The future of Twitter should not be akin to a Chinese State platform where millions of moderators pore through every message looking for wrongthink.
We should hanker for a network that treats us like adults, able to think critically about what we’re reading. We shouldn’t need a dubious centralised “fact checking” agency of truth to decide that for us.
Musk is a massive sci fi reader. He knows how dystopia forms.
I hope with his purchase of Twitter, he will nip the creeping authoritarianism and surveillance in the bud, and allow the social network to be a true public square for everyone. Good luck to him.
As a trans person, I'm not looking forward to the changes that will come with decreased moderation. I'll have to choose between maintaining meaningful[1] community connections and the certain increase of unhinged ideologues doing hate speech and the inevitable irl implications of such speech being normalized.
It's a shame that decreases in moderation result in cesspools of conspiratorical witch hunting rather than the rational debate we're so often promised, but the bait and switch is sort of the point.
I get the desire, but why do you think Musk would ever make it open? He frequently retaliates against anyone who speaks up against or disagrees with him. He literally is only ever pro free speech when it benefits him and discards it the second it’s an inconvenience
I don’t understand why Musk buying Twitter signals the end of Twitter. Free speech is bad? Your feed is comprised of people you follow, so what’s the issue?
>But those are all technical solutions to the problem of a missing platform; focusing there misses the point that what will really be missing is a community space. The answer to that is more community spaces, each with their own governance and interaction models. The solution will be an ecosystem of loosely-joined communities, not a single software platform or website - and certainly not a service run by a single company.
Please. Please please please. See the world as it is, not as you would want it to be. Where is the track record of decentralized communities? I think the closest you can get is torrents which themselves really centralized around tracker websites (Pirate Bay etc). Facebook bought itself life by buying another centralized platform- Instagram. it's now losing to an even more concerning centralized platform Tiktok. People are not making libertarian choices on the internet and they never have. Consumer demand has always contradicted libertarians on the internet.
Twitter never succeeded because it fostered diverse communities, it succeeded because it provided one place for them to fight. Let Ethan Klein fight with Ben Shapiro that is what drives Twitter.
Twitter has been 99% positive for me over the past decade. A really nice tool to just be aware of things happening not immediately around. Even these past few years... People's experience with Covid/lockdowns/travel bans, the Afghanistan evacuation, daily Ukraine updates. Each one of those would require reading a book to get an equal amount of information on, and books take too long to write and publish. I'm gonna miss past-Twitter and hope that something else as positive can exist one day.
> We could use more innovation in this space: better spaces for different kinds of conversations (and particularly asynchronous ones), better applications of distributed identities, better ways to follow conversations across all the places we’re having them.
Oh, you mean like web forums and rss? Full circle again innit? just that now the clutter of js frameworks is widespread.
There's not an enormous philosophical gulf between Musk and Jack Dorsey. If Musk doesn't destroy Twitter pretty quickly, he'll probably just get bored and mostly leave it alone.
We should hanker for a network that treats us like adults, able to think critically about what we’re reading. We shouldn’t need a dubious centralised “fact checking” agency of truth to decide that for us.
Musk is a massive sci fi reader. He knows how dystopia forms.
I hope with his purchase of Twitter, he will nip the creeping authoritarianism and surveillance in the bud, and allow the social network to be a true public square for everyone. Good luck to him.