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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32056 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Is another Twitter post okay? People are panicking about Twitter and Elon Musk's actions so far.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/elon-musk-twitter-disastrous-weekend/671942/

I'm someone who has never loved Twitter and I am dismayed at how it influences media and national discourse. It seems to foster a special brand of toxicity and bring out the worst impulses and tendencies of online interaction. My question is, what if the best case scenario happens and it totally implodes? Imagine - advertisers leave, users sunset their accounts, the thing just turns into a ghost town. Do you think national discourse changes for the better? What platform do all those frustrated users move to and will that platform just turn into another Twitter? Is there an equivalent platform at all? Will media outlets actually have to start reporting on meaningful content rather than the latest Twitter dust-up? Those high-profile personalities who suck all the oxygen out of the room, will people simply stop paying attention to them without a platform?

What platform do all those frustrated users move to and will that platform just turn into another Twitter?

Because network effects are so strong in the social media space, I'd imagine FB/Instagram/TikTok or some other big platform will create a 'tweet corner' or something that basically clones Twitter (like FB did with reels) to try and capture folks. I think that's much more realistic than some random scrappy social media company coming in the space is already incredibly fragmented.

Will media outlets actually have to start reporting on meaningful content rather than the latest Twitter dust-up?

I highly doubt this will happen. Media by and large has gotten shittier because of the advertising/freemium model. People want content and information for free, real solid journalism cannot happen with shoestring budgets and agencies having to suck the advertisers' dick. Not to mention the ideological capture, which I strongly believe was also driven by advertising. More outrage/political polarization = more clicks = more ad money.

If we want good media, or at least the possibility of good media, we've got to get rid of or severely restrict online ads.

Those high-profile personalities who suck all the oxygen out of the room, will people simply stop paying attention to them without a platform?

Depends on which people. The substack/rationalist crowd will continue to pay attention, but the public may pay less attention to them. I'd imagine their attention will just be captured by the latest TikTok personality though, I doubt people will all the sudden stop craving bite size content that makes them feel smart.

FB/Instagram/TikTok content isn't visible to people without accounts, making them mostly useless for the main function of twitter: public relations.

When was the last time you tried to access twitter dot com without an account or while logged out? More than three tweets on screen from a feed results in the interaction blocking log-in nag that cannot be dismissed. Single tweets that you are linked to are not as locked down but the same applies to a directly linked TikTok video.

Just went to nitter. net to avoid Twitter's horrible nagscreen, and of course it's unavailable for most people. Browsers telling you "you may not visit this site as its ssl cert expired 5 minutes ago" is a depressing look at the future of the internet.

Edit what the fuck, the motte automatically turns the Nitter url into Twitter? What absolute bullshit is this?

You must be on a weird section of the internet or have some interesting configuration. From what I'm seeing they have a DigiCert one good until December 12th, 2022, that is not OCSP stapled so there shouldn't be any cache issues and it's not on any public CRLs. This is for the 104.244.41.0/24 subnet that I'm resolving to at least. Offsite validation via DigiCert says the same.

edit: This was replying to the comment mentioning twitter dot com, not nitter dot net but it seems something autocorrected the latter to the former.

It's actually just a cert date error, so someone's system clock is fucked and I'm pretty sure it's not mine.

FYI the comment still links to twitter dot com rather than nitter dot net. I've been using the nitter.poast.org instance rather than .net since .net has been consistently unstable for me. Other instances list available here.

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