Twitter's potential collapse could wipe out vast swathes of recent human history | MIT Technology Review https://t.co/KidZdbO4y7
— Sherrilyn Ifill (@SIfill_) November 15, 2022
I owe someone a hat tip for this. But: It’s not just us obsessive dilettantes! This info is *important* …
Almost from the time the first tweet was posted in 2006, Twitter has played an important role in world events. The platform has been used to record everything from the Arab Spring to the ongoing war in Ukraine. It’s also captured our public conversations for years.
But experts are worried that if Elon Musk tanks the company, these rich seams of media and conversation could be lost forever. Given his admission to employees in a November 10 call that Twitter could face bankruptcy, it’s a real and present risk.
Musk himself acknowledges that Twitter is a public forum, and it’s this fact that makes the potential loss of the platform so significant. Twitter has become integral to civilization today. It’s a place where people document war crimes, discuss key issues, and break and report on news…
“If Twitter was to ‘go in the morning’, let’s say, all of this—all of the firsthand evidence of atrocities or potential war crimes, and all of this potential evidence—would simply disappear,” says Ciaran O’Connor, senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a global think tank. Information gathered using open-source intelligence, known as OSINT, has been used to support prosecutions for war crimes and acts as a record of events long after the human memory fades.
Part of what makes Twitter’s potential collapse uniquely challenging is that the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company, says O’Connor’s colleague Elise Thomas, senior OSINT analyst with the ISD. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with many times over the coming decades, she says: “This is perhaps the first really big test of that.”
Twitter’s ubiquity, its adoption by nearly a quarter of a billion users in the last 16 years, and its status as a de facto public archive, has made it a gold mine of information, says Thomas.
“In one sense, this actually represents an enormous opportunity for future historians—we’ve never had the capacity to capture this much data about any previous era in history,” she explains. But that enormous scale presents a huge storage problem for organizations…
“In a way, Twitter has become a kind of aggregator of information,” says Eliot Higgins, founder of open-source investigators Bellingcat, who helped bring the perpetrators who downed MH17 to justice. “A lot of this stuff you see from Ukraine, the footage comes from Telegram channels that other people are following, but they’re sharing it on Twitter.” Twitter has made it easier to categorize and consume content from almost any niche in the world, tapping into a real-time news feed of relevant information from both massive organizations and small, independent voices. Its absence would be keenly felt…
"For all the grandiose talk about The Light Of Consciousness and The Future Of Humanity that has come out of Silicon Valley during its ascent, what it has delivered has mostly been spectacularly useless, lifeless, and anti-human." https://t.co/gxNLus1Gsn
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) November 14, 2022
… It is not just a feeling but a fact that this moment is increasingly governed by the fatuity of the richest and most powerful people in the culture, and warped everywhere to reflect and serve their antic relentlessness and idle sadism and zealously anhedonic overall mindset. These powerful people are boring and smug and greedy, but also so uninterested in anything but their dorky feuds and faddish self-flattering worldview that they mostly tend to just reproduce all that. Because these people have bought so much, not just like “politics” and “the news media” but things that people actually enjoy and use all the time, the consequences of that small-mindedness rush downhill daily.
For all the grandiose talk about The Light Of Consciousness and The Future Of Humanity that has come out of Silicon Valley during its ascent, what it has delivered has mostly been spectacularly useless, lifeless, and anti-human. In this sense, it reflects its owners perfectly. The same people lend each other money, back and forth, in re-skinned pursuit of what these people always want done for them—to be served by strangers, promptly; to get over on everyone else and each other; to get richer even as they sleep. (There is also the effort, which is not new among rich dullards, to create an ideological framework that explains why their dippy whims are not only just, but vital to human progress. This also has the residual effect of creating some demeaning jobs, in this case for servile house intellectuals and not TaskRabbits.)
… A culture and politics so bent out of shape by the worship of wealth will naturally serve the rich and powerful much better than it will serve anyone or anything else. The pressure of that class’s comfort, the figurative weight of them lazing around atop everything, increasingly bears down on everyone, everywhere. Their amusements crowd out anything else, their preferences are reflected blindingly and echoed deafeningly; everyone is more or less left to nod along and either laugh at their jokes or not.
This is not really good for anyone. The masses groan and struggle but mostly just deal with it; the men on top soften and become weirder in the absence of consequence, or pushback, or even modest friction. It is absolutely meaningful that Elon Musk is a stupendously wack human being. He’s mostly a bore, heroically humorless and selfish, a bully and a cretin; for someone often described as a visionary, Musk is toweringly incurious. But because Musk is so rich, his defects are everyone’s business. Because Musk now owns Twitter, a ridiculous, ungovernable, justifiably beloved place where people shout at each other and famous people, and share links and make jokes, Musk’s personal wackness is now everyone else’s problem…
The decision to buy Twitter, which always felt like a clammy gag directed toward his online fan community but became real due to Musk’s signature heedlessness, has backfired. The consequences, unsurprisingly, have landed on people Musk disregarded all along. Thousands of employees lost their jobs at Musk’s epic whim last week and eighty percent of the company’s 5,500 contractors were abruptly terminated over the weekend, and others have quit rather than work under him; the site seems likely to become increasingly unworkable just as a result of that attrition. An already parlous business model is breaking under the pressure of the owner’s addled tinkering; Musk has made clear that he planned to continue to violate the Federal Trade Commission consent decree under which Twitter operates, and that the consequences, which could include jail time, would be his employees’ problem; the implementation of Musk’s glib impulses and gripes instantly made the site chaotic in ways that, inconveniently, proved extremely unpleasant for the site’s biggest advertisers…
All of which was admittedly pretty funny. But it also hinted at a deeper incoherence and untenability, a sense that Twitter was not so much taking shape under Musk’s leadership as taking on his signature defects as its own. If Musk was going to kill Twitter, this was always going to be how—by whimsically, willfully being himself in an exhausting and inscrutable headlong attempt to impress the bummy online influencers he admires and the joyless billionaire pantloads in his social cohort. Musk might indeed kill the site; he has already loaded it with debt and wrecked its capacity to generate revenue and gotten rid of the people that make it functional, and he gets bored very quickly and is fundamentally not committed to anything beyond his own aggrandizement. That doesn’t augur well, but things generally do not end that cleanly or decisively, online or anywhere else. They die like everything else.
It’s a cycle. People create something, together, that reflects their energy and weird work; that thing becomes compelling as a result, and that makes it valuable, and at some point someone puts a price on it and someone else pays that price. It is at that moment that the thing begins to change. The new owner will almost always decide that what is most interesting about this thing is not the human essence that gave it value, but The Owner Himself, and will act accordingly. People will come back for the valuable stuff until the owner succeeds in crowding it out; when that crowding is done, the owned thing dies. Until then, what’s left is just what’s valuable—the humanity and brilliance and unpredictability and fun that all that cynical and idiotic and self-serving wealth is always and everywhere busy replacing with itself. There’s nothing to do but look for the good stuff until the looking becomes too challenging, or until it’s gone.
Watching Elon operate in a domain I have some familiarity with has put me off ever wanting to own a Tesla.
— Tom Dale (@tomdale) November 15, 2022
Well, it’s easier than fixing anything https://t.co/tKaxRFmLXT
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 16, 2022
and like, you can say “oh, well, that’s what they hired [other executive] for”, but at tesla, he’s being sued right this moment for stacking the board with cronies who let him walk away with more than $50B to do his job less than part time
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) November 15, 2022
at some point, tesla’s board has to understand that they are the marks and that everyone knows it, and that’s *before* he starts defaulting on twitter debt
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) November 15, 2022
EthylEster
It will not be missed by me.
dmsilev
Apparently, according to a story I read this morning, the (remaining) employees of Twitter have taken to referring to Musk as “Elmo”, pretty much because it undoubtedly pisses him off and they have no more fucks to give.
Also, late yesterday Elmo sent out an all-hands email saying, more or less, “sign up to work for 80 hours a week for the indefinite future (with, of course, no additional compensation) or your resignation is accepted effective tomorrow”. We’ve now entered the “when, not if” phase of Twitter’s collapse.
gwangung
As a tool for organizing marginalized communities like the Black community, the trans community, the disabled community, and so forth, Twitter has no comparison.
THAT I will miss greatly, and curse that racist dickhead for destroying that like a five year old wrecking other kids’ toys.
Betsy
I’ve been saying for years that one solution for managing social media to the benefit of humanity is to apply the principles of public utility law to it.
We have a thousand years (literally!) of well-developed legal precedent for managing those systems that qualify as utilities. Certain aspects of social media are characteristic of public utilities.
Public utility law is one source that we should be drawing on when we scratch our heads about how to maximize the benefit of these systems, while managing and minimizing the harms they are capable of. It’s what we’ve done for public utility systems throughout history.
(ETA: examples of regulated public utilities are the electric grid and electric energy providers; the natural gas network and providers; telecommunications; flood management and regional stormwater systems; water and sewer systems.
Hospitals, ferries, the airwaves and telecomm frequencies, bridges, turnpikes, toll roads, bus and transit systems, airports, and more are related things, some of which are called “common carriers,” etc., and draw on a similar body of law.
These are all things that by their nature are unique and hard to replicate (you can’t have two sets of comprehensive water lines serving the same geography, for example), and are often operated by private companies, but are non-competitive in nature (they tend to result in monopolies or duopolies), while having massive effects on societal well-being (if the sewage system doesn’t work,e.g., everyone could die of cholera) — so they have to be profitable, but they also have to be managed with the public interest uppermost. )
trollhattan
It’s perhaps ironic that the highest Tesla concentration on the roads is in the South Bay. Might be some good used bargains, coming up.
dmsilev
@gwangung: There were tools Before Twitter (IRC, Usenet for those of us who are dinosaurs, etc.) and there will be things After Twitter (Mastodon seems to be the refuge of choice right now). Still sucks that Musk is vandalizing something that more or less worked, but at least we can take solace in the fact that he’s lighting his own wealth on fire (between the direct costs and the blowback tanking Tesla’s stock prices, he’s taken quite the haircut).
schrodingers_cat
@gwangung: Yeah it was one space to discuss politics that wasn’t lily white and was also global. I will miss it.
The Moar You Know
Maybe, just maybe, we should not have been putting all this “important recent history” onto a privately owned platform that’s been teetering on the verge of insolvency for its entire existence.
Or, more likely, the content on Twitter is not actually that important and a lot of folks who think it is need a reset of their perspective.
Falling Diphthong
Since taking over Twitter, has he done anything that Kendall Roy from Succession would not do?
Show up with a sink? Have the engineers print out their code and then fire the half with the shortest lists? The one new thing they roll out is a massive disaster that clearly had no thought put into it? Spend a great deal of time shit posting? Try to get on the right side of Cat Turd? Announce that he will sleep in the office, thereby causing greatness?
Math Guy
I have never had a Twitter account, but I have read Twitter posts when a blog – such as BJ or Digsby – links to it. In that sense, what I have read on Twitter has been filtered out of the background noise and made available by sites I read and have some trust and respect in. I’m certain “most” of Twitter is just a lot of meaningless noise and only interesting in the sense that it provides insight into what people say when they’re on Twitter versus FB, Tik-Tok, etc.. Is the historically interesting material archived nowhere else? Does a video clip of a demonstration in Iran excise only on a Twitter server, or do copies exist on the servers of news organizations like CNN or MSNBC when they use those clips in their own broadcasts?
Maybe this is a naive question, but I’ve spent most of my life doing other things.
Baud
Even if there were no Musk, I don’t see how any private medium can be expected to act as repository for history. Something was always going to replace it.
trollhattan
@Baud: I remember when Flickr said “fuck you non-subscribers” and arbitrarily deleted photos to get the count down to 999. Several years earlier they arbitrarily reduced file dimensions of all images.
I do not trust the cloud in whatever form.
Citizen Alan
The thing I find most revolting about Elon Musk is that he is living proof of the tendency of evil to self-perpetuate. The only reason any of us know the SOBs name is because his forefathers made a literal killing out of African conflict emeralds. And as much as it makes me angry when the DSA creeps start flashing “guillotine memes” everywhere, damned if people like Musk (and Thiel and Koch and the Mercers and DeVos/Prince) don’t seem to be crying out for them.
MazeDancer
There are, possibly, millions of people with some kind of chronic illness or disability whose lives will go back to bereft isolation without Twitter.
Twitter puts the world in your hands. And you do not have to leave home. Which is especially good for people who have difficulty leaving home.
Those of you who snoot about Twitter clearly have the physical ability to go out and lead rich, full lives. And may happiness and health stay your friend.
But between Long Covid, chronic mystery illnesses, auto-immune conditions, ME/CFS, and physical challenges, and that’s just a start, Disability Twitter has evened the playing field. Everyone can contribute their brain power evenly.
It’s exciting, involving, and informative. Even if you have difficulty sitting up.
You want to see despair? Read the “What will we do now?” laments of Disability Twitter. Countless members of that club haven’t identified themselves. They have just been enjoying the fun.
Unless all of the experts in every area on Earth move to mastodon or some other outlet, it won’t be the same.
trollhattan
@Falling Diphthong: Guessing they have the exact drug habits, too.
sab
I don’t give a shit about political twitter, but hundreds of thousands or more small businesses use twitter to market. Especially authors, musicians, but many others. They don’t have equally good outlets elsewhere.
Fucking spoiled billionaire with a blatant personality disorder gets to destroy livelihoods just because he can and he is bored.
We need to discourage billionaires from being American. Don’t come here if you are one. Leave here if you become one. Massive taxes.
ETA Maze Dancer at comment #14. I was nimble as always this year, but husband was housebound for six months after surgery gone wrong.
gwangung
@dmsilev: I was there for Usenet…..
But the tools out there are nascent, and therefore in the hands of generally white, middle to upper class hands (and often male). There is an ongoing thread on Mastadon on how the agreements are very much shaped for white comfort (a very strong encouragement to slap anything “controversial” like being the victim of racism with a CW tag). I can see where the previous agreements slow down organizing and bias it towards older users’ standards instead of the specific communities themselves. And I think other tools are similar.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
IDK, but the Tesla BOD letting Musk go play with twitter and stop micromanaging Tesla might have been the smart movie considering Musk’s current behavior.
cain
Nobody complained when G+ died. :P Lot of great conversations on there.
Halteclere
This loss of information when a service shuts down is unfortunately a society problem that isn’t easily fixed. Big things like this is like the burning of the Library of Alexandria every few years. But there are smaller fires that escape notice except for those directly affected.
A few years ago Yahoo shut down all their forums, leaving may groups scrambling to capture their collective information and find other homes. I’m a member of a couple machinist forums for specific antique machines, and more than half of the collective knowledge of those machines disappeared as the members raced to save what they could.
And I can’t count the number of times I have clicked a link to some older published article from an online magazine, only to find that all the pictures have vanished into the ether.
SpaceUnit
As someone who does not have an account, the daily
flowdeluge of Twitter embeds and links I encounter on the internet seems mostly ephemeral. It never struck me as a particularly efficient or manageable archive of precious historical data. And even if Musk manages not to destroy his new catnip toy something will almost certainly come along at some point and replace it.Maybe the Library of Congress can purchase all that data at the fire sale.
narya
The thing for which I find it most useful is live-tweeting of court proceedings, esp. the Jan6 trials. I enjoy other pieces, for sure, but those tweetstrings have been useful for following along on something in nearly real time.
hells littlest angel
All the shopping lists written over the past couple of centuries also contained “vast swathes” (oh brother) of human history, but we managed to carry on without them. Anything important on Twitter is likely recorded elsewhere. And if anything important is truly lost, well, I blame Balloon Juice for embedding tweets rather than posting screen shots.
OzarkHillbilly
Much ado about nothing. Twitter was very good at one thing: Holding conversations across all spectrums. Something else will take it’s place. Hopefully it will solve the problem of making money while doing it. Maybe, just maybe, the muskrat will take himself out of the equation and it will be Twitter.
Or not.
cain
@sab: Just more fuel to drive people to the Democratic party – you think the GOP is going to help there? They’ve very silent about twitter – other than them wanting to threaten companies to force them to use twitter for ads.
trollhattan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: How long before “SUVs with frickin’ lasers” trends?
Qrop Non Sequitur
Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast swathes of recent human history | MIT Technology Review
Any way this can be preserved when Twitter falls?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@MazeDancer:
They could migrate to Tumblr?
I’m surprised that’s not offered up as an alternative
Ohio Mom
Some of what is going on in this thread (and other discussions of Twitter I’ve seen elsewhere) is the fable of the blind men and the elephant.
For some of us — and I count myself here — Twitter is a fun stop. For one instance, I check on Connie Schultz’s twitter for a moment of respite. I learn bits and pieces from the Tweets Anne Laurie includes in her posts. Some Tweets are just easy laughs. You could say Twitter enriches my life but it isn’t essential.
But yes, for members of marginalized communities, for political activists, for people collecting the news, for small business people, for practitioners of esoteric fields, Twitter is a lifeline. It’s hard to see what could substitute for it and still work as well and fulfill the role it does.
So I don’t have much patience for people who say, Eh, never go to Twitter, it doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t have to matter to you personally for it to be important in a larger sense.
Citizen Alan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Does Tumblr even still exist? I thought it fell apart after its disastrous mishandling of the porn issue a few years ago.
sab
Is twitter surviving even an If at this point?
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: Thank You. The Indian media has been taken over completely by the BJP and its acolytes. Twitter helps me keep on top of the news from India. I have connected with many activists, journalists and even political parties. News from India rarely makes to the front page either on blogs such as this one or the MSM
For example Rahul Gandhi right now is on a walking tour of India and so far has covered 4 states in the last 2 months and is on the fifth state now. Some of the people who are walking with him and documenting the yatra are my mutuals. This would have never happened without Twitter.
Alison Rose
Don’t know if this was shared in an earlier thread, but:
I’m honestly shocked at a few of those names. But huzzah!
Qrop Non Sequitur
It’s almost like the relationship between reactionaries and moneyed interests is intrinsic and universal.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: Apparently Elon is looking to step down as the CEO is the latest I heard, where else but on Twitter.
schrodingers_cat
@Qrop Non Sequitur: Some Indian news channels have reached North Korean levels of sycophancy.
mrmoshpotato
Can we make a compromise and keep Twitter, but burn Facebook to the ground and salt the earth?
gwangung
Another point somebody brought up is that what makes Twitter so special ARE the specialized communities like Black twitter, disabled Twitter, etc. The development of these specialized communities, with no bars placed on them by the wider community, allows an evolution of a culture that is valuable in and of itself, and is immensely valuable to the wider community.
sab
@Ohio Mom: Yes so much. It’s entertaiment or not for most of us, but for many others it’s a lifeline, and one super-rich manchild can just buy it and snuff it out. If the government did this we’d be outraged. One guy, with noxious foreign backers did it, and we are just ” oh well. That’s the market.”
Math Guy
@Ohio Mom: I did not know this about Twitter until you and some of the others commented about the various user communities. Thanks.
Qrop Non Sequitur
@schrodingers_cat: Worder how that compares to Fox, OAN, and Newsmax. Apologies for my limited perspective.
MisterDancer
Agreed. When I posted about leaving Twitter here, I made sure to underline those communities, because I can afford — on multiple levels — to not have to use them.
I didn’t think I’d get so many annoying “why do you/we care about Twitter?” comments, as if TONS of the Front Page content on this very site — including this very post — has Twitter posts as it’s backbone. Does no one notice this?
I’m not one to do the “what service will replace Twitter?” dance, because that’s not how Tech or Communications really work. But yeah, there will be a massive gap in the “background” conversations that bubble up into new ideas and content for discussion here, if Twitter continues to decline — esp. since the playing field is starting to show real signs of tilting against Left-of-center ideas on that platform.
mrmoshpotato
@Citizen Alan:
disastrous mishandling of the porn issue
^^ Don’t mind me. Just enjoying that phrase.
Anoniminous
It is questionable if Twitter is a viable business. The company has had exactly two profitable years since it went public in 2012: 2018 and 2019. This was during the height of the Social Media boom. Twitter was in a downward spiral with the 10% of the users who accounted for 50% of the income drifting to other platforms before Musk bought the place and since then even more have fled. Ad income has cratered because companies who spent tens of millions on positioning their products and brands waited to see what would happen when Musk started running the place and have not come back since he fired the moderation staff. Musk has gutted Twitter by firing system security people, system reliability staff, and other people who keep the place running. We will see how badly he has damaged Twitter’s ability to run as a platform when the World Cup starts on the 20th of this month.
The banks who financed the deal are trying to unload the debt at, reportedly, 60 cents on the dollar and, reportedly, aren’t finding takers.
In short: Twitter has entered the MySpace death spiral.
schrodingers_cat
@Qrop Non Sequitur: My exposure has been limited to snippets I saw both of the Fox and its clones and Modia. (Modi+Media), so I may not be the best judge.
In my limited view I would say that some Modia channels are far worse than Fox News.
Math Guy
@mrmoshpotato: I created a FB account so I could use Marketplace to sell stuff we didn’t need when we moved. It has been useful that way, but I get annoyed at the friend requests from people I’ve never heard of from places I’ve never been.
MazeDancer
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Tumbler is a fine place for a fandom or group.. Who just like memes and ratings.
There are no world-class experts or journalists on Tumblr
Maybe it’s changed in the 8 years since I even saw it. Never got into Tumblr.
But Twitter is filled with knowledge, experts, a diverse world if interesting, smart, clever people.
Whose currency is words.
People aren’t considered a “them”, no matter if they are disabled or a refugee of transphobia or religious persecution, or just like to relax.. People are just people, unless they want to assert their identity,
Llelldorin
@MazeDancer: Now — the time while twitter is still kinda sorta working — would be a really good time for them to work out a mastodon server and migrate.
MisterDancer
Yes. It’s small, but (arguably) growing. In fact, Tumblr is owned by the same company that owns WordPress, the platform Balloon Juice is based on.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: He has done so much damage (he still owns it and is quite possibly broke) that I don’t kknow who could fix it. What idiot with the necessary skills would want to work there now. Even if he is quit as CEO he owns it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Citizen Alan:
Oh, it’s still very much around. It’s not what it once was, but it’s very much still alive. Several artists who were more active on Twitter have returned to inactive Tumblr blogs with Twitter imploding
Matt McIrvin
@cain: Google+ had a pretty cool science/math community going and was where I initially announced my only (marginally) significant contribution to mathematics:
https://oeis.org/A225984
There’s a reference there to a Google+ post, now nuked to oblivion except for the record of it I saved locally. That’s a problem.
I always found it a more congenial place to talk about that stuff than Twitter, though more people were on Twitter.
PDXBob
So, am I the only one thinking that when Twitter is about to collapse, Elon will go to the government (pick one) and say, this company is too important to fail, give me money?
Anoniminous
@Ohio Mom:
Since I’ve been around since the BBS days I’ve seen this two times before. It’s not a case of Twitter or Death. There are plenty of alternative platforms to migrate to. If the various communities are that important to people they’ll figure out a way to continue.
jnfr
I feel this a lot. I spend time on Twitter talking with people all over the US and the globe that I could never have known without it, about dozens of different topics. It’s necessary enough that it should probably be a public network.
Llelldorin
@Matt McIrvin: I recently discovered mathstodon.xyz, which is pretty much exactly what you’d think from the name.
MisterDancer
Tumblr is more than fan content. I’ve put into my Clippings file some truly compelling and well-researched content from posts there. People/orgs like Making Queer History do provide academic-level content on the platform.
It’s not nearly as “deep” as Twitter, no, but you also don’t have to breakup a post into bite-sized chunks, so there’s that. :)
gwangung
@Anoniminous: That sounds…privileged.
gene108
@gwangung:
Besides organizing, Twitter’s good at being able to find and follow different points of view.
My only hope is a more sensible person purchases it, at whatever discount it’s going to go for in bankruptcy.
mrmoshpotato
Much more scathing than calling Musty a rich, arrogant sack of shit.
Qrop Non Sequitur
A frightening thought. This suggests things will get worse before they get better.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@MazeDancer:
There’s no reason this couldn’t change
Is this a response to something I said? If so I apologize and meant no harm
Lady WereBear
@mrmoshpotato: Seconded.
RSA
A professional writer should be embarrassed by such nonsense being published under his name.
Wyatt Salamanca
OT
Steve Kornacki says Rethuglicans now have a majority of seats in the House of Reps
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@MisterDancer:
This. On Tumblr, you’re not nearly as limited with character limits on posts as on Twitter
pacem appellant
I’m sorry, but that’s presumptuous and lazy reporting. Twitter is neither necessary nor inevitable. When FB fades in a few years, though, they can just recycle these articles with little change to the content or truth value.
pacem appellant
@RSA: No sh¡t. What lazy journalism.
Scout211
@Wyatt Salamanca: CNN has the GOP at 218 now, too.
SpaceUnit
@RSA:
Agree. Twitter is no more essential to civilization than Elon Musk himself. The fucker could blow himself up in a rocket tomorrow and the world would keep plodding along.
Don’t tell Musk that.
MomSense
Fuck.
Leslie
Twitter has enabled an amazing number of vibrant communities and conversations. Even though I’m not very active there myself, I’ve seen so many links and threads over the years shared on other platforms. I deeply appreciate all the worthwhile content that’s found there, and hate what is happening.
Ohio Mom
@Alison Rose: Rob Portman (my outgoing Republican Senator who lives in a Cincinnati suburb and who is being replaced by JD Vance) has a gay son. It was a big deal in the local news when the son came out.
Like many Republicans on many issues, an issue had to happen to him, personally, before he could grasp its importance. Portman managed to keep his conservative cred and embrace his son’s gayness, which shouldn’t be noteworthy or praiseworthy but we are talking about a Republican.
I imagine watching the clock run out on his time in the Senate is very motivating to him to get this bill passed. Could he have championed this cause sooner, obviously not.
Maybe I shouldn’t let my feelings about Portman take over from this happy moment.
gene108
@MazeDancer:
This is very true, and something Twitter taught me, as I started following accounts of people with disabilities. I learned ableism exists, and that it’s everywhere.
I remember, then the TEA Party was demonstrating, back in 2010, and people joked about attendees on Hover Rounds. I realize how awful those jokes were, since mobility scooters allow people with mobility issues to actually leave the house and go to the local store.
BruceFromOhio
The Defector piece makes me glad to be a subscriber.
Ohio Mom
@mrmoshpotato: Except for Facebook Marketplace. I am still looking for a mirror for the bathroom and maybe a different rug for the family room. After I make those purchases, then you can burn all of Facebook down.
sab
@Ohio Mom: Agree with you. I have gay nieces and nephews and a couple who are trans. We need this in the law NOW. Have you seen what our state school board is up to? They lost in this election so they all are barrelling forward to implement what harm they can manage before the new guys come on board.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Scout211:
The gap separating Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy in terms of IQ points is staggering.
McCarthy taking his marching orders from Trump is the ultimate case of Dumb and Dumber.
Bill Arnold
The demise of twitter would be equivalent to burning an enormous library with a huge and largely unique collection, timestamped, with links; an enormous highly-connected graph. Those vast swaths that aren’t being independently archived, of both interesting and nefarious activities, will be masked or partially masked from future historians. (Even those people deleting accounts are doing damage.)
It is not publicly clear whether that is not the intent/hope of some of those those funding Musk; their motives are hidden.
It will be harder to organize media operations with a global reach. Depending on alternatives, it may be harder and/or more dangerous to organize dissent in countries where dissent vigorously discouraged. Tens(hundreds) of millions of people will lose their global-reach voices. Thousands of specialized communities will shrivel/disappear.
Mr. Musk, well. He is a fan of Iain M. Banks. There is main character in the novel “Surface Detail”, “Joiler Veppers”, wealthiest man in his (lower-tech) civilization, arrogant and cruel (and, it develops, extremely loathsome), who eventually contends with a (disguised) Chekhov’s Gun, unsuccessfully. I [would not disapprove of] such a fate for Mr. Musk.
Brachiator
One of the inevitable consequences of the Computer and Internet Age has been the probable loss of information due to format changes, the failure to maintain legacy storage media and shifts to new platforms. Papers, books and magazines, photographs and slides have been stored for decades to hundreds of years. But how much data previously stored in floppy disks and Bernoulli drives have been lost because they were not moved to more modern media?
How much potentially useful information was on the Well and Compuserve and other platforms, but lost when people moved on?
And ironically there is also an ever-growing surplus of stuff to be archived and stored as computers and social media become practically ubiquitous.
Twitter may die and much of what is there may disappear or become inaccessible.
But something will come along to replace it. We know how useful platforms like Twitter and even Facebook can be.
Baud
I have enjoyed AL’s use of Twitter here. For some reason, the Twitter format is something I couldn’t get comfortable with.
It’s hard to see how it survives, but hopefully smart people are working on a replacement that provides the value that Twitter has.
MisterDancer
So I’m gonna try to say this a different way, but I fear — like last time — I’m just butting heads against people who haven’t had these experiences, but are certain I’m, like, making shit up or something.
Twitter, as @s_c just noted in this thread among others, is a primary news source for many groups otherwise shut out from communications platforms. Due to twitter’s setup, that included many who literally cannot load other services, like FB/Instagram, esp. in situations with shaky/censored Internet access. That’s a huge reason why Twitter is fairly unique among social media, why it holds such International import — an import those of us in Western Countries can easily miss.
Taking one poorly-laid out line from an otherwise well-researched and documented article from MIT — not “mainstream media” — and using it to debase a key service like Twitter is foolish and mull-headed, at best.
sab
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You are just defending an obsolete platform. What on the internet are you not on?
On the other hand, don’t mean this as a dig. I am a luddite with a busy daytime life. I don’t have time for all these internet sites, but my kids live on them, and my nephew just bought a million dollar house in the Okland hills working for one.
ETA His million dollar house in the Oakland Hills is quite a bit smaller with a tinier lot than my 100,000 house in Akron, Ohio
ETA But it is in Oakland CA, not Akron OH. That is a big difference.
mrmoshpotato
@Math Guy:
Oooo someone has secret Facebook stalkers. Any with a name like Real Nigerian Prince, Not A Scam?
MazeDancer
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Sounds like you are a Tumblr supporter. Or user.If so, that’s great. It’s good to find a place you like.
Went to look at it. Certainly looks different than it did years ago. More like FB.
Many posts had that dreaded big block of text problem. And visually, for me, not appealing.
Lots of folks have pointed out how what works about Twitter is the cross-pollination of all the communities. And the experts. There is no subject, no matter how obscure, about which you cannot find an expert.
Who is usually open to taking expert opinion from anyone on other subjects.
Without all the experts, nothing will work.
And live events. Like the entire world joining to watch the healthcare vote and holding their breath as John McCain entered the chamber. And then all cheering together.
Ohio Mom
@Wyatt Salamanca: The news of Republicans taking the House feels like news about someone in your circle who is on hospice. You know they are going to die, just waiting for confirmation, now you have it.
schrodingers_cat
Earlier this year I joined two Twitter spaces about elections in Uttar Pradesh. They were in Hindi, populated by journalists, writers and grassroots activists. I got a perspective that I could have never gotten otherwise
Then there was another one in Marathi about Marathwada (which was a part of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s dominion) and is now a part of Maharashtra. Its to Mumbai what upstate is to NYC to give a crude analogy. One of the speakers was a serving civil service officer who has written a book on this region.
The technology may be replaceable but the networks won’t be as easy to replicate. It took Twitter well over a decade to gain this critical mass. In politics a year is a lifetime, a decade an eternity. This works well for RW governments the world over.
Splitting Image
To me the biggest danger of Twitter disappearing entirely is that every right-wing howler monkey who has been using it as a platform for hate speech will get a mulligan covering the last ten years. It’s possible to delete embarrassing old tweets, but enough of them are sufficiently lazy that when they say “I have always believed X”, diligent people can root through their archive and find a tweet that says the opposite. Donald Trump was notorious for this.
If Twitter disappears, people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, not to mention Ron DeSantis, will get away with years of hypocrisy, because no one will be able to find their earlier comments. The howler monkeys lower on the food chain will be able to re-invent themselves as moderates without anyone being able to check their archives and read what they were saying about Jews, blacks and gays five years previously. This will be a real problem going forward.
Matt McIrvin
@Scout211: It looks like the Republican House majority is most likely to be about 221 seats. Not by a long shot what they wanted, but it’s something.
Ohio Mom
@sab: Yes our state has dug itself a very big hole. How we get out of it, I don’t have that much imagination.
zhena gogolia
@Ohio Mom: Exactly.
cain
Asshole Andy Ngo, lost his court case today – got a blistering rebuke from the court and also was caught lying on the stand. Good job motherfucker – go fuck yourself.
Matt McIrvin
@Llelldorin: I think that was founded around the time Google+ was going under, in part as a replacement. I might check it out.
zhena gogolia
@MazeDancer: Oh, that is sad.
cain
@Ohio Mom: Once thing I’ve noticed is that they aren’t that smart and their policies are pretty stupid. They’ll continue to alienate communities through stupid laws. Peeling away support over time. They’ll create so much misery, pain and death – and they’ll still will fuck up the state economy.
MisterDancer
I feel like the Tumblr convo has taken an…odd turn. I don’t see where Goku was defending it’s utility compared to Twitter, outside of “maybe it could change?”
cain
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Apparently, he’s looking to get an acting CEO to take care of twitter. John Legere of Tmobile fame said he’d apply – I think he was joking.
EriktheRed
Yes, Twitter will be missed…
…but we’ll manage without it.
pacem appellant
@MisterDancer: I don’t think you’re making it up. I hear those valid concerns about the demise of Twitter. I am alarmed by Musk’s destruction of what was–for many people–a force for good.
My sympathy aside, Twitter is toast. It will be unusable by April 2023, if not sooner. I’ve lived long enough to see the rise and fall of online communities across several generations of tech. I’ve seen important communities lost to time and not so much as a whimper from the traditional media.
Change is hard, but there are alternatives. I hope the disadvantaged communities learn to thrive elsewhere.
Ohio Mom
@schrodingers_cat: If what is happening in India ever does break into the US mainstream press, it will be because a journalist is following the same Twitter sites you are.
gene108
@pacem appellant:
99.99% of modern civilization is actually not necessary, if you think about how our Paleolithic ancestors survived and thrived.
We don’t need books, writing, math beyond basic arithmetic, the wheel, pulleys, metal tools, agriculture, etc., but we’ve come to rely on them and made them necessary for our civilization.
Information sharing platforms are getting to this point. It’s like the internet 30 years ago. It wasn’t necessary to have access, but it’s become a necessity because we’ve built society around the internet’s uses.
Information sharing/social media is becoming ubiquitous enough that people are using it for business, community organizing, etc., so it’s becoming a tool like so many before that have become necessary for us to work as a collective global civilization.
pacem appellant
@gene108: Twitter is not the Internet.
Baud
It is hard for me to believe that no one will create a replacement to Twitter.
Omnes Omnibus
@SpaceUnit:
There are a lot of things that are not necessary for civilization to survive that make civilization more … civilized.
Alison Rose
I find it odd that on the same page where people are talking about how useful and important Twitter has been as a community for many marginalized groups, other people feel the need to dismissively insist it is completely meaningless and it doesn’t matter one whit if it disappears entirely tomorrow.
I mean. Tell us you don’t give a shit about certain populations without telling us you don’t give a shit about certain populations.
Just because something doesn’t hold meaning or value to YOU does not automatically make it meaningless and valueless.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: No one has found a replacement for you yet, and we’ve been looking for a longer time.
Citizen Alan
@mrmoshpotato: Oh it was hilarious. The owners wanted to ban pornographic tumblr pages so that they could sell it at the Apple store. But there were millions of tumblr pages, far too many to sift through manually. So they delegated censorship to an algorithm that was less discerning than the average 5yo child. Because I’m pretty sure a 5yo child could tell the difference between, way, a woman’s bare breast and one of the Cookie Monster’s eyes.
Bill Arnold
@Math Guy:
It is an enormous graph; every node has a timestamp, and includes at least text (up to 240 characters?) and sometimes media like an image or video, and the text can link to other nodes, to aggregates like hashtags, and to other web sites. Because every node has a timestamp (and a unique id), it in totality can be used to map out how particular pieces of information/disinformation spread. There is an API that can be used (and is used) to navigate the graph, that is heavily used by non-twitter parties.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I hope you find something soon. If Elon Musk pays me $44 billion, I’m selling out.
Omnes Omnibus
Except for mayonnaise.
Cacti
I won’t miss it at all.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I’ll look harder if you give me 10%.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Ohio Mom:
Sadly, your analogy nails it.
If Hell exists, I hope there’s a special wing set aside for Trump’s most important enablers: Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Mike Pence.
HumboldtBlue
Some fascinating comments here. I use Twitter (I was very late getting on board, 2018 in fact) the way I use Reddit. It’s customized for me, by me. I constantly hear people complain about “the cesspool” that is Twitter (and social media in general) and yet, I find it informative, fun (how cool is it I get to personally interact with a favorite author, Tom Levenson? Or banter about birds with Betty, Albatrossity and Cheryl?) and yet, my feed is filled with relevant and important information, sports of my choosing, movies, books, you name it, if I like it there is a Twitter community for it just like Reddit.
My Twitter feed is also very limited and like Reddit, where I am subscribed to 100-plus subs that are of direct interest to me (r/quilting is one of my favorites, because quilting is an absolutely underrated art form and the work those folks display are simply amazing) whether its sports (all of’em Katie) classical and jazz music, politics and a hundred other niche areas that attract my interest and attention.
In essence, both serve as a portal to a wider world that extends from this tiny cubbyhole of the interwebs where we all seem to share an affinity for many of the same interests (as well as share a very liberal and obviously correct view of the world) and I will definitely miss it when it’s gone.
SpaceUnit
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s not that I disagree with you, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
And all this doom talk feels like a combination of the demise of BlackBerries, Y2K hysteria, and that time Gina Peterson broke up with me in 7th grade.
Gin & Tonic
@Alison Rose: +1.
Mike in NC
We’re not lucky enough for Elon Musk to be the volunteer campaign manager for “Trump 2024”.
Ohio Mom
@Omnes Omnibus: As someone who is kept alive and functioning because of modern medicine, whose husband is kept alive by modern medicine, whose son only functions because of modern medicine, I am all for advanced civilization.
MisterDancer
To be really clear: You are not the only one here with that perspective. And I’ve also worked in Tech supporting a number of platforms.
I’ve left literally multiple novels’ worth of my prattle on platforms from BITNET on. So yeah, I know you can move on.
My concern is that, every time we do this, we lose just that much more of the record of what makes us human, in this time. A time we cannot magically re-create, once it’s gone.
As someone who also has spent a lot of time, money, and sweat trying to find the tiniest sliver of information from cultures I don’t even know the language of, because it turns out that, say, we NOW really need to know what the Women of that culture’s lived experiences were like? Yeah, I’m a bit…sensitive to the “oh well, all your words gotta go!” school of thought.
You might insist we’re losing noting of grand import. And I submit that it might be 0.000000001% of what’s in Twitter today…but it does matter, and will matter to those who come after us, if not in this exact moment. And even that last bit I think means “matters sooner than you think”.
So yeah, that’s what my Lived Experience and digging thru a ton of old CD-ROMs for that source that was emailed to me 3 decades ago, has taught me. I’m not saying “keep it all!” I am saying that treating the words of the world as essentially disposable on this scale is not smart or wise, and we’ve seen that, time and again.
Alison Rose
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, obviously.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
I’m completing my migration to Mastodon this week. Twitter has its uses, but screw Musk.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
No.
mrmoshpotato
@Citizen Alan: Oh wow. Tumblr’s porn ban was more messed up than I thought.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
Hey, you don’t ask, you don’t get.
MisterDancer
Was not hysteria. The reason “nothing happened”? Was that people worked day and night to fix code and systems. I happened to move to a new job just before y2k and many people in my new org were heads down with COBOL folx who were hired from retirement to fix things. I’ve listened to people, in the decades since, talk about their work as well.
It was work to ensure systems didn’t die on us. That work isn’t what is being poured into Twitter, right now. It’s a very different, and very corrosive, kind of work there now, from what I can tell.
And I have no idea why you’re comparing this to the Blackberry situation, given how long that company held out when smartphones came into popularity. Their issue was primarily not having a product for the smartphone era in time to take advantage of the shift.
Matt McIrvin
I had to get off Twitter because the circles I ended up in there were not good for my mental health. That was probably on me. All these people I followed because I already liked or respected them for other reasons turned out to have a compulsion for QTing or RTing a great number of political pests of the DSA/Bernie-fanatic or horseshoe-left persuasion, or else they were locked in perpetual combat with hateful right-wing chuds, and it all just ground me down. It was taking up too much of my time, too.
So I’m mostly witnessing all this from a distance. But I recognize it’s more useful to many other people.
And there were bright spots. Black Twitter, in general–these are voices I would mostly have just never heard otherwise.
And I ended up somehow following this one guy in Zambia (I think he’d followed me over some physics/math stuff) whose tweets were a gateway to all sorts of conversation that might as well have been in a different dimension from what I was familiar with. Twitter was better for that kind of jumping socially far afield than any other social network I’ve been on. I’ll give it that.
Scout211
Karen Bass is the next Mayor of Los Angeles. The race was called this afternoon. Link
SpaceUnit
@MisterDancer:
What about Gina Peterson?
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Same for me, when I’d get on Twitter, either from an embedded Tweet here or on my own account I was getting a bunch of replies to tweets and was unable to follow the original poster. I really don’t bother with it anymore.
RSA
@MisterDancer: I will be sorry to see Twitter go, if it does. I appreciate social media. It’s kept me sane at some important times in my life. I don’t use Twitter, but I hope it survives for people who need it. (And by need I do mean literally need; for life is more than food.)
That said, this Balloon Juice, so I will make this observation:
It’s ironic, isn’t it? that judging a piece of writing by a sentence-long excerpt is one of the most basic things people do on Twitter. Twitter as a platform has probably been the single most influential force in encouraging the style of reaction.
Geminid
@Anoniminous: Regarding banks trying to unload Twitter debt, I read in an October 28 CNBC article that 7 banks lent a total of $13 billion to Musk for his purchase.
I think Musk put up $25 billion, including $17 billion from Tesla stock he sold in April and October. The remainder came from investors like Sequoia Capital. A Saudi Prince had $2 billion invested in old Twitter that he rolled over into the new outfit, for a ~4% stake.
This was what some call a “hung deal.” Musk made his offer in April, and then tried to wriggle out of it. He finally came around and purchased Twitter at the end of October.
The banks hung with him, and now they have got debt they want to sell in an environment they did not forsee (although they could have).
These are big banks and will survive the hits they’ll take. They won’t jump into another one of Musk’s ventures anytime soon, though.
Bill Arnold
@pacem appellant:
Would you cheerfully burn 1000 random local libraries, and mock those who were upset?
Another Scott
In not so good news, but inevitable given the way things have gone, the USA crossed 100,000,000 COVID-19 cases on the Worldometers.info site today.
:-(
Be careful out there.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
It’s been a long time since I was on Twitter. I also think I followed the wrong people. I used it for news, rather than trying to find a community to participate in.
HumboldtBlue
twbrandt (formerly tom)
@schrodingers_cat:
This is the issue. It’s not just the tech, it’s the network that made it work. The mastodon universe, and other platforms, have the tech but don’t have the critical mass of people to replicate what twitter became.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: Every single time you express an opinion I wholeheartedly agree with, you follow up by denigrating mayonaise. Is this some Wisconsin thing where everything must be slathered in butter?
ETA: I have a cajun sister in law who pronounces it “My nez.”
SpaceUnit
@HumboldtBlue:
Interesting.
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: I doubt it. I follow a lot of people who tweet in Marathi and a few in Hindi, in addition to English. My mutuals tweet in multiple languages. Before I started posting on Twitter I missed having conversations in Marathi. That is what I will most about Twitter so as long as Marathi Twitter exists I will be there.
Marathi is like the third language for husband kitteh. So we usually end up discussing politics etc in English.
Baud
@twbrandt (formerly tom):
The lack of a critical mass of people is likely temporary. If Twitter falls, people will migrate to another network.
mrmoshpotato
@Another Scott:
Wow.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: I thought cheese or something called cheese curds whatever that is.
I use mayo as the base to make sandwich spreads usually with some chipotle and other spicy condiments. I can’t stand the prepared mustard you get here it is too vinegary and harsh for my taste.
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: Purely personal.
mrmoshpotato
@sab:
I wish this wasn’t too long for a rotating tag.
PaulB
There is a certain amount of talking past each other in this thread. All of these statements can be true:
1. Twitter was not the first social media platform that allowed marginalized communities to gather and share and it will not be the last.
2. It is likely that something will be built to replace Twitter. If not Mastodon, then something else.
3. A sizable amount of the data on Twitter is basically empty noise that will not be much missed.
4. The majority will likely not miss Twitter much should it die.
But…
1. There are communities on Twitter for whom this platform is, almost literally, a lifeline. People who found others like themselves, who found others with shared experiences, who found people who understand and emphasize with them, often because they shared similar background and experiences. People who helped each other, advised each other, fought for each other, laughed and cried with each other. With Twitter gone, these communities disappear. Rebuilding them will be slow and painful, assuming that it can be done at all. The damage will be considerable.
2. There are people and communities on Twitter for whom this platform is an economic necessity. Without it, their income is significantly diminished, potentially causing economic hardship.
3. While it’s true that there is a lot of noise, there is also a sizable amount of valuable information shared on a regular basis (as readers of this blog can attest to, given Anne Laurie’s amazing curation efforts).
4. There is an enormous trove of historical and cultural data that will be lost if Twitter disappears and its archives are destroyed. There will be no way to rebuild it. The best hope is that the archives get turned over to a university or foundation and get preserved.
If you are one of those who nodded along with the first four points, please do try to be a bit more sympathetic to the people who nodded along with the second four.
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: @schrodingers_cat: This might help.
Eolirin
@Baud: Handling Twitter’s scale is not easy and no one currently exists who can do it. Mastodon is not set up to be able to do that except via confederation of smaller communities and that’s going to add to the moderation burden to keep things working at scale. It’s really not so simple as all that. And that Twitter never quite got the business model to work may discourage people from investing the resources to make a proper go at it.
Social media isn’t an inevitably. It’s entirely possible there’s no way to make it profitable without massive data privacy or harassment issues. Even Facebook is struggling now that the advertisement bubble is bursting on them.
There will be platforms, but they may not be at scale platforms where multiple communities can mix. There is a potential loss there, though there was also significant harm there too. So idk. Maybe it’s for the best.
jnfr
@Brachiator:
Much of the early Well content was lost due to the cost of hard drives, but almost everything is archived now and that includes at least some old stuff.
Well.com survives! I’ve spent time there for 30 years.
jnfr
@schrodingers_cat:
I think this is exactly right.
gwangung
@schrodingers_cat:
And just so for marginalized, specialized communities.
Baud
@Eolirin:
There’s always loss in a transition. I’m just saying you can’t tell what will develop based on the way things look now.
Tom Levenson
@trollhattan: I lived in Palo Alto for five months earlier this year. Tesla Model 3s were the Chevy Malibus of that neighborhood.
Feathers
The problem with the Twitter alternatives is that they were all designed, especially Mastadon, to be Not!Twitter. This means that turning them into Alternative!Twitter will only happen over the screaming of the people who are already there, and not a small amount of brawling.
I have a Tumblr since forever which I didn’t delete because a friend and class project partner died but now I still have access to all her Supernatural fandom posts. It’s a show I never watched, but really enjoyed experiencing through her posts.
The other nice thing about Tumblr is that there are plenty of cute animal accounts. My current fave is everythingfox, in case someone wants to work on replacing their Twitter critter fix. My other fave is someone doing an Agatha Christie read through and posting recipes for meals that they feel go with the books. It’s the fact that things like empanadas and turkey hoagies and fermented Jalapeño hot sauce show up frequently that make it a true Tumblr blog.
Feathers
One of the things to realize about something else taking over from Twitter is that apparently Twitter generates content at the pace of $3M in server space a day.
Niche communities may be able to find a new home, but the niche communities won’t be able to talk with each other. Would the Starbucks and other retail union organizing be happening without employees being able to find union organizers on Twitter and learning from them?
cope
Totally ambivalent about Twitter, it seems to me that any expectation that a for-profit entity should be expected to follow a path that prioritizes the public good is probably unrealistic.
Ivan X
@Ohio Mom: well said. I had to make my peace a couple of days ago.
Ivan X
@Alison Rose: Well, what I would say is: I’ve long felt that Twitter is a language and culture and thought and nuance destruction machine due to its 280 character limit and its encouragement of everyone jumping in and taking a side and having a take before thinking things through.
But, many people in this thread have presented real world arguments for the value it provides, which I appreciate, so I’m reconsidering my stance, even if I still personally find Twitter of little value personally beyond #NAFO and Anne Laurie’s roundups.
Ivan X
@MisterDancer: Re RIM/BlackBerry, that was hardly the only problem they had. They were always an enterprise product company that managed to, for a minute, have success in the consumer space. But their first attempt at a modern “candy bar” smartphone was so delayed and such a colossal failure that they never recovered, and Apple went in and got all their market share. If they’d gotten that product right…well, they probably would have still gone the way of Windows Mobile eventually, but it would have taken them longer.
kalakal
@Ivan X: That pretty much sums up my position . I never realised there was so much to Twitter. I was mislead by the the tinsel as it were of people hanging on every inane utterance of celebs and the MSM using politicians belchings as a substitute for journalismwhich was its popular image .
Re Rim/Blackberry I had a contract a long time ago writing an app for Wall St types when RIM pagers were the only game in town as a mobile device with a ‘large’ programmable screen with push notification. Basically providing a user selected feed of financial news & data. They had a huge advantage over the competition and blew it
Kayla Rudbek
@sab: mustard, sour cream, cream cheese, cheese, or butter