At this rate, there will only be Truth Social left.
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I disagree. Twitter in particular sold the illusion of connectedness and access via the ability to interact with “celebrities”. Its actual impact on real world dissent was minimal.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354856515592512
Twitter was spectacularly successful at persuading western / northern elites who already had global attention that their interactions on it were something of a public service. This helped drive the rest of us to pay attention.
It was also particularly successful at amplifying western/northern voices as the authentic voice of dissent in the global south (read any of the extensive literature on Arab Spring referenced in that article or elsewhere.
It has also, right from the get go, been the social network of choice for internet researchers and so the chattering classes (that’s me!) have chattered about it relentlessly and often mistaken it for real networks of activism. Any work I have done has been IRL, tweeting about something isn’t important.
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mentioned in that wikipedia article is this:
Release in the EU was not planned as of early July 2023, and there were no plans to comply with the GDPR
Which I find very interesting, and makes me think that these regulations actually work for something. I assume they’ll find a way to comply, since they aren’t going to want to walk away from the whole EU market
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I’m sure the employees who are now suing were under the impression their contracts were ironclad too. She may be higher up the food chain and have better lawyers, but when the company goes belly up I guarantee you he’ll make an attempt to screw her over (assuming he’s still in charge and assuming there’s any money left).
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Yesterday I was seeing Baseball here on Brazilian ESPN/Star+… The narrator Twitter limit exploded on 1st Inning
Same happened on Sunday Indycar race and Baseball
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Functionally it shouldn’t last as the Twitter we’ve known but myspace still exists… as long as he’s not tired of paying the bills some shambolic entity will exist and you can bet it is financially worth it to her to ride that Titanic into the icy brine of the Atlantic.
errr, that happened day one.
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I tool a look at Myspace just now. It doesn’t appear to have had any updates since March 2022
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True. Sorry, that should have been “still grudgingly covering the costs of the minimum staff and services keeping some kind of Twitter.com up and outrunning his lawsuits on everything else.”
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Exactly. Still there though. No one ever has to say that it went away. Yakarino probably only agreed to come on because she has one of Musk’s kidneys in escrow.
it’s not about Elon and it’s not about business - it’s about blocking or destroying the public agora - ever since Tahrir Square it was obvious how social media (in all its forms) could be used to assemble a public response to actions taken against them - social media and news media are being systematically disassembled to restrict public discourse as fascist regimes work in concert to disassemble democratic government institutions — it’s not about some whacky billionaire - it’s about self anointed aristocrats around the world buying ownership, of everything
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The $1bn they threw to Kushner to rescue him on 666 Fifth Ave says you’re probably right about that… on the other hand, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.
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Journalists also flocked (pardon the pun) to Twitter in an almost pathological way. Seemingly overnight, most reporting became “look at these tweets I found”. Journalists seemingly stopped researching anywhere else. Twitter punched way above its weight class because of this. A microscopic percentage of the world uses Twitter, and I always like to quote the study I can never find but I swear is real– that 90% of the content on the platform is generated by 2% of users. It’s a handful of people tweeting enormously, with a captive press audience.
The whole thing has created a massive reality distortion field wherein many journalists stopped doing their job and everyone has the impression that Twitter is somehow a representative sample of what’s going on in the world.
I think we’ll all be better off the quicker it dies.
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Absolutely. Journalists were the first people I was thinking of but I didn’t extrapolate to your very important point of Twitter replacing news gathering.
The figures you quoted would be relatively normal for social networks. They tend to follow a Pareto distribution. Here would be a perfect example of that!
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Tried that just now.
- It let me open a link to a specific tweet
- It did NOT let me open a link to a specific user, login prompt instead.
- Clicking the user from the tweet did open the user profile page, but it did not show any tweets or prompt for login, just errors.
So, somewhere between useful and useless, closer to useless.
Over the holiday, we tried to go to a state park. Want to see the local weather guy? Nope, they post frequent updates to Twitter but only a few times a day to their own website. Want to see if the park is already full or if it’s worth sitting in a mile long line? Nope, they only post that to twitter and nowhere else, definitely not the park website.
Here’s to hoping they break twitter fast enough that organizations stop using it instead of their own sites for communicating.
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Again, everybody you think is cool stayed on it - ugh
Seriously! For my little town it’s Facebook. I had to create a new dummy account just so I could go and see the hours/menu changes etc for local businesses. Many have their own websites but don’t update them. I had successfully not touched Facebook for several years until I moved here but now I have no choice if I want to know anything about local businesses. Is the record store open on Sunday? Hours not posted on their site, gotta check Facebook. Is this landscaper still in business? Check Facebook because his URL is dead (but he is still in business). Need to make a hair appointment? Gotta check Facebook because the salon’s own website doesn’t have their current phone number on it. 
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Not to dispute you, but have you tried Google Maps? GM is often confused about hours on holidays, but it tends to be accurate if you click on the marker for a business on a normal day. For me at least. 
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My HEMA school exclusively uses Facebook for updates. I tried setting up a burner account for it, but got stuck in the ‘not a real person’ loop, even after identifying many pictures of motorcycles. I need a burner phone too, if that’ll even work. FFS.
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