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Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

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Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#551

Post by synu »

jrmg wrote: post #524
synu wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Mastodon, for what it’s worth, but never really figured out how to find a community that resonates with me. It’s quite possible I’m using it wrong in some way.

I’m never sure what people mean when they say things like this. I found community in Twitter by following people I knew, a small number of organizations, websites and celebrities, then occasionally following people I learned about through retweets or replies. How did you do it on Twitter? Did you use the search functionality? What did you do with it? The idea of doing that just seems overwhelming to me. I mean all th…

I wasn’t able to find anyone I know, and the incoming discovery feeds were people I didn’t know anything about talking about stuff I wasn’t interested in. Overall it was just really quiet and felt empty. Maybe this means I joined the wrong server, not sure. Eventually it seems someone deleted the server I was on, I am not sure if I can do anything about that or not.

When I first joined Twitter it seemed like more people I knew where there, so that initial bootstrapping was a lot easier.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#552

Post by maxbond »

freejazz wrote: post #532
maxbond wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd point out his positions are reactionary, not conservative. He doesn't want to preserve an existing state of affairs, he wants to counter recent progressive movements. The old guard politician from Chesterton's fence [1], the prototypical conservative in my mind, would view someone who wanted to put the fence back up, after the matter has been exhaustively litigated and the fence taken down, as just as if not more…

You are just describing the current US conservative party...

The Republican Party are distinct from the concept of conservative and reactionary politics. They practice both. As do the Democratic Party for that matter. A mental might might be that a party is a group of practitioners and these types of politics are tools they use to accomplish an agenda (though that model implies these tools are amoral and equivalent, which I don't agree with - I find conservative politics unobjectionable, though I tend to disagree with conservative positions, and reactionary politics thoroughly objectionable, as it usually goes hand in hand with bigotry).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary

(See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism)

It's useful to tease these concepts apart so we can better understand & critique certain policy positions. When Democrats vocally oppose student loan forgiveness, they are practicing conservative politics, for instance. It's not simply that Republicans are reliably conservative and Democrats are reliably progressive.

And there are many other forms of politics, these are just the most prevalent in US politics today.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#554

Post by bmarquez »

infinityio wrote: post #221
sneak wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instagram prohibits links, period, not just to other platforms. This is where "link in bio" comes from. They hate the web.

To be fair - it looks like twitter is also banning links in bio here?

Since they're banning Linktree (which exists primarily for that purpose) it sounds like they are. I hate that Twitter is turning into a closed platform like Instagram.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#555

Post by haxiomic »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #531

Unlike the majority of comments here, I think its fine & rather quite impressive actually. Doesn't it look like how you would normally experiment to discover more about something? You try out several edge cases, observe the results and learn from it. Twitter is likely using extensive telemetry to observe the behavior of it's users and is now just running extreme experiments until they find something that shoots up th…

This is a great plan if you're working with rocks or particles but these are human beings, once they distrust you it's pretty hard to get that back. Technologists treating human beings as inanimate objects of optimisation captures what I find so disheartening about the trends in our field

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#556

Post by klabb3 »

ancapsfascists wrote: post #431
pjc50 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a "classical liberal", whatever that means, surely you're not in favour of randomly destroying things that work and that people are happily using, by state action, in favour of an unpopular alternative?

Classical liberals are typified by Reagan style republicans and the current democratic party - business first, pro capital, infinite growth party.

That’s… called neoconservatism (and weirdly neoliberalism is a basically a synonym). Classical liberalism is closer to libertarianism, is usually against government involvement in private matters. Those ideas are much older and came before McDonalds, Goldman Sachs, Cayman Islands, quantitative easing, and trillion dollar bailouts type of economic system of today. Sure, Reagan and current day republicans steal rhetoric from classical liberalism all the time, but the political-economic system is unrecognizable.

The “big corporation-style” capitalism is definitely a new flavor, and unfortunately that’s seen as centrism today, adopted by moderates of all political sides across the western world and even beyond.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#557

Post by hakanderyal »

PG just announced he is moving to Mastodon[0][1].

This policy can be rolled back, but the trust is eroding, and it's much harder to rebuild. People will be more and more afraid of spending time&effort to cultivate an audience on Twitter.

For me, it'll require a leadership/ownership change, which is not that likely?

PG can do it, his audience will follow.

Not everyone has that luxury. Especially for those who are at the beginning, and need to be where the community is.

But I see this as a powerful signal of things to come.

[0]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168

[1]: https://mas.to/@paulg

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#558

Post by twobitshifter »

strangattractor wrote: post #169

There is no money is promoting free speech or at least not the kind of money Twitter needs to pay back it's investors and creditors. There have been multiple poor business decisions since the buyout. The "burn it the ground and start over mentality" is effectively placing the company in a startup position. Given the risk of startups it would have likely been cheaper/smarter to start a new company than pursue a levera…

I was thinking of this and if you take TV news media there’s a clear political dichotomy with CNN and Fox News. If you look at that deeper, Fox News is the most watched station in the USA. Still more, the Fox News audience is profitable to advertisers offering Cash-For-Gold and worthless symbolic doodads. Until now online media has not followed the same course - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter are all chasing Gen-Z and democratic and progressive markets, while trying to put forth an impartial image to moderation. With Twitter’s pivot, it may lead to the same sort of fracturing that we see in television. Sadly, given US demographics, building a conservative safe-space echo chamber might also be a better way to make money.

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#559

Post by absolutelymild »

pjc50 wrote: post #222
strangattractor wrote: post #169

There is no money is promoting free speech or at least not the kind of money Twitter needs to pay back it's investors and creditors. There have been multiple poor business decisions since the buyout. The "burn it the ground and start over mentality" is effectively placing the company in a startup position. Given the risk of startups it would have likely been cheaper/smarter to start a new company than pursue a levera…

Destroying Twitter, or at least rendering it unusable by its current audience, is clearly the objective. I'm not entirely sure why but it seems to be to "own the libs". (edit: I have been pointed at the EU rules https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... under which "gatekeeper platforms" may not "prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms". However I expect Twitter t…

> rendering it unusable by its current audience

Since journalists are so overrepresented on twitter, I’ve been wondering if undermining them is a goal here? Business people and conservatives are generally pretty hostile to journalism. It would be a pretty big coup for them if the NYT, Wapo, etc lost eyeballs because Twitter went down the tubes.

Is that worth biting tens of billions on? Probably not. But I’m sure Elon and David Sacks wouldn’t shed any tears if all the preachy lib journalists just disappeared one day!

Re: Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

#560

Post by wstuartcl »

modeless wrote: post #448
Chinjut wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need to defend Elon here. Clearly what will happen is highly capricious enforcement based on who he personally likes and dislikes.

Don't ascribe motivations to me without evidence. This is not a defense of Elon Musk. I think this policy is stupid. But our criticisms of it should be correct. Otherwise we're no better than our opponents.

I think it is pretty clear this is the case, I mean look at any post he has responded to with dislike in the last month -- every day there is a queue of disabled accounts that have interacted with musk or poked his thin skin.

At the end of the day as far as i am concerned its a dead platform -- just the ad reductions against the 1bn + interest means the runway is on fire. Whatever elon does at this point is just pretending to do work effort while juggling balls in the air. It is clear he will not only tank twitter but given he has already hit a sell off cliff on tesla shares he will be licky to have any relevent input on that corp in the near future.

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