Twitter was just a tool, a tavern that’s changed hands.
It’s not the world, it never was - even at its height, only a small percentage of Americans were ever even on Twitter.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/225469 https://sci-hub.se/10.1086/225469
Social media silos have the effect of making it seem like the reach within your silo is bigger, because of the way voting works on these apps.
“The way voting on comments works, the way certain things rise to the top, the way it governs what becomes visible and what doesn’t, that all winds up kind of pulling the strings on the discussion in a way that is not necessarily visible to you if this is the only way you’ve ever known it.”
— Jason Pargin, on the podcast The New Abnormal, Sept 22, 2024
The other issue is that the addictive nature of these apps is deliberate, and it can cloud people’s judgment when it comes to giving up on it to go somewhere else.
Another aspect is this nostalgia pull. Of course many of us remember the science community from the early 2010s, and many of us over the intervening years have met friends through twitter. That’s true of… everywhere actually. It’s true of every club, every social circle, every school you went to, and every workplace too. You wouldn’t stay in a shitty job and turn down a better opportunity because at some point in the past you had met a good friend at that job, who has themselves since moved on. You exchange contact information with people, and stay in touch. If someone’s not interested in that, and only wants contact with you through Twitter, I’d say that’s a big red flag that something about that is weird. What if you met your spouse and 3 of your best friends at a local cozy pub tavern. It was a lovely time, and a lovely place where you had a lot of fun once upon a time. But then it got sold and taken over by nazis, maybe even literal nazis, and they changed the decor, and most normal people fled. Now it stinks, I mean it literally smells bad now. Maybe it even has swastikas that you can’t avoid seeing. (Block removal.) Would you keep going to that bar for a beer out of nostalgia? Of course not.
I’m sure a lot of people have met via myspace too. Nobody would consider it necessary to stay active on Myspace nowadays would they? It’s literally the same thing, not even metaphoric. I met people via Geocities once upon a time. Geocities had a horrendous transition into oblivion too as it happens. And it’s a lesson that you shouldn’t solely post on a social media platform. Save your work or your information that’s posted wherever, and post it multiple places. And this is why I have donated to the Internet Archive every year since 2016 now. I donate a very modest amount, because I have modest means. Not everyone can afford to so not everyone can or should. But it’s an important service, that’s my point. Things can be preserved - to a point. But twitter doesn’t even allow that so easily anymore.
I met a lot of people via “the blogosphere” years back. In the early 2000s there was a blog I followed in the early to mid-2000s and over the years. It was part of a circle of blogs, most which were abandoned or changed or whatever. This person, an older boomer, had less frequent blog posts substantially over the years, the last blog post being many months ago, and I haven’t had responses to any of my emails this year which is unusual. I went through their site a few months back and added tons of their archives to the Wayback Machine. I checked this month and their domain is shut off now. I’m sad about this. I don’t even know who to contact who might have news. We had interacted on twitter in the past but he’d stopped posting there months ago too, and I don’t think revisiting twitter is the answer to this loss.
We must move on, there’s not really a choice. Twitter appears to mainly exist for right-wingers to pump right-wing propaganda, overtly, or covertly, to people on the left. They hatch their plans in closed telegram channels and then take their garbage out to FB and the groups they’ve infiltrated, and out to twitter.
They may hate you, but they love each other. You see hate mongering, they see a bright future. Chloe Humbert Oct 27, 2023 Right-wing groups are staging messaging and trolling campaigns behind the scenes in telegram channels, right-wing forums, group chats, and discord servers. They don't go on open twitter and reddit in mixed company and use that for strategizing or expressing their inner most deepest feelings, nor do they often even expose themselves to their opposition’s narratives. They’re not interested in “the discourse” — they see the open internet as a battlefield - and that’s exactly what it is - cognitive warfare. So they go on twitter or facebook to drop the message bombs and all the garbage they want YOU to see, all the nasty bullying they want YOU to experience, and then go back to their safe spaces for rallying, reinforcement, hope, and support. Their safe spaces are perceived by them as supportive, positive, upbeat, and friendly. Of course they’re not offering support or friendliness to YOU. But they offer community and belonging to their own.
I think it’s been that way, yes, even on twitter, for a lot longer than anyone realizes or maybe wants to admit. People have been tricked into thinking social media is a place to organize, simply because it’s a watering hole where you can meet people, and simply because political operatives and their propaganda schemes, and journalists promoting their reporting alike, have all been locked into engaging there. But operations depend on watering holes - this is a known tactic. The rise and fall of platforms, and even of groups generally, seems just the course of things. We must respond to realities.
Unfortunately the grass isn’t much greener on Bluesky. It’s definitely a better option than Twitter, but the flood over there is just recreating many of the same situations. It’s just a remanufacturing of the same situation.. All the operatives were all set up and ready for the flood over to Bluesky. They’ve been ready and waiting for the moment the audience would flood over.
Be cautious about taking on other people’s block lists and follow lists. These serve operatives trying to get their own accounts boosted or enemies shadowbanned. If enough people get followed their platform gets boosted and in turn it boosts people they’re boosting. If the same account gets blocked hundreds or even thousands of times, the account gets shadowbanned. I’m not sure if it’s the algorithm, or it might be a natural inevitable outcome of blocking, because I suspect that’s why Elon Musk wanted to get rid of the block function, because lots of his faves are incredibly offensive and unpopular and are likely to get blocked. But it’s more sinister than that — people can make block lists and sneak in voices you would actually want to hear but they don’t want you to hear or they want to use you to silence — or make follow lists and insert accounts they want you to see but that you would never follow on purpose. I’ve experienced this myself.
It’s not a level playing field, and it’s not a social space — it’s a battlefield. And they’re all like this. Any platform this is a problem, even if some are of course horrendously worse than others in all sorts of ways.
It’s most importantly, not a place to organize.
TEMPEST - Posted April 28, 2023 - Get off Twitter and get into the (online) streets - How “Public Health Twitter” prevents us from reclaiming public space - by Mary Jirmanus Saba and Zoey Thill Algorithms show us the people we want to see. Correspondingly, algorithms show our messages only to others already in our virtual “community.” So that even if a post reaches thousands of likes and retweets, it will still only be seen by those who more or less share our views. In some cases, Twitter has become a space of almost nihilistic lament. Certainly, the normalization of mass death and disablement is cause for despair, but because of Twitter’s algorithmic structure, when we lament, only people curated to see pandemic-related content will see it. This deepens the sense of isolation. We may ask, “Why don’t my other friends understand what’s happening?” The answer, of course, is that they aren’t seeing COVID-related discourse on (or off of) Twitter. The way DM groups are structured limits their utility. 1) One can’t easily search in messages; 2) there’s no way to directly reply to a previous message, limiting meaningful exchanges; and 3) message chats are “like”-able which means that they are subject to being written in a way that elicits reactions rather than engagement. Groups created to organize can become a place for “burns,” gotcha moments, and outright fighting, rather than a discussion about strategy and tactics.
The opposition is not organizing on these social media message boards, they’re targeting marks. (That’s all of us.) They’re not trying to organize there. And neither should we.
It’s not a bad idea to seek out groups and organizations and even non-profits that are doing the things that align with your goals. But even more importantly, make personal one on one connections. That’s how movements build. If someone’s only interested in you as a follower, and primarily just wants to connect with you somewhere there’s an audience, consider whether this is a connection worth time and energy on your end.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)
The bottom line is, there’s really no reason to keep hanging on to what doesn’t work.
”The liberals were outraged at Trump. But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead ironically their waves of angry messages and tweets benefitted the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply — angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.” — Hypernormalisation 2016, by Adam Curtis.