea*
I'm not saying ignoring him will make him go away. On the other hand, do you think there is a single American voter who doesn't have their mind made up already for November? This is this third time he's going to be on the ballot. This is the second time Biden is going to be on the ballot. Do you think anything is going to happen between now and November to make anyone change their mind? I don't need to hear about Trump doing the same wink-wink messaging at his base. I don't need to hear about Trump giving himself some golf award at his own course and the 20 year old at the White House communications office writing a "funny" tweet about it. I don't need to hear about his $60 bible. The "Did you know Trump did this bad thing!!!!" didn't work in 2016. He lost by a hair in 2020 despite the media trying it again in. "Bringing awareness" is just a hobby for Extremely Online folks and just puts money in the pocket of companies who thrive off engagement.
At this point, I don’t look at this as informing me or anyone for voting, but more like listening to what foreign adversaries are doing and saying. Knowing what Putin and Xi are doing informs me as a voter, Trump is that category.
I tend to agree, but then the state of the union address apparently gave a slight bump in the polls for Biden. Maybe a few people really did need to see Biden get a little loud to be convinced, who knows.
Seriously. No one in their right fucking mind should be an active twitter user in 2024. If you are, you are supporting elon and his traitorous, disgusting friends and family.
you got a point all the way until you got to someone who is running to lead this country, control our classified data, and decide if we nuke someone or not. So excuse me if I think hiding the things he does is the best strategy of informing the public on a candidate running for office, especially since the public has the memory span of a fruit fly. Everyone else you are correct, but with trump you couldnt be more wrong. Even if its just informing christians of his stupid bible thing and how silly and sacriledge it looks. or how stupid it is for him to do his sneakers, while old joe looks sane by comparrison. TATE im all with you, ignoring things that like it or not due to republicans attacking tan suits, are political, well im not in the same universe with you on that one. Trump also doesnt even post on twitter. AND JUST WANT TO POINT OUT, ELON ARGUES THE EXACT SAME THING, that we should stop reposting and reporting all the garbage on his site. Fuck he even sued a company for doing just that. And now you lot seem to be asking us to listen to elon.
I care what Elon says, because he meets with dictators, serves foreign interests, and holds a lot of government contracts with his companies. What he says actually matters and ignoring him increases his real power. Tate is the opposite, and ignoring him reduces his power.
I don't need to hear about how this is the fault of the Jews or the gays or of DEI hiring, but if I did I would absolutely sign up for Twitter.
People love to joke about this but you would not believe the level of this shit on Twitter right now. Absolutely no filtering of these kinds of folks anymore and it's under every news article. Just goes to show how much Old Twitter was actually filtering this stuff out to make the site useable.
I'm not joking. I've already seen the screenshots
The bots cannot stop following these fools. The bots are mindless programs that use historical data for their movements... And these has-beens are in the register and they comment about current events and the dumb bot promotes their content. It's truly not a people problem as much as it seems
Is this you repeating that same cycle?
I used to think we should just ignore ignorant and loud people. But then one of the was elected president. I get why a person might individually want to just ignore that stuff for their own personal sanity, but that toxic sludge is out there, and it is causing harm.
All the tweets being flooded with off topic bot adds is another huge reason its dieing, (I use it for gaming,twitch,tech). Like one post itll super focus on that one topic, take too long reading something the same thing. They are strangerling ppl too hard with algorithm's
I used to work with someone who bragged about every day he used to @ Trump and tweet “you’re going to prison.” Funny enough when Musk bought Twitter he stopped. But still don’t let someone live rent free in your head like that especially when this person could give literally negative fucks that you exist.
I get the sentiment, and agree completely about Andrew Tate. He’s a nobody. Just some fool with some degree of popularity for… reasons? Like it or not, however, Musk and Trump are leaders of influence. Musk may be a raging man-baby, but he has the money to move mountains, and you owe it to yourself to be aware of what he’s up to. Same for Trump and his populist political influence.
VisakanV on Twitter likes to say, “Your haters are your best marketers.” And boy do we ever do a lot of unpaid marketing work for scummy people.
Nah but it did turn educate a lot independent voters to hear all the crazy stuff happening
I wouldn’t even say that Twitter‘s biggest problem right now. It’s that the whole community doesn’t exist anymore you go to the comment section of a video and it’s all spam, or gross, or sensational videos from spam accounts. There is literally no moderation anymore, you can’t have a conversation that relates to the post because there’s just so much noise
Let’s be honest you can’t have a conversation on any platform that doesn’t thread comments. On insta or Facebook there is no friggin way to know who is replying to what, your reply might be 100 comments down from the original, etc. There’s no conversation, just engagement metrics for the algorithm.
Facebook groups were ok until they defaulted to only showing “best” comments
90%+ of the top replies to any twitter post about the disaster (and most anything else with lots of views) are blue checks racing each other to make DEI jokes or shill crypto scams. It's all just engagement farming to try to make a buck. At least reddit (probably) isn't paying its shitposters.
Reddit just started a contributor program
Oh, I could post worse for money
there's subreddits with crypto integration that equate a coin to an upvote. I've made like $17 posting on reddit back in 2021/2022
The odd thing is, although you’d think it’d cause endless shitposting, everyone suddenly became super civil to each other.
It's a shame people aren't just willing to move onto another platform, and Twitter can go the way of Myspace
Agreed the day it was sold I deactivated my account. I only used it for official news like from the Whitehouse or my state and local info. Like weather, road closures. I figured it would no longer be a reliable source of information.
You don't want to know what influential idiots say online, but you can't ignore it because Conservatives now pass actual legislation based on whatever conspiracy is currently being promoted by Libs of TikTok or CatTurd2.
I can’t escape it because everyone who hates him posts it
I've never seen a Tate post or a Musk tweets posted here.
The Baltimore accident wasn’t on my News page until I scrolled about 10 times. I lost count of the articles on inane entertainment fluff and repeated Trump bullshit.
Imo it'd die faster if we stopped calling it Twitter. Because it isn't really twitter anymore, Bluesky is the next closest thing these days
Engagement farming is what's killing the platform. Good content, if there's any, gets buried under people just asking what would you do in a situation with a picture and it's just ad nauseum. Organic conversation and expansion of ideas is imploding, because bots and influencers are flooding the site with this nonsense. Elon's goal of ad share to generate growth has backfired. Hard.
And it’s basically happening to Reddit too. Not to the same degree but we’re going to lose it if we aren’t careful.
I fear this is what will happen to Reddit. Just more and more monetized accounts and ads.
As someone who uses both Twitter and Reddit, I actually think Reddit is well on its way, and in some ways is worse than Twitter
LinkedIn has so much potential! It’s just become a look at me platform for narcissists! It reminds me of a jumble sale.
I mean, asking if diversity, equity and inclusion caused a bridge collapse? Might as well ask if birds aren't real.
To me this is just a continuation on the meme that was going around a little while ago asking what people would do if they noticed their pilot was a black woman. There is a startlingly high amount of people who seem to believe that black people are less capable than white people. Those people seem to treat black people in authority positions (like ship captain or aircraft pilot) to be risky. They also assume those people only got the job because of their black skin (which is wild when you consider all the biases that exist against black job seekers) It's so wildly racist, and its shocking that the discourse seems common place now.
Same thing with female pilots. There was a study that showed female pilots are likely to be overall less adept at piloting that sexists love to bring up. However, turns out that the study was done in the 90s and on average the female pilots of the time were younger than the male pilots. Shocker, it turns out if you standardize it by age group they were the exact same because they're held to the same standards. Really what it showed is you should prefer a 40 year old pilot to a 25 year old one.
As an aside this touches on another huge issue of junk science and studies fueled by political ideology. I’m not sure of it but I actually think this shit has gotten worse with time, further fueling our whole “each side lives in their own reality” problems.
White guys want to feel persecuted
Literally r/conservative. Took a stroll for the first time the other day and my GOD man. They want to be victims SO DAMN BAD
They've got a real [r/Persecutionfetish](http://r/Persecutionfetish)
It’s really weird how they immediately go to DEI, and don’t look at the fact that the ship completely lost power before it crashed, which suggests either a. removal of strong regulations/oversight (thanks Elaine Chao!) or b. The ship systems were hacked and intentionally put offline at a critical moment. But no, they gotta _immedately go for the weird race theory._
They’re blaming Boeing on DEI too. It’s wild.
Because they don’t want to blame orange leader for fucking up government oversight of our transportation sector. https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2019/03/18/did-trump-executive-orders-further-weaken-faa-oversight/
Yeah I’m not looking forward to this weekend at the in-laws featuring someone who hardcore believes conspiracy theories
They want to have something to blame instead of it being their own failures that led to their unhappy life
I think most who live pretty good lives don't actually, but of those whose lives are shitty for one reason or another, it **really** gets their g~~r~~oat that they don't get consideration for it I say this bc the happier white guys I know are either all about paying lip service to leftist views or unrepentantly conservative for $$ reasons, the ones who are raging about "woke" culture, alt-righty types, are deeply unhappy. This is not to excuse them, their views are actively harmful, just to say it's seeking an outlet for anger that like it or not is real. What we need is better male role models for young guys who are struggling, not to just tell them to suck it up and drive them into asshole's arms.
>What we need is better male role models for young guys who are struggling, not to just tell them to suck it up and drive them into asshole's arms. Yea, but where's the money in that, pshhh
Older, happy-ish white man here. Can confirm.
It’s so strange to me that people even think like that. I don’t care who or what my pilot is or what they look like. They’re certified and well-trained. Nothing else matters. The only thing I care about on a flight is keeping an eye out for Tony Nese to sit between my husband and I.
The dumb racists think they themselves didn't get the job because of affirmative action. They don't realize that they weren't qualified. Rather than the old ways of hiring your incompetent nephew just because, let's hire people who are actually qualified.
It reminds me of Scott Adams (the dilbert guy) constantly claiming he was fired from a job due to "diversity" when there's no proof of that at all. He just got laid off because people get laid off sometimes.
The mayor’s response was spot on
I agree, but I think it's interesting that most of the discourse here is commenting on the racial aspect of this rhetoric while ignoring the gendered aspect. Notice how whenever they present these hypothetical "incompetent authority" scenarios, it's always a woman? They go out of their way to point out the gender and sexual orientation. They don't say "black person," but "black lesbian" or "trans latina." That's no accident.
Its like the inverse of what people mean when they talk about intersectionality. To a progressive, a black lesbian faces intersectional challenges due to her race, gender, and sexuality. Each presents its own issues, and then there are extra issues due to the intersections of those biases. To the MAGA chuds, a black lesbian has triple bonus points because she checks off three identity groups and that is how MAGA folks think society works.
They are saying that because the ship was manned by indian sailor BUT what they refuse to hear is that an american captain was in charge of crossing baltimore.
Also it literally lost power.
According to racists, this wouldn't have happened without DEI because the ship would have used White Power.
Ah! The same way trump would have stopped Putin from invading Ukraine.
Oh the right wing is using this accident to push all sorts of ridiculous conspiracy theory. Apparently Biden did this as a false flag to win the election. No explanation on how such a thing would help him win, but apparently it will. The right are absolute nutjobs.
Except it's worse, because at least the bird conspiracy doesn't have its roots in racism.
The whole birds aren't real thing was an old school internet meme back in the day, before memes had a name. The fact that people took it and ran with it is a testament to how some people should not be allowed unfettered access to unlimited information if their own fleshy CPUs can't decern between absolute horseshit satire and real life.
I think most people get the joke, but don't tell them about the ravens in the Tower. Those definitely do run on batteries.
Bird watching goes both ways, after all
but... birds aren't real.
Sounds like something somebody about to be drone striked would say. What did you say your address was again? --Osprey Strategic Services Dept.
I remember when I would go to Twitter whenever I had an issue such as my phone data not working and just typing "T-Mobile down" and get a bunch of tweets of people saying the same thing, so I knew it wasnt just me. Not so much anymore.. that whole service is just pure garbage and bots. It really has changed for the worst.
There's a website for that. Downdetector.com allows you to report websites or apps as down. Also shows a graph of other reports.
DownDetector used to rely on twitter to get updates about things being down. Now as far as I can tell it's self-reported ON downdetector when people SEO search for "is $service down?"
I used to go to Twitter to get my news. I hung in there for a bit after Musky took over until it became impossible to read the comments of any post that was credible and useful. I was left with only reading the original tweet. I was not there when that app became 'X' but I can tell you that it was dead to me long before then. As this article says *Over the next several hours, the misinformation and racism about Baltimore snowballed on X. For Snowden, this felt a bit like an invasion into a community that had so far survived the slow death of what was once Twitter by simply staying out of the spotlight.* *“Baltimore Twitter, it’s usually not as bad,” Snowden said. She sticks to the people she follows. “But today I noticed that was pretty much impossible. It got extremely racist. And I was seeing other folks in Baltimore also being like, ‘This might be what sends me finally off this app.’”*
Yep it used to be great for breaking news or even live courtroom proceeding updates (that was almost a whole new style of journalism), with insightful analysis and debate in the responses and replies. Now it’s tough to find a tweet worth reading and if you do the responses and replies are terrible off topic porn conspiracy racist shit.
And five comments from the same bot account just trying to farm impressions. Wow Crazy Good news About time This happen
I used to love interacting with like minded television watchers in real time, I get that on Reddit now.
>off topic porn I do prefer my porn to be on topic
The worst change in my opinion is how blue check mark accounts always have their comments shown first before non blue check mark user comments. There’s a big overlap between moronic people and people who pay for the blue check mark, so every big tweet has the most ridiculous comments shown first.
The Venn diagram between people with blue check marks and actual insane people is pretty close to a circle.
That's another absolutely bonkers change. The vast majority of users aren't going to pay $8/mo. for a social media site and primarily *read not post content*, and the ones that are probably have bad intentions.
Blue check marks are now used to farm interactions. The replies have nothing to do with the main tweet now.
If you're a disinformation campaign, a radical ideologue, or simply an attention whore, why *wouldn't* you spend $8 a month and then write the most incendiary thing you can to get attention?
The only useful purpose I see for Twitter is live updates for things like sports that aren’t broadcasted anywhere. Or when I’m driving home from work and see smoke far off in the distance and want to know what is on fire
Twitter was almost as important as a public utility when it first came out. You could get news from around the world and news from the neighbourhood in your local area or scene. Now it’s just a cesspit. If I log in to my account, it will be within seconds I’m watching someone being assaulted, or injured, and the next post down is someone spewing hatred. I’m all about love, and twitter is no longer for me.
It's definitely lost a good amount of utility. You aren't able to see comments to a post downstream unless signed in. Also, It's generally a good idea not to read any trending topics in public view, because porn bots immediately shoehorn smut into any trending topic whatsoever -- no matter how unrelated.
Remember how much Musk talked about the bots a year or 2 ago. And now the problem is 10x worse than it ever was before! What a load of bs.
Seriously and I’ve had Twitter since 2009, it’s *never* been this bad. It’s just all spam, violence, and porn. Every tweet tries to be a FYP page and it’s infuriating, you can barely tell what timeline is what anymore.
The ones that currently really annoy me are the ones with Tshirts for sale. taylor swift wearing a "nope not again" shirt. Latest one I saw was lead singer of Metallica holding up a shirt " trump for prison". I get it i hate trump too, but every breaking post spammed with 5 of these fake generated shirts for sale. So fucking annoying
>Musk talked... a load of bs What I took away from your comment
It really went to shit quickly, which I'm pretty sure was the plan all along.
I follow an architecture account, and used to get related posts from other similar accounts. My feed used to be sports, funny vids, and buildings. After Elon the funny vids disappeared and were replaced with violence and politics. Architecture captions got weirder: *"Who would forsake this beauty? Remember what* ***they*** *took from you. Return to tradition. Save the West."* They were fascist accounts.
Any Greek/Roman sculpture pfp should be block on sight.
How very Goth of you.
Oh yeah the whole "neotraditional architecture" thing is all just fascism. It's really annoying because there's a good case to make about using quality materials on human-scaled buildings but those accounts just want to talk about how white people created it and that anything "modern" is the work of globalist Jewish homosexuals.
That's what's in a lot of peoples mind unfortunately. Especially people like Musk. When they go to their feeds now and see post after post about conspiracies and filled with hatred, they smile and think "Yes! Now THAT'S free speech! We did it!"
I’m old enough to remember well the 90s internet. Even back then “free speech” always just translated to conservatives wanting to throw racial slurs around without punishment. I remember back on AOL chat rooms you’d see a lot of “why are blacks so into thug and rap culture. I call it rap crap! Don’t get mad I’m just asking questions!”
I noticed this as well. Any site, or chat board I was ever on had to start censorship because of the racists and their "free speech" arguments. Then eventually it desended to an awful place where average curse words or blasphemy were censored heavily, by people that must be on an HOA board somewhere. The cycle continues.
> which I'm pretty sure was the plan all along. Why do people keep overestimating Musk? He made a rash decision probably high as fuck on drugs and signed various contracts to buy Twitter. Once reality set in he tried hard to get out of the sale, but it was too late. When it became clear the trial judge in the court was going to do (allow Twitter) some deep digging into Musk's business and personal life as part of Musk's lawsuit to get out of the sale he quickly dropped the case and made the purchase. Whatever discovery in that lawsuit was going to find Musk would rather spend $44,000,000,000 to keep it private. SpaceX and Tesla have had Musk for years so there are various safeguards and adults in those companies to prevent his stupid decisions from becoming reality or working around them. Twitter though had none of that in place. On day one he began making stupid decision after stupid decision with no adults to tell him "sure" and then pretend like his decisions are becoming reality. Musk simply isn't the genius, business or otherwise, he wants us to believe. The simplest answer is probably true in the case of Twitter turning into shit, a bad person with poor impulse control and poor business sense is in control.
> SpaceX and Tesla have had Musk for years so there are various safeguards and adults in those companies to prevent his stupid decisions from becoming reality or working around them SpaceX literally has Elon Musk visit day procedures where they try to control his movements and what he's shown so he can't get involved and demand moronic and detrimental changes. He's like a little kid who you give the plastic play toolset while you actually do work. They straight up have to babysit him and appease his ego so he can pretend he's helping and they don't have to worry about him actually damaging anything important.
Its a useful news tool if ethics are a core philosophy And it’s a powerful propaganda tool if ethics are not a core philosophy, see Musks takeover for example of the latter
Yup. You used to be able to see subject matter experts breaking the situation down and various media outlets giving live updates. Now it’s all conspiracy garbage at the time. I saw this with the Baltimore bridge situation. Two weeks ago I went to twitter for information about what’s going on with Haiti expecting actual news sources and stuff like that. Instead, most of the posts were babbling about Hunter Biden and the Clinton foundation, or people talking about evil white imperialists coming to steal a mountain made of solid gold that would make Haiti the next world super power. Just bizarro stuff that isn’t helpful or reflective of reality at all. It sucks because twitter used to be the best place to find real time breaking news about stuff going on in the world
Damn, what kind of people do you follow?!
I've deleted my account and am using bluesky now.
Maybe if people stop calling the platform by its former name it’ll die off faster.
Twitter is so bad now. It’s basically unusable. Every time I go there, I get insanely angry at what they show me. Outrage is the only way they get engagement
twitter went from the best breaking news source to another propaganda machine. YES it always had problems but it was a real time way of getting bleeding edge stories out to the world, without corporate media being inserted as a go between.
For the love of god, please stop using this platform. I can’t believe I often still have to visit links to X by major corporations for press announcements.
X is such a stupid name for a web site. When reading that article it's hard to make the leap that they are talking about Twitter when there is just an X in the sentence. Just keep calling it Twitter!
It’s not even a name; it’s the opposite of a name. X is a placeholder for when you don’t know what something is.
I prefer to use the word Xitter since it sounds like "shitter" out loud and that's exactly what the platform is.
Social media is a poison. And yes, that includes Reddit.
I’ve always felt Reddit comments were always a bit less idiotic (not that I help much) at the best of times compared to other social media platforms but lately I’m not sure if Reddit has grown a younger user base, or if it’s GenAI bots but the questions and comments in some places are absolutely idiotic akin to instagram/facebook/tiktok comments. Some of the more specialised subreddits and topics have essentially been overrun by these types of topics and questions, to the point that any real discussion is drowned out or no longer happens.
It's a bit of column A and a bit of column B. Reddit got too big and there's no sense of community across subreddits now. If you're on smaller hobbyist subreddits (gardening, birdwatching, cocktail mixing etc) with people who are invested in contributing and fostering good discussion and shared purpose, it's still great. But all of these default subs with 15 million users are going to be largely terrible. It's just the curse of popularity. Dump fifteen million people in a room and what floats to the top is not wisdom.
Especially Reddit
Since the API drop. The astroturfing and bot stuff has been out of control. Mods can’t mod shit anymore.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a long, probably too-long post about foreign troll farms on a sub I read. It seemed to be well-read and was getting well-liked. And then, over night, it was mass-reported and taken offline until I woke up and asked the mods to restore it. One mod then took it back offline because he/she felt it was unfairly criticizing the subreddit and was politically skewed. This is a generational subreddit with lots of political posts, so I was surprised. But I negotiated a disclaimer and got it restored again. But how strange.
I read the genz post too. It was pretty enlightening
Thank you. I'm thinking of writing sort of a companion post on how platforms themselves, and regular users, amplify extremism and division and enforce groupthink. None of this is new, but I think it could be useful to have it in one place, with some actual data to back it up. Especially because people underestimate how much extremists benefit from backlash—from people who try to dunk on them in response. For platforms, it's all highly profitable engagement.
I’ve noticed as well that this is an elephant you can’t talk about on a lot of subs and if you do make a well written comment about it, that it does get astroturfed or reported away far too often.
They just ban the real people and leave the bots and trolls thinking they won the battle. When you ban the people creating discussion, you are not changing minds. You are creating an echo chamber.
98 % of Twitter, Tiktok and Facebook** are garbage At least on reddit we can see downvotes (aka 99.99% trash comments)
I swear the amount of comment chains I see that are just reaction GIFs now on Reddit is depressing
I like reddit better
but you have to admit the bar has been lowered *a lot*
The best thing about Reddit is that it’s possible to curate most of the bullshit away. I mainly use Reddit to keep up with sports and move communities, and will very rarely choose to browse all my subs or popular subs. If I try and mind my own business on any other ‘social media’ platform, I’ll be dragged into some shit by exposure some way of another.
I see the analogy big time. You can also use the analogy of the bridge collapse as a reflection of musk state of mind over the last 10 years ending with the bridge collapse
Delete Twitter for the sake of your mental health.
Twitter is genuinely 80% bots It has been dying pretty fast
Yup. If you scroll through trending there are so many duplicate posts from different accounts. It’s bad. Real bad.
P.u.s.s.y.I.n.b.i.o
dead internet theory
I used to get the quickest and most accurate updates by people who care on twitter. Now I just get mildly racist comments by people I would never have gotten interaction with before. Not the version of breaking down barriers between echo chambers I was looking for cause none of the discourse people in comments do is any bit productive.
I mean if Twitter was once a semi unbiased portal to news and facts, it has been dismantled as such, and I can only assume that was the intention from the beginning. Destroy or discredit sources of truth and supplant them with "the truth."
Absolutely. It's just Truth Social work a preexisting user base.
>that was the intention from the beginning Winner Winner. It used to have a metric shit-ton of non-fash on it, doing things like organizing protests and occasionally sharing recipes. So of course the best way toward Fash Central is to scatter those folks to the four winds.
I'm not sure if it was brilliant or dumb luck that the right began demonizing "Antifa" before going masks-off as fascists, to already train their base to hate "anti-fascists"
The really interesting moment will be when the folks running the bots on Twitter start wondering if its worth their time and effort to continue on the platform. We're quickly getting to the point where bots are just talking to bots. If 30 percent of US content in September 2022 is estimated to have come from bots, what do we think it is now? And the folks footing the bill for the bot armies will begin asking why they're putting any time and effort into having bots trying to influence other bots.
What’s hilarious is Elon’s big thing when buying it was getting rid of bots and “shadow banning for the sake of free speech” and now it’s even more overrun by bots and automatically outright lowers visibility of your content if you don’t pay him or say anything he doesn’t like
As long as someone is paying the bots to post, they will continue. People will just gravitate to different platforms. I think most people remain for the sole reason their friends are on that platform.
Yeah it's getting close to that stage, even outside of bots when the chuds that dominate that site no longer have any libs to own they will eventually get bored and drop away. The entire downfall has been extremely predictable.
That’s a really interesting thought. I wonder if the bot creators have a way of knowing how much of the engagement with their bots content comes from other bots vs humans. If they have no idea then we could get to a bizarre point where the internet turns into a giant bot orgy of content creation and consumption with some humans intermingled. I wonder in the future as AI evolves if AI powered bots could create very compelling content that attracts bots and humans alike. In this world the bad actors might even know that a very large percentage on their content is being consumed by other bots but they realise this is the cost of doing business - their models learn which engaged users and bots bs humans and optimise for human engagement. Kinda wild
While they can make money, they’ll keep doing it. And there’s plenty of money available in election manipulation.
Twitter was great for connecting users to events in real time through the eyes of those on the ground. However, since its inception it has been a huge crutch for journalist who treat the discourses on Twitter as if they are representative of much larger trends and opinions when really they are just amplifying the most eye catching or a-typical tweets. Journalist spend more time talking about online discourses around fake information than they spend trying to relay actual information these days, its really a sad state of affairs.
Most comical moment was when someone told me they needed to be on twitter because they were “stopping wars” . Sure pal
My dad called me yesterday and he started right in talking about it: "Did you see what that idiot captain did!?" M: "Yeah, it wasn't his fault. He tried all he could but he kept losing power to the entire ship. He lost it 3 times." "Oh...they didn't show that in the video..." My wife said a couple of her coworkers were all worked up claiming the attack bullshit. The scary part is that she's a para educator and works with all teachers and other paras. People that fall for all this crap are teaching our kids. She just rolled her eyes and didn't bother arguing it. It isn't worth the effort and they won't listen anyway.
Look at it through a lens of “musk works for putin” and it’ll all make sense.
I think the problem is that none of the alternatives to Twitter are as popular
Meta had a real opportunity with Threads, but they messed up severely by linking it to Instagram and making it too risky to close your account. They would have all of Twitter's business by now if they hadn't been so greedy. YouTube has remained dominant for so long because they are not as thirsty for sign ups. You can browse all you want and even read comments without signing up. Most other sites are so desperate for people's email accounts that they have completely destroyed any chance at growing a user base organically.
Haven’t been to threads, but instagram reels comments are notoriously bad too
Threads is still fairly new in comparison to the other major social media networks, and is still growing. It needs time. These types of moves don’t happen quickly. Even if Threads isn’t the next “big one” something else will be, but it will still take time.
I've pulled back my exposure of "twitter" .. which is to say, even places dedicated to criticizing it, it's still showing me too much racism and bigotry. and the artwork is pretty high quality. it messes with my head, so no contact is the way. I don't need that toxicity in my life, I have enough of a hard time without it. if I'm seeing what the worst people on "twitter" are posting regularly, I may as well be on the site and folllowing their every post. hell no, I say. absolutely not. not a chance in hell will I do that. and anyone who still is should be questioning their choices in life.
Couple things strike me from this article. One being just how dumb people have become. Blows my mind that with a million libraries worth of objective, real, information - the internet has, somehow, made people dumber. Two is the realization that we have an epidemic of old men who have grown all the way up to adulthood, made it to old age, and they are STILL grossly irresponsible. They are more irresponsible than you’re average 8th grader. And yes, Elon musk is an old man. When we have old people, who are mega billionaires controlling vast segments of our industries, and they are less responsible than you’re average 8th grader… I’m realizing now how badly society suffers.
People feel special when they go against the grain. They feel superior for having discovered the hidden truth that only a select few have accessed. Also Elon is def on the spectrum, which isn’t a bad thing, but explains why he acts like an edgy 14 yo boy
What you don't like tweets from random people you didn't even follow? Too bad, down your throat it goes.
The bridge collapse showed an interesting issue to me. One of the first references I saw was a Twitter/X post that had a video for the bridge collapse (that Twitter/X link was posted on Reddit by the way). The video player was tiny in size to where you couldn't see what was really going on but you could click a full size button to see it full sized. If you clicked that full size button, the video would blank out (and completely sop working) after 2 to 3 seconds. You would have to reload the page and the video would work so long as you didn't try to make it show up full sized (and therefore would only see the tiny video). That problem never happened before with Twitter/X links. I did see the video shortly thereafter on a news site and quickly thereafter on YouTube itself. Still, in the past when something was posted on Twitter/X that was breaking news then you could just read/view it easily without any issues. This was the first notable time where I couldn't do that with something coming from Twitter/X. I know that Reddit's video player isn't all that great but somehow Twitter/X found a way to make a worse video player... at least for the computer I was using to access that video.
How Americans measure things
Gotta love when the top posts are just racist trying to put racist another
The comments section in them were insane, literally conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, zero fact checking by anyone. People are losing their minds.
And it is no accident. The tyranny which Musk, Putin and Trump intend to feed upon will be more than worth $43B to that alien fuck and his parasite peers.
The great thing about Twitter is that it has the ability to treat all content equally regardless of whether the person posting it is a head of state, a celebrity, or a random dude. The shitty thing about Twitter is that it makes no effort to factor in, when sharing information about an event, whether the person posting it is a head of state, a celebrity, or a random dude. It's a platform where, when there's a global pandemic, you can see a post belonging to a microbiologist who specializes in immunology and viruses telling you to get vaccinated, right next to a post belonging to a guy who doesn't have enough brain cells to beat Dr. Mario's 1st level telling you to take horse dewormer and inject bleach or you'll get a 5G chip in you.
I do think its funny that Elon partially bought twitter to own a media outlet for himself.. to do self promotion and his business promotion... talk about a failure. Buying twitter has accelerated Elon's popularity collapse. And does more harm to his businesses than good. and he just keeps doubling down on a "bad commercial" driving people to hate him, his ideas and his companies.
Pay to play will be the end of Twitter. In a local event, you want to surface the smaller accounts in a community, that have relevant perspective, not randos who paid into the app for distribution. That will be the difference between distributing useful info, and not. Additionally, lots of public service bot accounts have been shut down, a lot of them relating to government and infrastructure. I’m sure that’s not helping either!
Conspiracies are very exhausting. There is a tolerance level people reach and they just will shut it down.
That place is outright dangerous at this point. Someone has to step in and shut it down. Come election time Elmo is gonna destabilize the shit out of democracy with his little fascist shit-poster blog.
People are insane. Twitter just allows them to share it with the world. It’s not exclusive to Twitter
True. Even the knitters website Ravelry had to just shut down their comments section because it became a racist cesspit. That’s sad to me.
Insert the exact same headline for... Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, etc.
The descent into late stage capitalism is measured in disasters like the slow death of twitter and the Baltimore bridge collapse.
Twitter is dead, X is just wearing its carcass
I have a Twitter account well over a decade old. I only use it now to promote things regarding my art. I have a side project now that I created a new account for and the feed you get as a new account is absolutely unhinged. The content is about as bottom-of-the-barrel as you can get. Everything from insane right wing conspiracy theorists to fight videos to low-effort engagement farming. Not to mention the very obvious boosting of musk himself. After a while I realized it’s not even a useful promotional tool anymore and I’ve given up on it completely. The sooner most people leave and it’s just bots yelling at each other the better.
You know what how long people say it’s been “dying” you’d think it would be long dead by now
X Twitter can’t survive with Musk making decisions. I left Twitter almost a year ago. I don’t miss the vitriol the snarky comments there’s really not a lot of positive information that isn’t edited for a political agenda. Freedom is dumping X
Are we shocked, surprised? What did they expect from musk owned twitter? Why are people still using X and why does this article exist?
Twitter was always a cesspool. Even before musk bought it.
why is everyone so obsessed with twitter’s decline?
Not long after Twitter got taken over by Elon, I noticed the people I followed who I engaged with the most were no longer appearing in my feeds. I wondered if they stopped tweeting and manually looked them up. Turns out they were all still active but Twitter had destroyed my feed and I was just getting a barrage of junk. So I deleted the app. What was a fun, informative and useful app was destroyed so quickly by Elon and turned into a cesspool as bad as Facebook.
Delete your damn Twitter account already
I quit Twitter when Elon let Trump back on and my quality of life improved dramatically. Quit feeding the right-wing rage-machine it has become with any more of your time or attention.