The way I see it, Twitter was one of the last sites standing in the content curation game. Reddit’s great, but balkanised. HN itself is pretty good and broader but Twitter was the best product I used for kicking up stuff from around the web I might actually find worthwhile reading. Now it’s lost that function.
Was it a good business decision? No idea. But it’s made the product worse from this consumer’s perspective.
I've been reverting back to RSS and using Pocket as an interim solution (pocket-reader in emacs is really nice and converts well-formed articles into markdown, with the help of pandoc).
I want to host my own RSS server though and then maybe use a native reader to view it, like an RSS of RSS feeds. I don't want to pay an RSS feed company to host that for me and generate ad targeting from it.
The reason is that I want to be in control of the content I consume, and I'm not in control if an engagement algorithm is emotionally manipulating me.
I recently abandoned my self-hosted RSS server because I was having a lot of trouble getting past Cloudflare bot checks. I recommend Inoreader as a relatively inexpensive paid solution.
I'm using News Explorer for macOS and iOS. It syncs feeds, articles and read/unread status via iCloud. And for other URLs I use AnyBox which can download them for offline reading (or archiving).
Can you give some examples of before and after? Don’t see it myself. I confess I gave up on it once Musk started pushing racists like Tucker Carlson so this may colour my view.
LUELinks/ ETI is kind of like Reddit without the balkanization, right?
IIUC, instead of subs you have tags, but tags have moderators and communities around them. Kind of like crossposting, but with a common comment section and no duplication.
The interesting thing about Xitter was the massive reach it offered over other social networks. So many people on there have Xeeted, "I can't believe this site is free!". I think this lead to other effects like news networks spending half their time covering what people are Xeeting instead of actual news. This no doubt made Xitter as possible as it is today.
I have two big questions about the future of Xitter.
1. Corporate media seems to want to destroy Musk, especially since he bought the social network they invested and depended on so heavily. Does this effectively remove Xitter from the center of public discourse? How will this impact Xitter usage?
2. Everything seems to be trending towards, "pay for reach", which makes it look more like all other social networks. While its certainly possible to build a successful business on this model as Facebook, LinkedIn, and other massive social networks have been done, will Xitter deliver other benefits that are more compelling than competing social networks beyond "lots of reach"?
From my point of view Xitter seems to be going in the direction of being another ad company. Reducing reach, hiring a CEO from the ad industry, and adding paywalls for subscriptions, etc. are all signals that tell me to start looking for a different watering hole.
What will be that next watering hole that gives away an absurd amount of reach in exchange for a relatively modest amount of revenue and corporate media coverage?
Could you please please please stop with that it just sounds/reads horrible (and it is also wrong if you talk about the past where people still at least tweeted, and it will also be wrong for the future where people will be Xing on X, if anything, yeah still sounds horrible).
Without pretending the previous Twitter owners were flawless, I do think they had a respect for the "magic" of the site and took care to not damage it too badly. One thing that's been striking about watching Musk talk about Twitter is how...few of his views about what makes the website enjoyable or special are shared by other Twitter veterans. For better or worse Musk is going in a different direction and I think this blog captures one way that's happening.
> Does this effectively remove Xitter from the center of public discourse?
I honestly don't think that Twitter was ever the "center of public discourse". At its peak, it was used by a bit more than 20% of people in the US, far below the likes of Facebook.
There was a streak where it seemed like every other story corporate media (CNN, Foxnews, etc) covered was a Tweet that some prominent person published. That’s what I mean by being at the center of public discourse.
Compare that to Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., which never really achieved that level of press coverage.
Was it a good business decision? No idea. But it’s made the product worse from this consumer’s perspective.