Is it slow though? It seems to be going at neck-breaking speed.
It was completely dead and buried at least 5 years ago.
The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
11–20 of 347 posts
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Original Twitter did implement it. Musk renamed it a month after finishing his purchase. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2022/helpful-b... And rolled it out broadly a few weeks before Musk took over. (Yeah yeah, that’s a long time for a feature to be in beta or development or whatever)
A year or two really isn't a long time for a beta of this nature.
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#13Always amazes me when someone realizes that Twitter is not the real world.
As for the "engaging content" the author describes, I dont find these engaging at all. Nothing is less engaging than a 34 tweet long thread, each tweet being a wall of 800 characters and the actual content reading like some regurgitate, quasi-AI generated platitude.
When you've reached a point where even big company millennial MBAs realize that Twitter is not real and that "likes" don't translate into sales, you can tell that we're at the end of the rope.
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#14Community Notes is the best feature. I wonder why wouldn't original Twitter implement it. Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.
2021 January - Birdwatch launched with first 1000 users
2022 October - Elon acquires Twitter
2022 November - Birdwatch renamed to Community Notes
2022 December - Community Notes feature made available to tweets around the world
Maybe Elon pushed the release schedule timeline up, but it would not be correct to state that pre-Elon Twitter didn't develop and launch the feature. It had been live for almost 2 years by the time Musk showed up.
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#15Community Notes is the best feature. I wonder why wouldn't original Twitter implement it. Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.
> Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.
I think that an important thing to understand is that social media generally doesn't project a single bias. It is more dangerous: it creates bubbles that encompass groups of people and then mine their minds for attention. This results in polarization, increased rage, and fake outrage, and the like.
So it isn't really helpful to complain that Twitter is leftwing or rightwing etc.; it amplifies for you whatever you already believe. Even though we can generally accept that people's minds don't really change on big issues (whether online or in person), one big problem with social media is that it disincentives listening to each other. "Distincentivze" is perhaps euphimistic - it puts up hard to penetrate walls between us. We don't listen to each other, even if the other person has a worldview or conviction that we detest.
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#16One thing I've realized about social media, especially X/Twitter, is that it's not a singular place, that is you can have 4 feeds on twitter from different users that might as well be different social media platforms.
I've noticed if you follow the "Indie Hackers" on X then you will get lots of self promotion (ie. "My startup just hit $X/MRR!!, here's how I did it: substack.com...."). On the other hand there are other places like "Finance X" or "Sports X" where you get deep dives about the state of that space from various people.
Moving away from X/Twitter, there's tons of "authentic" content you can find on Youtube, a recent favorite of mine has been watching Peter Santenello[1]. He could be considered a journalist and his whole thing is just going into random communities and talking to people. I especially enjoyed his series about Appalachia and the Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn.
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#17this phenomenon exists outside Twitter/X as well you know, Youtube is an example
Here's a complaint about the printing press enabling the same dynamics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#/media/File:...
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#18One thing I've realized about social media, especially X/Twitter, is that it's not a singular place, that is you can have 4 feeds on twitter from different users that might as well be different social media platforms. I've noticed if you follow the "Indie Hackers" on X then you will get lots of self promotion (ie. "My startup just hit $X/MRR!!, here's how I did it: substack.com...."). On the other hand there are othe…
I feel like these conversations condense down to "the death of authenticity... if you want to make money/get mainstream."
There's plenty of people doing it for free, but there's a melancholy from people who saw the myth of "being yourself and getting paid well for it" dissolve.
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#19I used to follow quality people posting meaningful stuff. They disappeared. Why? No blue check.
Meanwhile I had to ban the Primerian or whatever the fuck that is because I got his every tweets, responses and memes shoved in my face and I never followed him.
Every tweet is another "10 fact you didn't care about that will shock you" with a thread emoji like I should care.
The whole thing is just disgusting now.
Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2022/helpful-b... And rolled it out broadly a few weeks before Musk took over. (Yeah yeah, that’s a long time for a feature to be in beta or development or whatever)
A year or two really isn't a long time for a beta of this nature.
Personally I agree. It’s a social engineering feature and, accordingly, you need a lot of time to see how the system ends up abusing/adapting/repurposing it.
It’s just an easy critique: “they don’t ship fast enough according to my totally uninformed and arbitrary assessment!”