Twitter's impressive implosion + the future of social media
Nov 15, 2022 22:26:39 GMT -5
Celestial, Liou, and 2 more like this
Post by Breakingchains on Nov 15, 2022 22:26:39 GMT -5
Catch-up info for those who haven't been following: Elon Musk floated the idea of buying twitter, signed a contract, tried to back out, and was then legally forced to buy it. He has proceeded to fire a large number of employees who were responsible for keeping it functioning at all, then run it into the ground at absolute lightning speed, to the point where both many everyday users and a lot of the brands/celebrities have jumped ship.
That's the short version.
After twitter first got big, I remember thinking it was probably going to fail in like... a few years. The 140 character limit seemed dumb to me (honestly I was even wordier then than I am now) and I'd already seen a lot of social media rise and fall by that point. But then it just kept going. You started seeing it incorporated into other websites, or hardcoded into the UI of various gadgets like digital cameras and game consoles, as if it was expected to be a lasting institution. It seemingly got too big to fail and over the years, the internet started consolidating into a few large websites and services, rather than thousands of small forums, numerous search engines, and hundreds of thousands of experimental or personal sites.
When tumblr cracked down on content rules, the widely-despised tumblr userbase largely jumped ship and all hit twitter. And with that influx of uhh... highly dedicated discourse enthusiasts, it grew insanely toxic and stressful for most people. But its algorithms and outrage-bait model kept it the social media of choice for most people, because it was designed to feed off fast-paced addictive engagement. Facebook declined and twitter got bigger. Reddit cracked down on hate speech, twitter silently refused to ban the nazis and so and twitter got bigger. Adult content and adult art got more and more tricky to host, in all kinds of places. Twitter got bigger.
With all that in mind, I'm amazed at the speed of its downfall. There's a nonzero chance it will just experience a massive tech failure and drop offline at this point--but even if that doesn't happen, it probably won't have a full recovery from this whole episode, and is likely to go into decline.
Can't say I'm gonna miss it. I don't think anything good happened on twitter tbh. Shortform posting plus aggressive algorithms tend to create an outrage-bait culture that breeds misinformation, hate, and lines in the sand. It's imploding for reasons largely separate from those issues, but it's imploding nonetheless, and I think that's probably a net good.
That said, it makes me wonder about the future of social media as a whole, and which platforms are going to rise to replace it.
So basically, it's unclear who is going to effectively replace twitter, and whoever comes out on top, I'm concerned about what their methods and company ethos are going to be. Social media has done a lot of damage in the past decade or more by way of fostering various fast-paced disinformation campaigns, pseudoscience, hate groups, etc.. I read an excellent book recently talking about the rise of mass shootings in the USA; the authors comprehensively studied every single modern shooting to come up with a list of strategies to reduce them, and one of their main findings was that social media companies have to step up to create a less toxic environment or we'll get nowhere.
I really don't trust them to step up. And that's just one of the problems created or exacerbated by modern social media, not even touching the rising incidence of things like dangerous medical misinformation, the overwhelming conviction that Justin Bieber is a lizard person, and other forms of extremism. My hope is that people will start to become more aware of these issues, reject platforms that manipulate them, and lean towards platforms that aim for a less addictive business model, more modest profits, and a more calm and healthy environment. But those platforms have to get safely established first and for now, to my eyes it's unclear which way we're leaning.
So that's just my present brain farts on this topic. I'm interested in knowing your thoughts, any promising new platforms to support or old ones to return to, and how you're feeling about this shift in the social media landscape.
That's the short version.
After twitter first got big, I remember thinking it was probably going to fail in like... a few years. The 140 character limit seemed dumb to me (honestly I was even wordier then than I am now) and I'd already seen a lot of social media rise and fall by that point. But then it just kept going. You started seeing it incorporated into other websites, or hardcoded into the UI of various gadgets like digital cameras and game consoles, as if it was expected to be a lasting institution. It seemingly got too big to fail and over the years, the internet started consolidating into a few large websites and services, rather than thousands of small forums, numerous search engines, and hundreds of thousands of experimental or personal sites.
When tumblr cracked down on content rules, the widely-despised tumblr userbase largely jumped ship and all hit twitter. And with that influx of uhh... highly dedicated discourse enthusiasts, it grew insanely toxic and stressful for most people. But its algorithms and outrage-bait model kept it the social media of choice for most people, because it was designed to feed off fast-paced addictive engagement. Facebook declined and twitter got bigger. Reddit cracked down on hate speech, twitter silently refused to ban the nazis and so and twitter got bigger. Adult content and adult art got more and more tricky to host, in all kinds of places. Twitter got bigger.
With all that in mind, I'm amazed at the speed of its downfall. There's a nonzero chance it will just experience a massive tech failure and drop offline at this point--but even if that doesn't happen, it probably won't have a full recovery from this whole episode, and is likely to go into decline.
Can't say I'm gonna miss it. I don't think anything good happened on twitter tbh. Shortform posting plus aggressive algorithms tend to create an outrage-bait culture that breeds misinformation, hate, and lines in the sand. It's imploding for reasons largely separate from those issues, but it's imploding nonetheless, and I think that's probably a net good.
That said, it makes me wonder about the future of social media as a whole, and which platforms are going to rise to replace it.
Tiktok is still big right now, but it has major toxicity and disinformation issues for similar reasons that twitter did--a heavy focus on algorithms, short form content, and encouraging addictive user behavior. Add in the total lack of user privacy/ease of doxxing and you have something horrible waiting to happen. Reddit's great now, IF you avoid the big subreddits and find the cool little hobbyist ones. Ain't nobody going back to Facebook. And there's seemingly no perfect site for artists right now, especially for adult artists.
Smaller platforms have sprung up; Pillowfort is still around and has just finally made sign-ups free (though there is still a rolling waitlist) and it aims to be completely user-supported so it can avoid being beholden to investors, advertisers or even app stores. Its problem is that the current user count is still relatively low, and that The Kids These Days(tm) don't automatically understand how to use a platform with no algorithm and no attached app--it's an older web-design philosophy, and that gives it a learning curve. Mastodon aims to be a decentralized twitter replacement, and all of its goals sound good to me on paper, but uh... I legit couldn't figure out how it worked. Dreamwidth is still around, but I'm in the same boat there--either I couldn't understand it or it lacks the social features I wanted, and I'm still unsure which. Other small platforms were popping up but then closing left and right for a while.
Meanwhile, Tumblr is making jokes about "firing gunshots to lower the rent" by making cringey Superwholock shipping gifs en masse and posting memes about Vegeta being transgender in order to scare the twitter users away from coming back, because tumblr is ratty shoebox full of extremely online chaos goblins (and frankly I'm cool with that.)
So basically, it's unclear who is going to effectively replace twitter, and whoever comes out on top, I'm concerned about what their methods and company ethos are going to be. Social media has done a lot of damage in the past decade or more by way of fostering various fast-paced disinformation campaigns, pseudoscience, hate groups, etc.. I read an excellent book recently talking about the rise of mass shootings in the USA; the authors comprehensively studied every single modern shooting to come up with a list of strategies to reduce them, and one of their main findings was that social media companies have to step up to create a less toxic environment or we'll get nowhere.
I really don't trust them to step up. And that's just one of the problems created or exacerbated by modern social media, not even touching the rising incidence of things like dangerous medical misinformation, the overwhelming conviction that Justin Bieber is a lizard person, and other forms of extremism. My hope is that people will start to become more aware of these issues, reject platforms that manipulate them, and lean towards platforms that aim for a less addictive business model, more modest profits, and a more calm and healthy environment. But those platforms have to get safely established first and for now, to my eyes it's unclear which way we're leaning.
So that's just my present brain farts on this topic. I'm interested in knowing your thoughts, any promising new platforms to support or old ones to return to, and how you're feeling about this shift in the social media landscape.
