when did twitter stop being cool?

flopson at 10:41 13 Jan 21

also none of the ui features in the poll affected its quality or coolness at all, just something for people who get traumatized by website redesign to hyperventilate about. even switching to 260 characters, i had already forgotten about 140 after 2 days


I am a dork and was huffy about the switch to 260 and also got used to it in about a day, and now could not imagine having only 140 characters

yeah fsr i cared about that one too at the time. i thought brevity was the soul of wit or wtv but 260 is still pretty brief and tweets are still quite witty

When did they fuck up the TL so you no longer were presented with things chronologically?

2014 - algorithmic feed

what was the first threaded tweet that was like 1/ STRAP IN that might be it

the algorithmic feed is when it started to go downhill. before then, there was much less of the “main character” effect and the people who interacted with each other seemed to actually want to interact with each other. there was less drive-by dunking

also none of the ui features in the poll affected its quality or coolness at all, just something for people who get traumatized by website redesign to hyperventilate about

stars vs hearts rly did affect both quality and coolness, made losers thirsty

2015 is when Quote Tweets were introduced, which some have pointed to as a sign of downfall.

2006 and it has just continually gotten worse.

Still amazing how easy Twitter makes it to block anyone who advertises on the platform, my first instinct is to block any sponsored post and I now get almost entirely ads for Eastern European farm equipment and HIV medicine aimed at doctors.

when they fully b0rked 3rd party apps I had to switch to looking at it on laptop instead of phone in queue / bus / bathroom, and thus got fewer ads than ever

Whenever that lameass “Why I Quit Spin Magazine” tweetstorm happened.

I disagree with all posters above, increase to 280 was and is bad, the witty tweets are invariably the short ones, the double-sized tweets are for people who would very visibly Rather Be Blogging (see also: 1/ STRAP IN)

2015 is when Quote Tweets were introduced

hoo boy, yeah, i voted for the right year

twitter has never been cool?

I don’t even own a tweet

when did the blue checks start?

Yeah this. I also remember the day they introduced "liking" tweets and within hours it felt like a competition for who screams the loudest.

I think 2010 or 2011 was when "liking" tweets started. Probably 2010 so that's my vote.

i guess i keep substituting "good" for "cool" in the thread title. i remember twitter being "cool" in 2009. but also 2012 was like the peak of ppl using twitter as a platform for increasingly surreal "jokes," which felt "cool" to me at the time. the point of no return for the latter was like 2014 i think, and then the feed was consumed by the five-year-long american election

yeah the election was a huge turning point, I do sort of feel without any real evidence that going public was the biggest blow to coolness and goodness

quote tweets might be the best answer, because everyone wants to dunk on dumbshits it had the effect of boosting the worst tweets

early 2009 - when a load of celebrities like Jonathan Ross suddenly started joining and going on about it

yeah i was also thinking "good" instead of "cool." idk if twitter was every really "cool," tbh

TWITTER: I don't get it

'I use myspace and del.icio.us and shit I'm not a luddite'

I knew a few people who tweeted their way into careers and big opportunities in 2011/12, so it seemed good/cool to me then. I feel like it was around 2015 that I first started hearing the performatively-bleak "this is a hell site" type rhetoric from the heavy twitter users i know, then a couple years later is when it seemed to shift into being an actually-bleak manifestation of irl depression/device addiction. So I guess I would vote for 2016.

"So, micro-bloging, then."

twitter as a whole cant really be cool (except maybe at its infancy. and even the doubtful, many old tweets are bad—a lot of the 2012 era weird twitter humour is cringey so random larfs now—and it’s likely just people who got in early claiming it was cooler before as they get old and confuse the two phenomenons) just due to its size. but it contains within it a lot of what i think of as the coolest part of the internet. the more visual platforms are hotter and more fashionable but nothing’s as funny or smart. a big platform on which to post jokes and pithy observations is an obvious thing and will survive in some form forever as a permanent part of culture imho

I knew a few people who tweeted their way into careers and big opportunities in 2011/12, so it seemed good/cool to me then

from what i can gather rubbernecking media twitter this is now the only way to break into the industry. which i could totally see ruining it for everyone in media

a lot of the 2012 era weird twitter humour is cringey so random larfs now

was true at the time too, very few of them were good

the few that were good tho were v v good

unfortunately i find your posts itt depressing flops

I basically like it btw

I knew a few people who tweeted their way into careers and big opportunities in 2011/12, so it seemed good/cool to me then

Sounds like a dystopia to me.

any time a friend of mine has more success than me its a dystopia

otm

unfortunately i find your posts itt depressing flops

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Thursday, January 14, 2021 3:16 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

my twitter feed is good! i see good stuff ever y day. can’t complain

Twitter kills Vine is the one that most annoyed me, aside from that I don't think the site is noticably any worse than it has been at any time in the half-decade I've been using it consistently, and I wasn't around much in the fun early days.

no social media platform was, is, or ever will be cool

the internet is not cool. computers can be cool. sorry i don't make the rules.

the internet is a some hellraiser cenobite puzzle box shit

Beandad

maybe it was a time/place thing and I was just the right age, but i kinda liked MySpace. it was tacky and stupid and customizable (obv problems for advertisers and dead-eyed freaks like Zucc & Jack bent on... whatever the fuck they’re bent on)

an old work friend of mine who occasionally writes about poker for B3tF4ir was an early twitter enthusiast who saw the corporate comedy crossover potential and he hired a professional comedy writer to do the Arena Flowers twitter account. He got a bit big-headed when the FT did a write up on him and I think it's been mainly downhill for him since then. I think the Arena Flowers account is still going but I'm not sure if he makes any money out of it. Before the rona he was struggling to get by and airbnb-ing the spare room in his Berlin flat

Genuinely think twitter has gotten better the last couple years. Nadir was 2015-2018 or something. Trump getting banned is def a positive also

Not only was it always terrible, but Twitter and Instagram have substantially devalued the very concept of cool.

^^^ man alive knows what's up.

man alive is the definition of cool, this is well documented

only apart from when he posts about politics where he sucks badly!

calzino, another cool poster I’ve definitely never tired of

HI DERE

lol

if that was actually funny, then I'm going back to twitter for a non-neanderlol style laughfest

Umm ... what is an IP in the context of Disney?

m/l: a character/concept/setting and the associated registered copyrights and trademarks

Ah, OK. That’s all I know IP to mean but the context of “Disney ips are for children” threw me

See the corporate boardroom drama ip man for a full background

^ arf

The thesis is that is is not ideal for grown-ups to have a major emotional investment in, or to build their personality around their regard for, stories about cartoon mice or space elves or superheroes.

(Especially as they do not have discrete authors, and are controlled by a company that actively cares about exploiting the reader for money 100% more than thye are interested in telling a meaningful story (via the means of financially exploited authors): the glimpse I caught of what I'm inferring Katherine's discourse to be was a sneeringly-phrased imprecation against training-wheels authors teaching themselves by making art about those characters, for fun.)

realistically, in that trite punk rock, well-intentioned way, probably 2007-2008

then it turned into this ugly monster where the good people just chill on its bunions but you can still smell its stinky feet

Twitter fucking sucks, it has always sucked. All social media is garbage.

The lifeblood of twitter is all about WHO is saying what and to be SOMEONE on twitter all you have to do is: whatever it takes using an insufficient amount of characters to do it. I don't trust anybody on twitter.

Twitter is great, just don’t follow shitty people.

Twitter is great when your pal wins a Gwyneth fanjo candle in a quiz, it explodes when lit, she sells the story to a tabloid, and the story goes viral with many, many LOLs.

If I had a nickel...

I upset Ripper Owens on Twitter once

I noticed a few years back, in myself and others, that any assertion I made in a public online forum had a subconscious primary motivation. I'd conceive of an assertion, think it was coming from a particular place, but in retrospect, I'd be able to see the subconscious motivation for making that assertion. In certain cases, the primary motivation would be full-tilt psychological projection-- identifying a pattern of behaviour in others, publicly speaking on it, without realizing (at the time) that I was, in fact, describing my own behaviour.

Having noticed this, I became more trepidatious about making online assertions. Twitter is, I think, just the most obvious arena for this tendency to thrive. I see rich people asserting that they're poor, and accusing others of being ostentatious about their wealth. I see the smuggest individuals I've ever met accusing others of smugness.

I mean, even this post itself has to come with a disclaimer... I'm not posting this to claim that I'm "above the tendency toward psychological projection in making online assertions", just that it's kinda prevalent, a constant byproduct of being online, in my own posting and others

Extending generosity that they might not deserve, you could imagine that smug people are extra-sensitive to it in other people because they are trying to fight it in themselves... maybe.

im just extra sensitive to it bc im a perfect judge of other people, nothing more to it rly

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

never was i had myspace!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

write in vote for whenever half of all posts in the world became reaction gifs

ILX majority otm.

twitter stopped being cool right here

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsS6UfSXYAMMvKX?format=jpg&name=medium

Trump's getting back in in 2024.

Demolition Man

People are sharing the many films Sylvester Stallone has featured in after a user asked if people could name a movie that the actor has starred in that was not from the Rocky or Rambo series

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/06/jack-dorsey-is-offering-to-sell-the-first-tweet-as-an-nft.html

poll ultimately OTM

ffs you could probably buy a set of ancient Sumerian stone tablets for that price

it seems like a great way to meet new people, talk about interesting ideas, but also be silly and have some fun once in a while. seriously considering signing up for an account and getting in on the conversation.

The thing that tells me to Login/Signup no longer seems to have an X so I can't get rid of it :(

Oh, okay. I can see if I c&p to incognito mode tab.

was 280 chars really only in 2018 it feels like it's been around much longer

imagine what tweet threads would look like if they lowered the character limit to 14

The thing that tells me to Login/Signup no longer seems to have an X so I can't get rid of it :(

― Tapioca Tumbril (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, January 31, 2022 11:36 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

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