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In the fight between network effects and identity politics, I think identity politics will win the long term victories. We've all seen what happens when "Twitter, but for conservatives" services get launched. When will we see the first "Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?
I would not predict Twitter's immediate demise, but I did not really anticipate Facebook's abrupt demise. I've used Facebook for years without much complaint, but in the last year or two they've declared war on my adblockers and serve me 10 ads for every status update I see from people I actually care about. This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.
My students report almost no Facebook use, outside of Instagram, and when I ask them about social media they usually say TikTok or YouTube (the latter of which I do not think of as social media at all). Many also use Discord but for some reason don't seem to think of Discord as "social media." If it was publicly traded, I'd probably buy stock in Discord as the next Facebook-like center of online activity. Most of my students have heard of Twitter, and absolutely never use it.
Twitter won't collapse overnight, and I think Musk has better business intuitions than Zuckerberg, but I think history is against him. At some point enough people will quit that the network effects will collapse. The question is whether Musk can spin the company into something more sustainable before that happens.
Yeah this is really weird to me. I quite enjoyed facebook for many years, as it was the only reasonable way I could keep track of people I knew above my Dunbar limit. It was genuinely quite pleasant to get a drip-trickle of new information about people I knew, like oh neat they went to Spain, oh dang that's some insane workplace drama, oh wow they have triplets! And EVERYONE used it, so it worked almost perfectly as an address book of sorts.
The downside for me started maybe about 5 years ago, where instead of seeing my friends' status updates, I was increasingly bombarded with seeing their 'likes' on thoroughly shitty meme pages. It just felt so depersonal all of a sudden. I had to duct tape a variety of browser extensions to get it anywhere near usable but it just got worse. The vibe felt off, maybe it was just the culture war but people felt increasingly nasty and hostile, just shoving outrageous clickbait into everyone's face and saying "LOOK AT THIS SHIT". I truly hated it.
Nowadays it's desperately trying to claw onto attention by pretending it's TikTok, so I just get inundated with videos about pugs acting silly. I keep it around as an archive I guess, and it's still useful as very limited address book. But besides that, it's more or less useless.
Which brings me to the biggest loss of all: events. Oh my god, events. This was the best feature by far. Because everyone had a facebook account, the default assumption was that you will create a page on facebook for all your parties. And jesus fucking christ it cannot be understated how amazing of a feature it was that you could see who was going!!! I admit it, if I was on the fence about a party, I'd trawl through the 'attending' tab to see if any hotties were going. Facebook also let me know what their favorite bands were. I'd show up to the party already equipped with a solid opener.
Those were the days, and there's no comparable replacement for events. RIP.
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Is it really that bad a business model? Discord's paid options mainly offer cosmetic things with a side of what I'm going to call "premium infrastructure access" (i.e. I think you get better bitrates in voice calls and such). People seem to be fine paying for purely-cosmetic digital things, and premium infrastructure access is something a lot of services offer. Is it more that those things are not enough to sustain it?
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Twitter for SJWs already exists in the default mastodon, uh, servers? Instances? I don't know the lingo. It became a thing back when they were furious that Twitter didn't have enough censorship.
Of course now it's just tiny isolated islands of "LGBTQ+ antifa hacker" servers that all block each other over not blocking the right fascists. Pixiv's Pawoo and Baraag, which I think are by far the largest, are totally isolated from the wokiesphere. Plus I think there's still some GNU Free Speech guys lurking out in the wastes like shitposting Fremen.
Mastodon WTF Timeline is a pretty interesting description
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The reasons for which being absolutely hilarious given the groomer thread.
His affected squeamishness is hysterical, isn't it? Almost as much as Matt Skala absolutely failing to hide his power level in the linked post lol.
I was referring to watching the drama unfold between people arguing democrats/leftists/"the woke" are groomers and people who identify with those labels taking offense to the label while thinking to myself how ridiculous the arguments of both sides are given how "the wokiesphere" responded in that case. Or how Reddit responded to similar concerns. Or how Facebook did.
EDIT: Grammar.
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Is there some reason why you think he's not actually squeamish? I'm not familiar with him as a writer.
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Oh yes, very much so. Or at least, if they fail it won't be for the same reasons. While officially Parler was killed because of hate speech and such, my impression was that was just a pretense. It seemed pretty clear to me that actually, Parler was killed because it was offensive to the woke ideology which dominates big tech companies. Whereas "Twitter for SJWs" wouldn't be offensive ideologically, so if it fails it will be because it couldn't get a user base (unlike Parler, which imo was smothered as an act of censorship).
Parler was in long-standing violation of Amazon's rules regarding moderation (something like 6 weeks before getting kicked off after the Jan 6th riot), but it's also worth noting that there was possible (probable?) political pressure on the tech giants to ban it when people started paying more attention, which does support your point that ideology played a big hand in deciding Parler's fate.
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I think that with layoffs coming there is a message of depolitization coming in the FAANG...
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This is my experience exactly. I hated the shit out of the suggested posts side hustle, just show me my cousin's baby photos goddamn it
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No. Normies are the lifeblood of social media, and any ideologically inflected alternative is going to suffer from the fact that normies aren't going to be interested in switching platforms to hang out with a bunch of fanatical weirdos. Being slightly more reputable that right-wing conspiracy theorists is not enough.
Most people are operating off a vibes-based rather than rigorous definition of social media. "Social media" means the big, talked about platforms - Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc... Not private forums, the comments section of a news site, or a blog.
I'd argue that some people probably think that an outward facing surface is part of what makes traditional social media, the idea that you can tweet out to whoever the retweets take you to or that you can be looked up by randos on facebook. Discord kinda doesn't have that, its all invite based, its mostly not used to send 1 message to a large audience, and you can't really look someone up unless you know their discord ID.
It's still social media in the broad sense but its more like myspaceified IRC than chatroomified twitter.
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Another interpretation might be that Social Media is a place where individuals share, consume, and create viral content. YouTube/Twitch are becoming more like legacy media and Discord is more a communication tool.
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"Twitter but for X" services die for a simple reason; you can't really start a new social media just as a clone of an existing one but for a certain limited audience, there's just not enough "there" there for that to work. Social medias simply die when there's enough social medias with new, more interesting and more fluent (one might say: more addictive) mechanics to take their place and the potential new users start using them. Myspace didn't die because someone established a MySpace but for Bush supporters or whatever, it died because new, more interesting social medias with different mechanics took their place.
Switter (twitter for sex workers) seemed to be going strong before legal issues made continued operation dicey.
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That's a false premise. They don't tend to die, they're active but less popular.
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Demise? It still has 2 billion users, plus 2 billion Instagram, plus 2 billion for What's App, although there is a lot of overlap between these.
I think the opposite will happen. Twitter will gain popularity as a free speech friendlier alternative to other platforms, and also increased engagement under Musk.
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Already exists.
Also Tumblr
Also Mastodon.
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