> Well, it finally happened. I met my very first cyber-bully.
Followed by several Mr. Mackey paragraphs describing how people can be, gasp, rude online.
Shitposting predates twitter, the web, Usenet, and even BBS. Almost as soon as you could communicate with computers in the very first chat rooms you had academics hurling insults at each other. And before that you'll find cheeky telegraph messages.
You should read how Timur used to talk to people:
Believe me, you are but pismire ant: don't seek to fight the elephants for they'll crush you under their feet. Shall a petty prince such as you are contend with us? But your rodomontades (braggadocio) are not extraordinary; for a Turcoman never spake with judgement. If you don't follow our counsels you will regret it
I'd take cyber bullying over a Turco-Mongolic psycho on horseback taking personal issue with me any day.
Please, can we have a week free of twitter stories? Pretty please?
For some reason I thought there might be something of value written as HN is supposed to aggregate and curate useful information. I keep falling for it, I understand Jerry Springer viewers now, hard to pull away from a dumpster fire.
What is of value to you is not the same as what is of value to others. Please do not project your own desires onto the world or assume everyone must feel the same as you in order to be worthwhile.
> Oh, and good luck. Despite the bullying and other inconveniences, Twitter remains an intriguing world for the social explorer.
11 years later and that message might finally lose its relevance. Despite Twitter's numerous faults, in my eyes, it was always an interesting platform where you could find something to look at/read, even if it was often in the form of a link to another platform.
Now, with a ton of people feeling fed up and choosing to leave, it's going to lose the one thing that made it good (and, other times, bad) - its user base. A shame if it does, Twitter is an essential part of the Internet's history.
Probably too early to tell. Early reports have it at like a million which would be a drop in the bucket. I don’t think Twitter would die just because Elon took over, the question is will his changes overall slowly improve the site or slowly degrade it for “most people” whatever that means, the hard part for Elon is the least sticky twitter users may also be the least vocal. He could listen to everyone and still lose a large swath of users for reasons he doesn’t understand.
There are a lot of people fake leaving (read: rage posting about how they are going to leave but not actually following through) Twitter mainly because of Musk's buyout. Mastodon seems to be the new home for a lot of these people. While I'm sure some will leave and stay gone, Twitter has too much inertia going for it that is desirable to most users: centrality and reach, ease of use, by-proxy ad platform, to name a few. Some things like search and monetization need a lot of work, and from what I've gathered by Musk's tweets these two are at or near the top of the list to be fixed. In order for Twitter to fail at this point there's too much human behavior that would have to change. There are a ton of people out there touting Mastodon as a replacement, but I just don't think that's going to happen.
For the same reason that conservatives never succeeded in leaving Twitter for their own platform (Gab/Gettr/Parler/TruthSocial), progressives will also be unable to shake their addiction to the blue bird.
Sure, some will leave, but alternate platforms will never come close to even Twitter's tiny numbers.
I’m so surprised when people make statements that have this at their core: “people’s habits change slowly over time and have huge momentum”.
If Twitter changed it’s tech stack and became a genuinely better platform, they could gain those million users back almost instantly. People are not semi trucks: they’re making choices moment to moment.
> A shame if it does, Twitter is an essential part of the Internet's history.
A big thing I think that’s unanalyzed in our age of punditry and hot takes is — what is it about imperfect systems that is successful. Everyone sees the huge problems with imperfect systems, and yet, as bad as twitter is, it seems hard to imagine a product that is much better without fundamentally changing what Twitter is.
If the date in the slug is accurate this is relatively early on (2011/12/22) - well before it became the desired battleground for ideological differences, and well, well before Twitter (or even Reddit) became the cesspools they are now. So there is a little novelty in this post that is probably sincere.
Implying the internet as a whole isn't a cesspool since the start.
I remember Medal of Honor/Call of Duty lobbies, MSN Communities, bulletin boards,... were quite a bit... worse. Every lobby you joined was a cesspool of racism, sexism,...
Heck, even Reddit was much worse in the beginning. While now you have Democrats versus Republican discussions, in the first years you had communities that openly talked about committing genocide of other races and sharing jailbait pictures.
The worst of Twitter now is very tame in comparison of those unmoderated lobbies.
Fair to a point. In those times you knew what you were getting into. The users picked the winners (popular kids) and the losers - it was truly the wild west but at least it was truly community (for lack of a better word) driven.
The difference is that now the platforms pick the winners and losers. That's where it fell apart.
Followed by several Mr. Mackey paragraphs describing how people can be, gasp, rude online.
Shitposting predates twitter, the web, Usenet, and even BBS. Almost as soon as you could communicate with computers in the very first chat rooms you had academics hurling insults at each other. And before that you'll find cheeky telegraph messages.
You should read how Timur used to talk to people:
I'd take cyber bullying over a Turco-Mongolic psycho on horseback taking personal issue with me any day.Please, can we have a week free of twitter stories? Pretty please?