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Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

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Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#51

Post by wharvle »

cbozeman wrote: post #44
segasaturn wrote: post #4

Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.

X isn't dead, nor is it dying. Elon Musk took away a bunch of people's status, people who thought they were important somebodies because some nerds in an office met them in person and/or they paid some money to get a verification mark. That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it…

Musk said a couple weeks back that the loss of advertisers will “kill” Twitter, but it’s ok because “the world will judge them” (the advertisers)

But maybe he was joking. Sure didn’t seem to be, but who knows. Or he’s wrong.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#52

Post by keybored »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #24

> Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to be blissfully unaware of things that other people are consuming. I've long been trying to communicate this trend to anyone who will listen, once needs are saturated the trend becomes building specialization that produces the most hedonism/value for…

People have been telling sci-fi stories about society evolving/devolving into people locked into their individual pleasure boxes for decades, friend.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#53

Post by the_doctah »

Retr0id wrote: post #49
the_doctah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's censorship?

"Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

Do you think it is more or less censored than before?

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#54

Post by JakeAl »

terminous wrote: post #31
JohnMakin wrote: post #8

> The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? This is exactly it. Consider a scenario that's likely fairly common given experiments I've done in the last several years. Say a site people still use to talk to/keep in touch with friends sometimes like IG/FB decides a user is "toxic" and either shadowbans them, or s…

> that a social media site can have such enormous influence on one's perception of "reality" is staggering and it should die and die quickly. You say this as if humanity has not been fighting over the long-distance communication of information for literally the entire history of human civilization since the invention of language. Even before written language, storytellers decided what oral traditions they would or wo…

On this note, the invention of the printing press led to The Reformation with the first printing of the Bible, which up until that point had been duplicated by monks by hand, and The Word controlled and interpreted by the Church, who wielded their power like modern governments and institutions deciding what is or is not mis- or disinformation.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#55

Post by JohnFen »

the_doctah wrote: post #45
segasaturn wrote: post #4

Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.

"Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's censorship?

Twitter was a dumpster fire before Musk, but Musk has decided to pour gasoline in that dumpster.

I don't care if Twitter succeeds or fails, but I think that if the media and other entities stop using Twitter as their sole method of communication, that can only be a great thing for everybody.

If people stopped using Twitter as a source for reporting, that would also be a great thing. Twitter is a unique world, not representative of the larger world.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#56

Post by photochemsyn »

Legacy corporate media outfit bemoans loss of organized narrative control due to rise of uncontrolled unmonitored information sources, fears future without panoptic observation of popular opinion trends:

> "This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify."

Suggested reading: > "The detailed and engrossing 2008 book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford investigates the CIA’s ideological struggle from 1947 to 1967 to win “hearts and minds” for US capitalism and to prosecute the Cold War."

That effort to control the media narratives being fed to the American public did not end in 1967 of course, it's alive and well today (although the organizations responsible are more nebulous, ranging from government bureaucracies to non-profit foundations to corporate ownership umbrellas).

It's true that the siloing of information due to the self-reinforcing effects of social media optimization algorithms (related to the desire to generate captive audiences for targeted advertising) is a problem, but having multiple independent social media accounts devoted to different topics is one way around it.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#57

Post by JohnFen »

the_doctah wrote: post #53
Retr0id wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Twitter Has Complied With Almost Every Government Request For Censorship Since Musk Took Over, Report Finds" - https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

Do you think it is more or less censored than before?

If that Forbes article is correct, then it's about the same amount of censorship as before.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#59

Post by kurthr »

Dig1t wrote: post #36
segasaturn wrote: post #4

Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.

Traffic is up on X 22% YoY Not quite death, but certainly agree about news outlets no longer seeing it as okay to say that “The internet is freaking out about X” https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitte... >Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and h…

Man, those are some terrible statistics... 142.86% of nothing is still nothing.

   For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent, 
   while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period. 
   While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets 
   still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this 
   data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely.
   Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86 
   per cent.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#60

Post by haswell »

keybored wrote: post #52
maerF0x0 wrote: post #24

> Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to be blissfully unaware of things that other people are consuming. I've long been trying to communicate this trend to anyone who will listen, once needs are saturated the trend becomes building specialization that produces the most hedonism/value for…

People have been telling sci-fi stories about society evolving/devolving into people locked into their individual pleasure boxes for decades, friend.

And for the first time in the history of those stories, reality is extremely close to that fiction.

The reasons those stories are told over and over is because we're highly susceptible to things that use our pleasure centers in ways that lead to maladaptive outcomes. You could reframe this to say we've collectively warned ourselves about this for decades, and we're still plunging headlong towards this future despite realizing how badly it can turn out in a worst case.

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