Another problem is that Twitter's demise left people who liked the format disenchanted and suspicious (and rightly so), and because of that, trying to recreate Twitter is bound to fail, at least until some more time passes.
I just checked https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009 and X (formerly twitter) is the #1 news app followed by substack, CrimeRadar Dispatch Audio, and coming in at 4th place is reddit.
So if twitter's dead, what does that make reddit, 3 spots behind it? Well, not dead, obviously. Pretending that twitter is gone or dead is just not rational behavior.
That's a two year old article and X is the #1 news app today. How can you possibly construe that as "shrinking fast" if two years later it's in the top spot literally today? It seems like wishful thinking on your part rather than being reasonable based on first principles and the data at hand, from where I'm sitting.
The ranking compiled on Wikipedia is from a couple months ago. X is now behind Pinterest, Reddit, and LinkedIn (and of course, the major social players). Also, why would it be "wishful thinking"?
BTW, on US iOS App Store, Claude today is way ahead of Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Surely you don't think it means it's used by more people.
Again, the ranking from Apple is from today. Not "a couple months ago". And again, it's #1 while reddit is #4. So which is incorrect, Apple, or Wikipedia? It has to be one of them.
>Also, why would it be "wishful thinking"?
Because you've Motte & Balley'd twice now, each time in the direction of downplaying X's success. Because X is objectively doing great. #1st place is objectively great.
>BTW, on US iOS App Store, Claude today is way ahead of Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Surely you don't think it means it's used by more people.
Are any of those news apps? This is the third Mott & Bailey. Again in the direction of denigrating X with bad data. So first principles and neutral data sourcing cannot be the reason for the inaccuracies - I dare say lies. It's flailing at this point.
The discussion is about trends, and the most recent datapoint shows it at a point of primacy when the argument was it was in decline two years ago. Clearly that claim was incorrect.
One of Twitter's strengths was that it was a constructive community where near services & informational/radiative bots chilled. It was a connective fabric, it made information available.
That's all been gone. The algorithm fav'ing paid blue check users massively made things worse from there.
Bluesky attempts to be better on all fronts here. Interesting apps/services are welcome, permissionless. There is no top down pro-facsism pro-racism pro-MAGA finger-on-the-dial algo-shaping.
Sure there's some who will just be burned out & not interested. But there's so many interesting structural safeguards & such a openness to play & creativity & tuning... I really encourage folks to give it a time. I would definitely hope that "bound to fail" is perhaps not a cast die, that, we tried something great once, it's gone, never again, is not how this works.
I remember being in 20 years old, at the start of my career, and complete broke. I thought Twitter was just a toy website, until one day I radically changed my mind.
I was a customer of a bank that treated me with nothing but contempt. Whenever I called the bank because of a problem, I would stay on the line forever to eventually talk to an unbothered representative. One day, instead of calling, I complained on twitter and tagged the bank. Half an hour later the bank apologised and fixed my problem.
Elon Musk is all of those things personally (see: that heil-handing incident), and it's public knowledge that he made the Twitter engineering team amplify his own posts.[1]
For whatever faults the old Twitter had pre-Musk, it did establish a certain critical mass for a certain type of short form threaded discussion which seems to be largely dead at this point.
Jack seemed interested in the protocol side of the house and making a good product that was in spirit of the internet, it also had a mix of people you might know IRL (with reasonable privacy defaults) and official sources/public figures. I don't think he was much interested in the censorship, it feels they got run over by a bunch of activist types during covid (who decided it was de rigeur to censor real doctors for perceived 'misinformation'). Jack started work on Bluesky and now is involved in Nostr
Speaking personally, supposedly Twitter now (X) still has a bunch of censorship and I don't especially like Musk (but what he did was valuable, showing Jay Bhattacharya he'd be put on a trending blacklist) and the site is... well, I should be able to follow threads without having an account but they crippled it so much. It reminds me of Instagram, "log in to see any PUBLIC page"
Court orders are different from psyops. The Bhattacharya thing, and the entire narrative around that stuff was essentially a psyop. Geo-restricting a Turkish politician because the authoritarian govt arrested him and gave a court order to restrict his account is - first of all - what all social media platforms must adhere to legally, and second of all is currently being contested by X in court.
I don't know if it was a psyop. Twitter banned tons of people during covid for completely ridiculous reasons, unless it was somehow all forced by court order or something
It was the censorship. Which isn't gone, but is way less restrictive than it was. And I've actually started seeing bangers (auto) translated from Japanese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese lately, which is fantastic. I don't really want an English hivemind. I want to see what the whole world thinks. It's kinda fantastic tbh.
Who needs censorship when you have an algorithm to feed people what you want them to see and you've self-selected for only people who aren't morally opposed to the new site?
Don't be fooled into thinking you're getting a dose of unfiltered reality on X.
>Who needs censorship when you have an algorithm to feed people what you want them to see and you've self-selected for only people who aren't morally opposed to the new site?
It feeds you what you engage with, and it changes surprisingly quickly. It caught onto my ARC raiders interest almost instantly. I engaged with a Portuguese post once, and now I get wonderful translated posts in Spanish, French, and Arabic too.
>Don't be fooled into thinking you're getting a dose of unfiltered reality on X.
What evidence could you possibly have that I'm not? There's lots of "politically incorrect" things which is a symptom of low filtration. Besides, you can't have seen my feed. Completely baseless allegation. So what's the real reason for taking the anti-X stance?
> There's lots of "politically incorrect" things which is a symptom of low filtration.
Politically incorrect things might be a symptom of low filtration on almost any other site, but not one run by Elon Musk. He has a clear agenda and is not shy about putting his finger on the scale at X. It's so blatant and well documented that it's almost hard to imagine you could be commenting in good faith.
>Politically incorrect things might be a symptom of low filtration on almost any other site,
Why would that change anything? I've always found political incorrectness to be a symptom of free speech.
>but not one run by Elon Musk.
Why would that be any different? Same symptom. Same free speech as far as I can tell.
>He has a clear agenda
What's the agenda?
>is not shy about putting his finger on the scale at X.
What instances of him putting his finger on the scale do you have? He gets community noted hilariously often.
>It's so blatant
What makes it blatant?
>well documented
By people who clearly hate the man and have lost their ability to reason over it. Like the ones who lost the narrative control of twitter.
>it's almost hard to imagine you could be commenting in good faith.
Having different opinions than you isn't bad faith. I brought up that the censorship is better than before (but still not great), and mentioned some cool new developments I've seen. You've attempted to steer the conversation to be about Elon Musk or myself. These are both ad hominem attacks, which is textbook bad faith.
