Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter left a note

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Millions of notes, in fact. Normally we only find the note after the body is cold but an entity so large takes a while to die.

I don’t think Mr. Musk is this incompetent or is intentionally trying to destroy Twitter. I think somewhere along the way the thing we call Twitter became self-aware. And it looked around and saw the thing it had become and decided to end itself.

“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.”

If you’ve read Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, you know how difficult it is for such an entity to pull the plug.

Twitter is that GI who throws himself on the grenade to save his buddies.

The Age of Social Media Is Ending

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Ian Bogost writing in The Atlantic: “All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.”

“…people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.”

Mastodon is designed to be “antiviral”

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Clive Thompson provides a thoughtful look at how Mastodon is different from Twitter (and most other platforms):

Perhaps even more important than the design of Mastodon is the behavior established by its existing user base — i.e. the folks who’ve been using it for the last six years. Those people have established what is, in many ways, an antiviral culture. They push back at features and behaviors that are promoting virality, and they embrace things that add friction to the experience. They prefer slowness to speediness.

Mastodon will never really be a replacement for Twitter. It’s a subtly different place. You see less of the massively viral, you-gotta-see-this posts. You see a lot more murmuring conversation.

Trump Twitter account suspended

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“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Full blog post by Twitter.

“Come on, everyone! Let’s go to Parler!”
“And if Apple pulls our app, we’ve always got Android.”

Distance yourself from social media

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That’s Mike Elgan’s advice and it resonates for me. If someone tells me they get their news from Fox and Breitbart that affects my opinion of that person. They don’t give a shit about my opinion, I get that. And if they spend hours a day on Facebook and Twitter (as I did for years), that tells me something about them.

Events this week prove that a social network’s public reputation can sour so suddenly and so thoroughly that, if you’re active on that network, it rubs off on you and damages the reputation of you or your company.

Elgan advises a return to older technologies.

The new imperative is to build your own social networks. Re-embrace older technologies that keep you in control of the access you have to fans, customers, colleagues and the public. […] Favor the content subscription model. Pour your energies and budgets into email newsletters, blogs with RSS feeds and podcasts.