The Death of Infosec Twitter

[flagged]

I suspect your reasoning is also motivated, though I don’t know by what.

There are things I’ll give credit for. I suspect the “community notes” feature is overall beneficial (though I haven’t seen it much firsthand because I use a very outdated version of the application, which doesn’t support it.). Also, making the code for the recommendation algorithm publicly readable was very cool, and I appreciate it.

The way that verification was replaced with the current system, was, I think, rather poorly designed. That’s not to say that the critiques of the previous system were illegitimate. But the way the change was done threw the baby out with the bath water. Ideally, the system should work as follows: paying-users and associated features, should be independent of verification. Anyone should be able to pay a one-time (unless they change display name too much) fee to have their account verified, where this verification should be an actual verification, not just “did this person pay money”. (This might have to cost a fair chunk in order to be viable, due to labor costs of verifying, but I think it could still be reasonably cheap..) There could be an option for paying subscribers to have some icon display by their name, like the checkmark does currently, but this should be optional, and should be distinct from the verification icon.

Also, there’s all the stupid stuff, like blocking links to competitors, and seemingly not having a competent rollback system for updates when they break stuff, etc.

The people leaving Twitter want:

1. Both high quality and high quantity posts instantly available

2. Reasonable API access, maybe not directly but they want their niche workflows to be supported

3. Clear and consistent moderation. Eliminate disruptive content while giving reasonable people a clear understanding of whether something will be removed before they post it.

Threads has made vague promises to these three but not yet delivered.

This is sad indeed, but it was already infested with low quality trolls before the Elon Musk purchase. The entire Jonathon Scott clown-fiesta was utterly embarrassing.