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We Don’t Need a New Twitter

calnewport.com

21–30 of 121 posts

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#21
post #5

We don’t need all of what Twitter did, but we need some of it. The biggest thing Twitter did that nothing else could match was getting extremely specific or local news quickly. Is some web service down? Twitter is faster for info than both isup.me and the official status page. See smoke in the distance? Twitter can tell you all about the fire way before the local news.

[deleted]

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#23
Twitter was doing just fine when it banned nazis and covid disinformation. to call this "a more sanitized and boring experience" is textbook black and white reasoning. moderation is hard, but twitter's new "moderation is the CEO personally bans the accounts he's personally offended by, while people who share child exploitation videos are celebrated and paid cash" [1] is not the way to do it.

[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/elon-musks-twitter-rewa...

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#24
post #3

Twitter need distributed editorship. If a tweet is inflammatory, viral, or incorrect, a group of respected users can suppress it or edit them to remove bait headlines. This would be similar to the Wikipedia editor model. Editors can be elected and their actions would be a matter of public record. This would give us a democratic republic of tweets. Eventually users would learn to tweet quality items.

Twitter probably has to implement campaigns from DoJ, DoD, NSA, or whoever else is owed “special favors”. Distributed editorship would only mess with that.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#25
Twitter/X is a goldmine due to the "Lists" feature.

You can subscribe to the people that talk about the topics that interest you eg nutrition, marketing etc...

And then through those people you learn about other people and website/resources.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#26
post #5

We don’t need all of what Twitter did, but we need some of it. The biggest thing Twitter did that nothing else could match was getting extremely specific or local news quickly. Is some web service down? Twitter is faster for info than both isup.me and the official status page. See smoke in the distance? Twitter can tell you all about the fire way before the local news.

All I want is somewhere the local fire station, mayor, power company, and transit companies, etc. ca share their updates in an easy to find place.

Twitter solves real problems for them, but with the last year of changes clearly doesn’t value the requirements that use case needs.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#27

When I first started using Mastodon I felt a bit overwhelmed by angry toots from certain communities. One of my pet peeves is leftists who, just as the John Birch Society saw "communists" everywhere, now see "fascists" everywhere. (For the record I am a leftist, a friend and I were the first people to put Chomsky audio lectures on the web, I've been to Howie Hawkins' house, etc.) It was clear to me that the "explore"…

Another great tool on Mastodon is the "block all from instane" button. Birds of a feather flock together, so blocking the most egregious offenders is a fast-track to keeping your TL clean (in my experience).

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#28
post #23

Twitter was doing just fine when it banned nazis and covid disinformation. to call this "a more sanitized and boring experience" is textbook black and white reasoning. moderation is hard, but twitter's new "moderation is the CEO personally bans the accounts he's personally offended by, while people who share child exploitation videos are celebrated and paid cash" [1] is not the way to do it. [1] https://www.mediamatt…

But it still bans nazis, and it only ever promoted covid disinformation at the behest of the US gov (and there are receipts to prove it).

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#29
post #3

Twitter need distributed editorship. If a tweet is inflammatory, viral, or incorrect, a group of respected users can suppress it or edit them to remove bait headlines. This would be similar to the Wikipedia editor model. Editors can be elected and their actions would be a matter of public record. This would give us a democratic republic of tweets. Eventually users would learn to tweet quality items.

Praise the hive mind or be silenced. No thanks.

Maybe we could all work on the "I see a tweet I disagree with and I'm not reflexively responding with a knee-jerk overly emotional response" thing instead.

Re: We Don’t Need a New Twitter

#30
post #3

Twitter need distributed editorship. If a tweet is inflammatory, viral, or incorrect, a group of respected users can suppress it or edit them to remove bait headlines. This would be similar to the Wikipedia editor model. Editors can be elected and their actions would be a matter of public record. This would give us a democratic republic of tweets. Eventually users would learn to tweet quality items.

Wikipedia being a non-profit, and Jimmy Wales being a respected leader, is key to Wikipedia's success. Why should I contribute to the curation of a for-profit company? Especially if Twitter will simply be sold off to the highest-bidder, such as a rich narcissist with a chip on his shoulder? ----------- This past year, we've seen the collapse of trust in three community driven websites: 1. Twitter 2. Reddit 3. StackOv…

What says that Wikipedia is successful and not just existing like Twitter and Reddit are likely to continue to?
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