Demise of Twitter: how a 'utopian vision' for social media became a 'toxic mess'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/28/the-demise-of-twitter-how-a-utopian-vision-for-social-media-became-a-toxic-mess

by Brajeshwar • 2 years ago

18 18 2 years ago

theguardian.com

vouaobrasil• 2 years ago

Global social media can never be a utopia simply because no one cares for anyone else on the platform. Large-scale anonymous interaction outside of specialized communities doesn't work.

nextworddev• 2 years ago

Haven’t been on Twitter in a while - is it actually dead or no? Seems like most ML stuff is active on Twitter

hifromwork• 2 years ago

Probably depends on the niche. I use it a lot exclusively as part of my work and it's quite active there (I work in infosec). I imagine there are many different niches and circles of interest that are still active on Twitter, even if overall the activity slowed down a bit.

etrautmann• 2 years ago

Yeah - the academic neuroscience community still uses it somewhat. I think many people need whatever validation they get from the platform and have nowhere else to turn currently.

noobermin• 2 years ago

The other thing the article failed to mention is musk's twitter is gladly willing to censor certain people on behalf of some governments like Turkey while picking fights with others like Brazil. Again the whole free speech thing at the very least isn't by some principle.

piva00• 2 years ago

Gladly censoring Turkish and Indian tweets while picking a fight against the whole government of Brazil, including the courts.

The difference seems to be that Brazil has a large potential for lithium and rare earths (3rd largest reserve of rare earths) vs Turkey and India (which has discovered some large deposits of lithium).

Elon is just scummy as fuck...

winternett2• 2 years ago

There is a ton of manipulation on all social media now. If you look at the profits company execs and investors make from it, it's easy to see how they're funneling revenue out of these platforms into their pockets without really investing in the communities at all with features that create opportunity and utility. The model for large social platforms has been corrupted to the point that there's a blueprint for them, similar to casinos, where only the house wins.

I think the main reason why Elon turned Twitter into hell was to get most of the people on older accounts to quit because they had EULAs that weren't compatible with his profit plans. Now, older accounts don't grow, and they languish in a sea of whatever content Elon wants to trend. There is incessant spam about crypto, celebrities, boring music, police chase and fight clips, KPop, a ton of things that no one is interested in, while the site just also loses money.

It's symbolic of social media altogether, as Instagram, TikTok, etc. have all turned on users to just push ads, and they announce features that nobody wants. It's the height of tone deafness that will cause everyone to migrate completely off of social media... They did it to themselves. It was their ego, not any sort of utopian vision, when you think only from your own limited social perspective, there's no way you can lead a platform of millions of people with differing perspectives and backgrounds.

jncfhnb• 2 years ago

I think the main reason it went to hell was blithering incompetence

pixl97• 2 years ago

There is a ton of manipulation on all social media now.

I mean there has been a lot of manipulation on social media for a long, long time its just that it is so wide spread and so obvious now it's not deniable by anyone. Way back off in the early days of Slashdot, long before the sale to Dice, there were topics that were astroturfed and vote manipulated to ensure a consistent message (probably by some nation state, but who knows for sure). Anyone watching back then realized the internet was already going to turn into a cesspit when it came to user contributions. The tech companies turing was always going to happen, there is just too much money involved in rage engagement of users. Baring the over expenditure on twitter, social sites like facebook are still printing money.

winternett2• 2 years ago

Even when we had Internet forums (PHPBB and whatnot) the admins would assert their influence and moderate unfairly. Only turning back to an ecosystem of individually owned sites would counter the over moderation, but even then, you still have the issue of SEO and Search Result manipulation to battle. :/

mediumsmart2• 2 years ago

Uncensored social media is a utopian vision and would be a toxic mess. How that happens is kind of irrelevant, or is the article about something else?

nozzlegear• 2 years ago

The article is about how that happens.

mediumsmart2• 2 years ago

Thanks. I thought it would be.

soundnote2• 2 years ago

There have always been issues around misinformation and trolling, says Barnet, but the company adopted measures to try to combat some of the worst of the effects, by implementing what she calls the “three pillars”: blue tick verification of users, moderation policies and a trust and safety team.

And there it is. Twitter bad because it doesn't enforce opinions Guardian likes anymore.

“To some extent that represents a broader sense in the US about free speech that it is an absolute good above all. Whereas elsewhere in Australia and Europe and many other places there’s much more about needing to balance the rights of free speech and the right to freedom from harmful speech. And for many otherwise quite liberal people in the US, that sounds like censorship, essentially.”

Censorship sounds like censorship to people? I'm shocked.

He says this is a shame, as academic research on Twitter used to enable the platform to identify and clean up pockets of hate speech and misinformation, which will now go even more unchecked.
“It’s certainly already starting to transform into something that’s more similar to … platforms like Gab or Parler, or even [Trump’s] Truth Social where you’ve got far, far right people furiously agreeing with each other and furiously hating on everyone else.”

And more crying that Twitter doesn't enforce left-wing values anymore.

Not that it enforced rules against hate speech before - people were absolutely racist against whites in the old times, but that's a kosher kind of racism among the left-leaning PMC, so nobody cared. The whole article is just whining that the other side gets a fair hearing now.

RavingGoat• 2 years ago

Twitter becoming 4Chan isn't the win that you think it is.

soundnote2• 2 years ago

Twitter isn't 4chan, it's not even close. The medium is completely different, and that matters. The users are different, and that matters.

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

There's so much missing in this article.

* No more public access. Twitter used to be a place to share and get info out, but now a lot of people won't be able to browse & enjoy a link you send them.

* Absurd rate limits. People can't seem to stay on Twitter like they used to, because rate limits kick in very fast.

* Many interesting accounts & bots shut down after API limits started being applied. Doing something interesting in Twitter used to be free. Now it's many thousands of dollars.

* One of the worst things, the signal to noise ratio has gone to hell. Blue-checks are paid for, and get higher ranked. People happy to pay for & advertise bluechecks tend to be Musk fans, with strong anarcho-capitalist/libertarian views and/or edgelordy. Good/upvoted content is buried beneath sludge. The problem got so bad that Twitter started giving people bluechecks whether they wanted it or not and forced it on, removed the ability to hide/disable, just to make bluechecks not look so consistently terrible.

* The hate speech happening is burning bridges. People keep acting like, oh, nazi shit showing up next to an ad is a rare mistake, but advertisers don't want to be two posts away from nazi shit, they don't want to be near it at all. Rather than sympathize with the ad buyers, Musk shit talks and threatens them & goes off about "censorship".

* Twitter ("X") isn't getting any better and all the excitement being drummed up isn't for Twitter getting better; X's vision is to become something else, a video service, a banking service. Whether that's what core users want or are interested in or not seems dubious. There's no signs an infection point comes where Twitter can go back to being good, to being open & democratic & the place; everything seems on track to just be pointlessly recast & the past blown up.

underseacables• 2 years ago

How many people dislike Twitter only because of Elon musk?

Demise of Twitter: how a 'utopian vision' for social media became a 'toxic mess'

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