This very much reflects my views, and it explains why I am not worried about the "but it's bad to have echo chambers" aspect. (See, Tim T, if Krugman agrees with me, how can I be wrong!):
Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.
I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.
But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.
Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis.And yes, most of the new Bluesky posters I find useful are liberal, but that reflects the modern right’s anti-intellectualism rather than political bias on the part of the site.
I have no idea what this means for X’s financials, and I don’t care. What I see is that you can indeed ruin a network if you try hard enough. And it’s starting to look as if Musk has managed to pull it off.
1 comment:
Lest we forget that sometimes Twitter could be awful. It systematised the internet pile on and made a new type of censuriousness - cancel culture, essentially - possible. While at the same time negating the possibility of real dialogue, because reasoned thought doesn't always hit in 100 characters (or whatever TF the limit is/was), and implementing blocking in a way that was never really done on the classic (and still the best) blogging software.
I was interested to see that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey quit Bluesky recently because, he argued, it was making all the same mistakes Twitter was in its formative years. I wonder what he meant by that?
Internet mediums do have a use-by-date. It is possible that Musk - who is a good businessman even if he is in most other terms an idiot - intuited this in relation to Twitter, and the collapse of the medium would have happened in one way or another anyway.
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