> Twitter is now toxic to advertisers, influencers, and many general users
I guess that's what he wanted? I mean I don't feel sad that advertisers and influencers (basically also advertisers) now have it harder on Twitter. In my book it's a good thing that this particular era of Twitter is coming to an end.
And Mastodon, which everyone claims is superior, I see mainly as a GDPR nightmare but it also has other flaws which will probably prevent it from being accepted by the majority of (especially non-tech-savvy) users
> What is clear is that it was known that linking to Mastodon accounts was not allowed on Twitter, which is why PG, attempting to evade a ban, did not provide such a link.
The user avoided posting the link so that he would be compliant with the rules as the CEO interpreted them. Your expectation is for the user to avoid posting any content that runs against Twitter's financial interest, even if that content is compliant with the rules. That is not a reasonable expectation, and the unreasonableness of this expectation caused the backlash that led to the account being unsuspended.
> How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs? Seems like they can bully and intimidate any organization from universities to corporations to GitHub projects to kowtow to their demands.
Don’t play the losing game. Just don’t be on Twitter.
> If you consider Twitter to be toxic, wait until you experience Mastodon.
I noticed this immediately on several Twitter alts I explored and immediately stopped using them. They were massive echo chambers and circle jerks. Some of them would even turn on each other and implode over incredibly minor things.
I remember message boards imploding in the early 2000s, but that usually took years, massive circles of people leaving, and changing of hands to achieve...this was like that on a speed run; and they mostly all went back to Twitter.
> I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve.
Many aspects of Twitter-the-service are wonderful, but in many people's opinion the service's creator has shown (and continues to show) poor judgement and an apparent inability and/or desire to moderate bad actors. For example, Chris Sacca has been a prominent critic[1], and there's a long history of Twitter's somewhat-abusive history with developers[2].
> Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place.
Decentralized services don't preclude that — see Google and websites, Apple and podcasts, etc. An open ecosystem means that one company doesn't have to solve every problem, and that multiple companies can compete to solve the same problem.
I can at least say that it is for me. Not because of changes on Twitter but because a lot of the people I am on Twitter for have all the sudden created Mastodon profiles and started posting content there too.
> "Tweets" are much longer, so it no longer feels like microblogging. Sensitive content feels even dumber, I don't want to click "Read more" in order to view a tweet like it was some kind of a ad-bait blog post.
While messages can be longer, IME they tend to be about Tweet length.
Content Warnings are optional and can be expanded automatically by your client.
> And I have no idea if I chose the right Mastodon instance with the right hall admins that won't read my private messages and ban me for having the wrong opinion.
Valid. But I'm not sure this is much different at Twitter. And at least with Mastodon, you can leave and take your data with you. If you're concerned about this, you have the option of hosting yourself. I know a lot of people rankle at that suggestion but Twitter doesn't even give you that option.
> The person who replied to this assertion noted some examples of such alternative platforms being interfered with
Those are alternative platforms to twitter in the same way that a strip club is an alternative entertainment venue to your local movie theater.
The alternatives to twitter for people who are not of ill repute are places like Parler and Mastodon, and they're doing just fine and the tyrannical hand of the free market has not crushed them. They're relative failures in the marketplace, but the market doesn't owe them success simply because they have different/lower moderation standards.
> At least with Twitter, it was a corporation with rules and procedures.
I would submit that was is a load-bearing word in that sentence. Twitter as it exists now effectively is run by a single random individual who can read your DMs and kick you off the server if you write anything he does not agree with. Bans have gotten weirder, stupider, and more mercurial since Musk's takeover (the Tweetbot/Twitterrific bans arguably being a particular case of it), and the "Twitter Files" are a result of him giving activist-journalists access to unencrypted DMs without permission. (I'm not interested in debating whether the subjects covered in the Files prove some kind of malfeasance on Twitter's part; that's orthogonal to the point I'm making here.) Twitter may have had rules and procedures a few months ago. Now it has Elon Musk making decisions by polls he pinky-swears to abide by the results of.
In practice, major, established Mastodon instances with tens of thousands of users may well be less likely to treat their users (and developers) as badly as current Twitter is.
> Political pundits had a direct interest in sabotaging the perception of Twitter as an authoritative source of new information,
It's weird that someone think that Twitter is an authoritative source of new information, but it's quite common. Politician fight using tweets. Journalist just dump tweeter threads into paper.
I think that this will save Tweeter. A distributed version like Mastodon can't be an authoritative source of new information. Which of the instance is the real one? I guess the only way to kill Tweeter is if one of the Mastodon instance get so big that becomes the "official" one and ever betray all the other instances disconnecting them.
> Twitter has been a very interesting petri dish for me to see how people interact with each other when they feel like they can say and behave any way they want
It is very self selecting though, isn't it? You even acknowledged that mentioning people fleeing Twitter for Mastodon. It seems Twitter (etc.) attracts the people who want to make a lot of noise without repercussions, who then proceed to make the most noise. And studying behavior on Twitter just studying this small subset of Twitter users, who are a even smaller subset of the general population. Or are you able to adjust for all this?
> I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.
At the very least, I think social media should be legally mandated to provide a chronological feed. I’d argue rules should go further and ban algorithmic feeds outright, though I’m not sure how such a ban could work in practice.
Amusingly, I remember Musk himself was talking about open sourcing Twitter’s feed algorithm and other such aspirational goals. How times have changed!
> and the collapse of Twitter under Elon Musk has created an opportunity for a team with genuine expertise in this space to take a run at text-based social networking again.
In what way has Twitter collapsed? This sounds highly political. Which of course it is, because “a feed of text posts” is in no way innovative. The innovation is in the selective censorship. Orwellian.
> They want to be able to publish freely, to the internet, to share ideas, information they have, memes, whatever.
Is this necessarily true? At this point, I would figure that people who continue to publish on Twitter are aware of its restrictions and continue to communicate there with that knowledge. If anything, one could argue that trying to access Twitter content without an account is what's actually inappropriate here, as posters can no longer trust the guarantees of the platform.
> Twitter is supposed to be a website where people can share ideas.
Twitter used to be a website where people can share ideas. Twitter currently is a website where people can share ideas with other Twitter users. If you post on Twitter now with the intention of being truly public on the internet, I'd say you're using the wrong tool for the job. Whether that's a good business decision or not is irrelevant; the fact is that Twitter has changed its purpose, and users should update their expectations accordingly, however they see fit.
Isn't that considered to be anticompetitive behaviour, what with Twitter being the dominant player in the microblogging space and all?
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