१३ जुलै, २०२३

What if the thing you thought you hated really was what you loved most of all?

I'm reading "Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads? The app is vapid, boring and destined to fail/The blandness of the Threads experience makes me yearn for the trolls of Twitter" by media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan (The Guardian).
While millions might be using Twitter at any one time, one’s Tweets would only flow in the feeds of a few dozen, maybe hundreds. Occasion Tweets [sic] would rocket around within language groups if many people liked or re-Tweeted them. But that was unpredictable and unsystematic. That’s no way to run an information machine. That’s because Twitter never was an information machine. It was and is an emotion machine. Its fundamental emotion is indignation. We all overdid it with indignation in the best days of Twitter. Even nice people over-indulged, which is why it was ultimately corrosive to public deliberation and civic virtue....
On Threads, there are no hashtags. Meta has opted not to facilitate them, so there is no way the heart of Twitter could happen on Threads. Instagram head and Threads founder Adam Mosseri says algorithms won’t promote serious or political content. “We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place,” he wrote on his Threads account.... Mosseri does not want negativity spoiling his platitude party. 
Twitter was designed to amplify indignation. Threads has been designed to impede indignation.... 
Now devoid of responsible content moderation, Twitter is overrun by NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls.... Twitter is eating itself with a series of bad decisions.... The moral of this saga is that no one can nostalgically replicate the experience of Twitter circa 2011 to 2021, just as no one can replicate the web of 1996-2001 or the blogosphere of 2004-09 before Twitter wiped it out....

The golden past is, as ever, lost. 

३० टिप्पण्या:

RideSpaceMountain म्हणाले...

"Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
Zuck: just ask
Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuck: people just submitted it
Zuck: i don’t know why
Zuck: they “trust me”
Zuck: dumb fucks"


Never forgetti Zuck's 'trustworthy' spaghetti.

Dave Begley म्हणाले...

No hashtags because that's probably protected IP. And the inventor was Evan Clark from Clarks, Nebraska and he went to UNL for 1.5 years.

Enigma म्हणाले...

The schoolroom has split into apple-polishers and the note-passers.

Maybe they will all mature into teenagers soon.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves म्हणाले...

Remember when the left were desperate to find out (create) that Russians hacked the vote machines for Trump in 2016 - they blamed facebook, too.

Facebook/ and by extension Zuckerberg were formerly the enemy of the obedient hivemind left. Now that Zuckerberg is clearly in camp mob-democrxiat - he is the left's hero.

gilbar म्हणाले...

On Threads, there are no hashtags. Meta has opted not to facilitate them, so there is no way the heart of Twitter could happen on Threads. Instagram head and Threads founder Adam Mosseri says algorithms won’t promote serious or political content.

Threads developer says;
"We analyzed EVERYTHING that made people use twitter, and Removed those things.. This is WHY WE SUCK!"

rehajm म्हणाले...

Now devoid of responsible content moderation, Twitter is overrun by NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls...

...euphemisms for conservatives or people expressing opinions we don't like...

This is a flattering analysis of why Twitter appealed to liberals. It omits some of the most important reasons people enjoyed Twitter-it was a liberal opinion propagandist and liberals enjoyed gratification of censoring conservative speech. That's the most fun. On ZuckFace are the conservative voices showing up at all? No?

How boring...

Alexander म्हणाले...

i see the problem right here:

If you can't differentiate between accounts that are publicly posting pornography, and accounts that are making some spicy political opinions or 'trolls' that can be elimiated by simply hitting the block button, then of course you're forced to create a bloated mess with an army of gatekeepers and thereby destroy what makes the site work.

Of course, it's people like Siva Vaidhyanathan that have spent the 12 years since the twitter golden age insisting on more and more bloated mess rather than just accepting that some people like the orange man, and that you don't need to jettison users for badthink you can just block them.

rhhardin म्हणाले...

People link to Twitter and you never see a link to Threads, is all I know.

I have a Twitter account but it was blocked instantly, even before I posted anything, I think because through a series of page reloads and stops I opened the account without a mobile phone.

gilbar म्हणाले...

While millions might be using Twitter at any one time, one’s Tweets would only flow in the feeds of a few dozen, maybe hundreds..
Now devoid of responsible content moderation, Twitter is overrun by NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls..

let's THINK about THIS. The ONLY things you see on Twitter, are the things YOU follow..
My Twitter is boring, and mostly about amusement park rides, (and Liberals of Tiktok).
If YOUR Twitter is "overrun by NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls", that's YOUR Problem
YOU are a sick motherf*cker.. That's WHY YOU are following NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls.
NOT rocket science

Kate म्हणाले...

I would say the golden Twitter years ended in 2016 with the Orange Man indignation, but otherwise this is a good summary. Iowahawk, one of the great blogging wits, stopped completely for Twitter. I wonder if Substack will attract someone like him back to long form writing, and we'll all cycle through another (better?) iteration.

CJinPA म्हणाले...

Everyone is a "media studies professor" in their own way.

Kevin म्हणाले...

Now devoid of responsible content moderation

So the previous content moderation regime was “responsible”?

It was certainly responsive. I can’t make a case for responsible.

Original Mike म्हणाले...

Sure, Siva. Nazis.

Dude1394 म्हणाले...

Show your work. MAINLY because the author is a democrat, then you must make them show their work. They have squandered any semblance of giving them the benefit of a doubt.

Paddy O म्हणाले...

"That's WHY YOU are following NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls. NOT rocket science"

This. Twitter has a content filter for NSFW content, which I keep on and never see NSFW content. I didnt even realize that Twitter allowed pornography. I switched it off once to see (my kids are at the age I need to be more attentive to whats possible) and I still didn't see anything in my main feed of who I follow or in the for you section of follows and recommended. Only when I looked at trending topics did some start showing up.

I turned the filter back on and all the NSFW is gone. I also use the Twitter calm extension and that hides a lot of trends and stuff that stir up frenzy.

The article is like that old story about the man taking a Rorschach test. After he's done the psychiatrist says, "You seem to be obsessed with sex, Mr. Warner." Mr. Warner replies, "Me?! You're the one showing me all the porn pics! Psychiatry is a very perverted field!"

Paddy O म्हणाले...

"So the previous content moderation regime was “responsible”?"

One of Musk's big tasks early on was to clean out the amount of child porn and trafficking content, right? The old Twitter moderators were responsible for the world they wanted to see.

Sean Gleeson म्हणाले...

I was stuck at the headline: "The app is pid," it said. I figured "pid" must be some new slang. (Like "mid" means a middling item, but what could "pid" mean?) Googling "pid" got me nowhere. Maybe it's a neologism only used in Britain? So as a last resort I finally clicked through to the linked Guardian article. Ah. It actually says "vapid."

MayBee म्हणाले...

Twitter is overrun by porn in the way that the internet is overrun by porn. I never see it in either place, but that's because of how I use them.

As for hashtags, Instagram has them so it's weird for Threads not to. I haven't figured out how to find content *I* am interested in there.

Temujin म्हणाले...

I like how he paints the golden years of Twitter as 2011-2021, those golden years of censoring the anti-Narratives, the right wing thoughts, the various publications, links and notes to things that were not 'approved' by all the most righteous ones. The glory days that unlocked the ability to change elections.

Old and slow म्हणाले...

My girlfriend, who is a bit of a lefty, told me that she didn't like Twitter because it was nothing but porn. I found this very amusing, because I see no porn, just lots of heavy machinery and politics... Wonder why she gets so much porn?

traditionalguy म्हणाले...

One thing Twitter and Threads probably nagree on is George Orwell is a non person. That dude understood too much.

chuck म्हणाले...

Twitter is overrun by NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls

Obligatory opinion among liberals, so that box is checked. Evidence supporting the opinion is neither given, nor expected.

Barry Sullivan म्हणाले...

Betraying my ignorance here: what does "pid" mean? As in "[t]he app is pid, . . ."

All I came up with online is "pelvic inflammatory disease."

So am I to conclude that these days calling something "pid" is an insult such that here the author is calling Threads equivalent to a nasty women's problem?

Isn't that awfully rather sexist?

mgarbowski म्हणाले...

Now devoid of responsible content moderation, Twitter is overrun by NSFW content, Nazis, and trolls.

I use Twitter a lot and see close to zero Nazis, limited NSFW content which almost always is hidden behind a warning, and the troll level is same as it ever was. Since Musk took over, it also is much easier to take control of your feed. If the author is seeing different that's a function of who he follows.

Heartless Aztec म्हणाले...

For me, all of social media sucks. Twitter, Truth, Threads, Tik Tok, Facebook, the lot of them. But that's my own universe where they have all been shuttered and removed from my hard drives and phones. I allow only blogs and You Tube (for repairs instructions, etc) to exist in my Heartless Universe. I love being the God of Me.

Big Mike म्हणाले...

The sad reality is that the only good idea Zuckerberg ever had was stolen from the WinkleVoss twins (he also used their money to build his Facebook. He isn’t all that creative on his own.

The Vault Dweller म्हणाले...

This article sounds like the bargaining stage of grief.

PM म्हणाले...

pid as in stu-pid.
Perfectly self-referential.

Mikey NTH म्हणाले...

The free marketplace of ideas is a very scary place. Too bad there is no way to reject any of those vendors by yourself.

JK Brown म्हणाले...

Twitter lives up to its root, twit

"To vex by bringing to notice, or reminding of, a fault, defect, misfortune, or the like; to revile; to reproach; to upbraid; to taunt; as, he twitted his friend of falsehood.
[1913 Webster]"

Threads seems be going for the sewing circle/quilting bee vibe. They apparently have now ideal how malicious women get gossiping over a quilt.