Twitter C/D

Not to shift focus back to twitter, but it felt like yesterday was a breaking point for a lot of people. Anecdotally the exodus seems to be leading largely to Threads over the other alternatives, but I'm curious how it all shakes out.

What happened? TL is the same as yesterday

The reinstatement of Alex Jones, I assume?

Ah ok

my lrb blog changed everything

Yeah, it was the reinstatement of Alex Jones plus the live chat between Musk, Jones, Andrew Tate, etc.

Yeah, I Saw a few celebs and minor figures posting simply the thread emoji yesterday, Jason Isbell and Emily Nussbaum were two that I can remember, assuming that was them ditching for Threads.

i used to wear a blazer w/no tie to my very dry office job but stopped abt 10 years ago after multiple times people approached me to offer condolences, assuming that i had to duck out of work for a funeral

My first job was at a grocery store. I was working with a friend there when an older coworker stopped in wearing a jacket. My friend, a wiseguy, says, "where's the funeral?" Our coworker calmly replied, "I was just at my grandmother's funeral." Oof.

everyone really jumped off on the sartorial guy post, huh? I should have posted the speed limit thing as a non-hypothetical

i'd also like to cast my support behind team "ties suck and can die".
i had to wear them for school and hated them simply because they were annoying and now that i'm older i have an adams apple that really protrudes and the collar/tie can really get uncomfortable (adams apple aside i do not have a fat neck). maybe it's because i hardly ever wear them, but can sometimes wind up with a neck rash after.

i like ties as fashion objects but prob would not like to wear one every day, even people who do and get used to them theyre still unbuttoning that top button and loosening the tie at the end of the day right its at least slightly annoying

tho in america at least the number of people who wear ties to work has dwindled to almost zero

big series on the death of tweets

https://www.theverge.com/c/23972308/twitter-x-death-tweets-history-elon-musk

I had one job where I wore a tie every day for seven years, it didn't really bother me. But happily dispensed with it when I left. For most of my work purposes now, the old blazer-open collar shirt look is perfectly acceptable. (And I think actually looks better fwiw.)

I haven't been spending time on bluesky but it def seems preferable to X or threads. Meta keeps foisting threads samples onto my instagram feeds and they seem pretty dumb.

yeah it seems pretty bad a place for brands engagement content

someone on bluesky said they were following 700 people on there and there were like 10 new posts every day

when I left twitter I tried to find a few of the people I still followed and liked there on bluesky and added them. Even with some of those, they're still posting on twitter and not posting on bluesky. People just can't let it go.

no app has nearly been able to match twitters derangement levels, bluesky has its moments but all the ingredients just arent there, seems pretty unlikely there will ever really be another twitter imho rip

I signed up for (or activated?) Threads yesterday and it seems ... fine. I don't really engage with social media in anything other than a passive way, but it feels like more of the people I followed on twitter are now on Threads, though the people I follow on Bluesky seem to post more often than the Threads people do. I have no idea if that is really the case, or if the algorithms are as usual fucking everything up. For example, I have a Facebook account, and I find it maddening that my one glance of the day sometimes starts toward the top with someone's post from a week+ ago. It's like watching a serialized TV show, only the streaming service starts with episode 4, because the algorithm senses there is more "engagement" with that one post and in turn foists it on me. My wife told me that I need to engage *more*, click likes and bullshit like that, so the service knows my preferences. My response is that I already opted in to the feeds I follow by following them, so it knows my preferences just fine and is choosing to disregard what I want in favor of giving me what *it* wants me to see. The result is that I engage even less, because if it's not giving me what I want - posts from the people I follow, as they are posted - then I'm just not going to bother.

threads always seems to be serving me up business/media influencer people I don't follow.

getting plenty of activity on bluesky, none of it from pricks I don't follow

facebook has gotten really annoying for me in that, i typically avoided dumb/insular meme accounts/groups etc and just wanted to follow what was up with my friends. but now it is serving up 3 "suggested" posts to every one of my friend's OC - and i don't really want anything to do with "harry potter shitposting" groups - at all - but no mater how many times i'm hit "i don't want to see this", i doesn't stop with the idiotic suggestions
xposts

the whole thing drives me crazy because like 95% of Twitter's appeal at this moment he bought it is "this is where everyone is and this is where people are posting". none of the issues it was having or features they could roll out could be more important than that. once engagement significantly declines on a social media platform it never recovers (let me know if I'm wrong about this, I just can't think of an example). so him fucking up this bad doesn't mean "oh we'll do this on a different platform", it just means this thing people liked is just gonna die, and it's gonna die because we let very stupid people become extremely rich

Maybe I use Facebook enough but my feed is pretty good. Too many ads though, which are easy to skip, the reels are my downfall. I can’t not look at them and they are 100% garbage. If I could turn it reels I’d be so happy.

Facebook is infuriating. I want to see what all of my friends are doing in chronological order, but it insists on fucking with the timeline and deciding which friends I should see and hiding the rest and cluttering everything with suggested garbage. I would ditch it but there are a handful of people that communicate with me exclamation through messenger.

the Verge series is great, pretty harrowing stuff from Sarah Jeong, knew it was bad but didn't know it was *that* bad. hope she's doing okay!!

xp to Cow_Art, the browser extension FB Purity (Fluff Buster Purity) is very handy for making your feed less infuriating, including making it chronological all the time, stripping ads, etc. It still lags on showing you activity by all your friends -- when I look at FB unfiltered on my phone I see posts from friends that never show up on desktop -- but it's worth the effort to get it installed. Donationware.

Installing now! I love(d) the equivalent one for twitter.

Hmm, it's still not chronological.

OK, found the toggle. Thanks for the recommendation!

this is the twitter/menswear thread, but, you know, since this is where the people are, i've noticed that facebook and instagram seem to have different priorities in showing your posts to followers.

with instagram, i'll post a new painting and pretty much everyone that's going to like it will "react" within a couple hours, and they never see it again after about 24 hours. it's rare for someone to engage with any of my posts that are more than a day old.

with facebook, i'll post a new painting and no one seems to see it for several hours. then, over the next several days, it seems to gradually land in people's feeds. i'll be excited to share my third painting in a week, for example, and it's crickets while the crappy one from last week suddenly gets a like from my sweet aunt, who is a good indicator of when my posts actually reach people because she's always on facebook and always likes everything i post as soon as she sees it.

no one is reading at this point but since zuck owns both entities maybe they're testing out which method of distributing posts causes the most addiction? or maybe instagram images somehow make more sense to distribute to feeds quickly as opposed to typical facebook content?

culturally could see it making sense for facebook to be slower (old people)

I'm still convinced I can create my own social network that would solve all my problems and be successful. I tried finding somebody to code it for me but didn't work that hard. Then I thought maybe I could start with doing it myself using no code tools, tried something called Bubble. There was somebody selling a social network template. Fully functional facebook clone. It just looked bad. i figured I could install that, then go in and dig around enough to make it look clean and minimal and good. Then go to facebook and start inviting people. But then I decided it was too much work and it wasn't easy to make it look good.

The music conversations and community I have on facebook are amazing. I just want to take them elsewhere. There's a lot of people of certain generations who do use it. The other day David Javelosa of Los Microwaves, Graham Massey of 808 State and David Harrow of Anne Clark were talking about drum machines. I don't even know if all those guys know each other's music.

I used to run a yahoo group that eventually had 7000 members. Im convinced I could bring people over to my social media site, starting with music folk and growing from there. If it existed. People want it. Facebook with no ads, no reels, no suggestions, just your network in order of posting. Maybe have additional tabs, show messages gaining traction (so you dont miss big things), show public messages popular with your network, show all. You can have some algorythms involved as options, but you shouldn't have to work to get that.

i thought i was the source of one of the anon quotes in that verge bit, but the author confirmed i was merely one of like 5 sources who said the same thing in different words.

dan an interesting idea for building a new social network is to make the letterboxed of x, ie devoted to one topic and designed around that particularly rather than just copying facebook, like a letterboxed post is a review, idk what you would do particularly for music but itd be worth thinking through, prob someone has already made one, but ive never heard of it so it hasnt caught on

I used to run a yahoo group that eventually had 7000 members. Im convinced I could bring people over to my social media site, starting with music folk and growing from there.

xps
you absolutely should! not all 7000 would do it, but if even 50 people (if even 10...) with the right enthusiasm and interest made the transition, it would work. not having to worry about profit and endless growth on a finite planet makes things soooooooo much easier.

lately i've spent a lot of time on a ...digital space...(not exactly a messageboard, but not social media either since you can't "follow" and you can't "like" and there aren't any notifications) that a friend started. it's mostly 20 people who post. it's fucking fantastic. i'm sure a lot of people reading this, maybe most, also have small-scale messageboard or digital communities that they take part in, so you get it.

so much about this world is about getting larger, scaling, making money, profiting, with hundreds of thousands of people gathering together in one place to feel the thrill of proving others to be wrong about stuff. i understand trying to replace old twitter with some sort of functional equivalent, and i do enjoy, or at least enjoyed, being able to use twitter as a way to get perspectives from very smart people every time something incredibly complicated and bad happens in the world. i bet some rich asshole will figure out a way to do it again and get all the geniuses who are never wrong (and if they were wrong, they were wrong in the most genius lateral way you would never be able to think of) to get back on the platform. but perhaps people will start migrating back to smaller digital communities where you get rewarded for making others feel good instead of feeling bad.

tl;dr i still use the big platforms, they're useful for some things, but i have heavy respect for the local or topic-specific small-scale internet communities because they tend to be about feeling good rather than feeling bad

xp lag00n that's an excellent idea

not interested in just a music site, the ultimate goal is to not have it be about music. Id just use that to build an initially community and get discussion going. But as people were enjoying it they'd talk about other topics and invite their friends and then I'd put facebook out of business.

Happy to have it start as a small community (no choice obv!), I just didn't like any of the out of the box solutions to building one. I've looked at a lot since the pandemic started and I first wanted to do this.

👍👍

imo just read a book instead

write like hearts next to parts you like then show them to someone

Def

what's wrong with ilxor.com?

someone on bluesky said they were following 700 people on there and there were like 10 new posts every day

i will tell them follow ned

tell them to take the sub down to the sea floor then open the hatch

Ned is a key part of the bluesky experience

https://www.garbageday.email/p/duplicate-infiltrate-and-undermine

This newfound interest in Twitter as an influence network culminated in 2022, when Musk first announced he wanted to build a Twitter substitute (duplicate), before, in April, instead, offering to buy it (infiltrate). After his announcement, his phone started blowing up with texts from powerful folks in both tech and politics, including one still unknown sender who literally outlined a four step plan for reinventing Twitter that could basically be condensed down into “undermine, infiltrate, undermine, duplicate.”

Texts from an unknown sender, from discovery in the Elon Musk/Twitter suit. https://t.co/nxbqGBQiog pic.twitter.com/RbOImEl50M

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 20, 2022

As you can see, the assumption was that users and, more importantly, advertisers would stick around as Musk cannibalized Twitter. And now we know they haven’t. Users are fleeing, especially the important ones, and advertisers are finally beginning to move on, as well. This text is only part of the conversation, but it’s extremely funny that nowhere amid this supervillain monologue was it ever questioned if Twitter would continue to even be relevant as it transformed into Gab. Perhaps Musk didn’t have the “savvy cultural/political view” to pull it off.