I'm no Elon Musk fan, but I'm okay with Twitter sliding into broken irrelevance. Twitter in the Woke Era was awful, a mental health killer. Everyone in the media hung out there all the time and set the tone for our culture, so there was a time when Twitter actually was real life.
Twitter is still shitty now, but at least I feel better about ignoring it because it's less important. In the end, I think the idea of Twitter in general was a mistake. Shoving everyone together in the same digital room was never going to work. Our brains aren't built to handle it.
Assertions without examples or specifications of 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 aren't helpful for trying to make a point. Just comes across like fools gold-level waxing nostalgic for a more simplistic time before that never existed or unnecessarily hopeful for something better after.
And it sounds like you're only against the idea of another coffee shop in the town square when too many start showing up and it starts overflowing without expansion and/or order to keep things tenable or tenable 𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ. Which is understandable.. but be honest about that, as personalized technophobic griping projecting just kills tech discussions when the former was all it was ever about.
We need some kind of term for people who proudly don't use social media as a conscious choice. There's always been places online where people can engage with select communities based on shared interest. It's a lot like real life. A lot of people I know play music, because we play music. It's local and there's no random dude from Vancouver telling me I suck if we have a bad jam session. Having a bad jam session is how you get good ones.
This idea that your every thought minute-by-minute should be open to the entire world doesn't work with human psychology. It's a first-draft culture. If I want some dude to hear what I'm playing on guitar, then I'll perfect it and record it. Otherwise fuck off. It's not a finished product. It doesn't really benefit me for some dude in Vancouver who hasn't been alive as long as I've played music to tell me that he thinks I suck. If you aren't fine with sucking, then you don't ever get to not-suck. I definitely don't want my sucking 15 years ago to come back to haunt me because I'm better now. It's been 15 years.
The criticism of Musk's actions is pretty spot on with good examples, but for the life of me I don't understand why anyone would be baffled by them. Or assume that he was interested in making the platform better. He was already signaling to white supremacists quite a while before buying the platform. Keen observers noticed his pivot in 2020:
I noticed it once he started going mad about "population collapse" and his tweets became so obnoxious I had to mute him. When the idea of him buying Twitter was floated, the writing had already been on the wall.
"It’s not as though anyone thought Twitter was a sane, healthy, and prosocial place under previous management."
It wasn't, but it was taking some good steps... which forced Jack Dorsey out, and given that he's time and time again shown that he's on board with Elon's ideas and has the same libertarian ideology, he's somebody I look at as a culprit.
Prior to Musk, Twitter was fun in moderate doses, as long as you stayed away from the extreme left and extreme right (which, despite all the claims of "conservatives being banned", did exist). Now it's a real drag, what with all the insane takes and irrelevant blue check replies.
Lately I've come to see Twitter as a kind of exposure therapy. I go on it to train myself not to be bothered by insane garbage takes.
That's a good way to look at it!
I'm no Elon Musk fan, but I'm okay with Twitter sliding into broken irrelevance. Twitter in the Woke Era was awful, a mental health killer. Everyone in the media hung out there all the time and set the tone for our culture, so there was a time when Twitter actually was real life.
Twitter is still shitty now, but at least I feel better about ignoring it because it's less important. In the end, I think the idea of Twitter in general was a mistake. Shoving everyone together in the same digital room was never going to work. Our brains aren't built to handle it.
I agree. I actually made this point twice before in prior pieces, so didn't rehash it here.
"Twitter in the Woke Era"
Assertions without examples or specifications of 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 aren't helpful for trying to make a point. Just comes across like fools gold-level waxing nostalgic for a more simplistic time before that never existed or unnecessarily hopeful for something better after.
And it sounds like you're only against the idea of another coffee shop in the town square when too many start showing up and it starts overflowing without expansion and/or order to keep things tenable or tenable 𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ. Which is understandable.. but be honest about that, as personalized technophobic griping projecting just kills tech discussions when the former was all it was ever about.
We need some kind of term for people who proudly don't use social media as a conscious choice. There's always been places online where people can engage with select communities based on shared interest. It's a lot like real life. A lot of people I know play music, because we play music. It's local and there's no random dude from Vancouver telling me I suck if we have a bad jam session. Having a bad jam session is how you get good ones.
This idea that your every thought minute-by-minute should be open to the entire world doesn't work with human psychology. It's a first-draft culture. If I want some dude to hear what I'm playing on guitar, then I'll perfect it and record it. Otherwise fuck off. It's not a finished product. It doesn't really benefit me for some dude in Vancouver who hasn't been alive as long as I've played music to tell me that he thinks I suck. If you aren't fine with sucking, then you don't ever get to not-suck. I definitely don't want my sucking 15 years ago to come back to haunt me because I'm better now. It's been 15 years.
The criticism of Musk's actions is pretty spot on with good examples, but for the life of me I don't understand why anyone would be baffled by them. Or assume that he was interested in making the platform better. He was already signaling to white supremacists quite a while before buying the platform. Keen observers noticed his pivot in 2020:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262407/elon-musk-red-pill-far-right-twitter-tesla-spacex
I noticed it once he started going mad about "population collapse" and his tweets became so obnoxious I had to mute him. When the idea of him buying Twitter was floated, the writing had already been on the wall.
"It’s not as though anyone thought Twitter was a sane, healthy, and prosocial place under previous management."
It wasn't, but it was taking some good steps... which forced Jack Dorsey out, and given that he's time and time again shown that he's on board with Elon's ideas and has the same libertarian ideology, he's somebody I look at as a culprit.
Prior to Musk, Twitter was fun in moderate doses, as long as you stayed away from the extreme left and extreme right (which, despite all the claims of "conservatives being banned", did exist). Now it's a real drag, what with all the insane takes and irrelevant blue check replies.