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Notes -
Happy Birthday Elon Twitter
We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over
TwitterX. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.I see that I had no involvement in that particular thread, and as a matter of fact I can't even recall if I had an (active) Twitter account at the time of the purchase.
I do recall strongly pushing back against suggestions made by some, with @2rafa being one I concretely remember, that Threads would either dismantle Twitter or grossly undermine its userbase. Given that Threads quickly devolved into a wasteland of brands going "How do you, fellow kids?" at each other, and the odd influencer who would be better served by keeping their mouth shut and making people suspect they were stupid instead of opening it and removing all doubt.. Yeah, I'm taking all the imaginary points for that one.
At any rate, I'm mostly content with Twitter, at least from the perspective of a lurker. I didn't rely on third party apps, so the withdrawal of the API wasn't as pissing off as it was when Reddit did it. Community Notes are great, and ought to be a feature in pretty much any social media. Right wing or contrarian accounts seem to be safe, and I also get a laugh out of people like Cremiuex and i/o confronting milquetoast liberals with uncomfortable hate facts and statistics. Sure, I'm not particularly right wing myself, showing up as a centrist on most surveys of political affiliation, but we're tugging on the rope in the same direction, to the extent that's inevitable when all incentives encourage polarization into two symmetrically opposed parties.
I'd rate it as a 7.5/10 experience, I can reliably doomscroll and get something more informative than Reddit out of it, and it's not like there's anything larger than the Motte I can point to as doing better in terms of quality.
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