Twitter C/D

it's continuing now! there's just somewhat more pushback!

no i have good news, it ended in 2015

racism and other societal ills are only allowed on substack now

Even St. Francis of Assisi would get fp'ed for being "too sanctimonious".

― Respectfully Yours, (Aimless), Sunday, January 3, 2021 11:00 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lmao

kinda dig ryan broderick's take

I believe that Twitter is a dying website and that it has entered a period of deep insularity and cultural decline and is now virtually intelligible to outsiders. Put simply, 2021 Twitter is 2015 Tumblr, 2016 Reddit, or 2013 4chan. The only difference is that its hopelessly-addicted user base is made up of journalists, politicians, celebrities, and academics. So we’re forced, as a society, to take Twitter’s inane message board drama more seriously than we would if we were talking about a Something Awful goon building a wildly unsafe house. Toxic Twitter power users have filled vacuums where community moderation should be and now they police the site like warlords, serving up public vigilante justice for their restless and angry followers.

Which is how we end up with Bean Dad.

its been like that for a long time tbf

bean dad prob blew up more than the typical main character just because the name bean dad is so excellent

I listen to the Jennings/Roderick podcast sometimes. It was weird to learn that a lot of people don't like Roderick this much! I thought he was a blowhard but pretty innocuous. Some of the tweets people dug up were pretty rough though.

i wonder when the last time twitter was growing its user base in any real way was gotta be more than five years ago, no real way to know since all these companies juice their stats

Isn’t everyone talking abt bean dad bc he said some super weird and possibly made up shit, and then a few outliers go psycho on him & those ppl are signal boosted and come to represent a ginned up idea that twitter is an overreaction machine ? Idk this seemed like a pretty deserving clusterfuck to me lol the guy’s story was bonkers

the thing twitters always had going for it is that its users are journalists and various other people who are niche famous within their industries, people who have reach outside twitter, which keeps the visibility up via tweets getting shown on tv/sites and whatnot, prob brings them a fair amount of inbound traffic for their advertising, instagram is taking some of that now, but for people who want to talk/fight it cant really compare

twitter should water its roots with blood by banning donald trump

trump is their most famous user they love him

wld be funny if trump switched to the gram and had to post a picture everytime he wanted to say something

he could just use one of those fake trump tweet generators and take a picture of it

lol

Isn’t everyone talking abt bean dad bc he said some super weird and possibly made up shit, and then a few outliers go psycho on him & those ppl are signal boosted and come to represent a ginned up idea that twitter is an overreaction machine ? Idk this seemed like a pretty deserving clusterfuck to me lol the guy’s story was bonkers

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40), Monday, January 4, 2021 2:19 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah people try to make these things so serious when its 99% idle rubbernecking

i prefer bean dad discourse to tall/short woman discourse

genuine lol that that Broderick (no idea who he is btw) piece is on Substack. Medium must be really mad about this

I miss the blog era too but there's no going back

ryan broderick yeah i know that guy, cool guy

i prefer bean dad discourse to tall/short woman discourse

Beanín nach bfhuil

yeah people try to make these things so serious when its 99% idle rubbernecking

― lag∞n, Monday, January 4, 2021 1:27 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

People on Twitter have always had fun getting "mad" about trivial shit. But over time, I think the general mood on the site has turned sour and more anxious, so even trivial shit feels higher-stakes somehow.

I think the phrase “rooted in pedophilia” was used.

But over time, I think the general mood on the site has turned sour and more anxious, so even trivial shit feels higher-stakes somehow.

― jaymc, Monday, 4 January 2021 19:42 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hardly just "on the site" now was it

So yeah, like most of these things it’s something I saw on tumblr a decade ago, lol these fucking people.

yeah users moving from tumblr to twitter is an underrated aspect of some of the more truly insane developments in the discourse

I’d seen bean dad retweeted before and he struck me as innocuous gen x npr indie rock dad

kind of wonder how much of people being cranky was that they dislike that archetype

Broderick’s warlord analogy about Twitter is a great one. Absolute utter abdication of responsibility by Twitter dot com management leads to a power structure very similar to the one you see with real-life warlords, with attention as the controlled resource.

all of the were so anti racist that we reinvented segregation stuff is pure tumblr lol

yeah users moving from tumblr to twitter is an underrated aspect of some of the more truly insane developments in the discourse

What furries hath we unleashed

the tumblr teens (now probably 20 year olds) are really aggro when someone questions one of their five hundred personal identifiers

I identify as pandemisexual
I do not leave the house during a pandemic

from that substack article: "The site’s trending algorithms are so thoughtless and robotic that literally anything that achieves a certain level of engagement is beamed into global feeds."

interestingly or prob not is that twitter clearly has been doing a ton of moderation of their trending topics i noticed a couple weeks before the election they basically shut them down altogether the top trends would barely change for days and itd be like fans are wishing justin beiber happy anniversary just obvs nothing organic bubbling up, then the day after the election there was all this right wing conspiracy stuff on there about the election being stolen but that only lasted for a couple days at which point it didnt go quite back to the pre election stasis but none of the really nasty wackjob stuff was showing up, and then the usual wingnuts started complaining about being censored because none of their stuff was trending, they were clearly running campaigns with the goal of getting trending, which is interesting from the pov of all the hysteria about bots getting a topic trending is prob the only thing bots are really good for since what real people follow bots, anyway since then the trends are looking pretty curated, a lot of them have written descriptions which is a clear sign someone took a look at them, i think you could organically trend on some local level but once youre getting to the big list someone is deciding what stays and nuking the really dicey ones

thats just about the trends list fwiw i use the old school "latest tweets" feed rather than the algo "home" feed which is mostly from what i can tell based on what people you follow are interacting with, dont really have a sense what sort of moderation is going on in there but i wouldnt be surprised if there was some tied into topics too

Nothing innocuous about gen Xers

Nor innoculated, alas

ayye

Broderick’s warlord analogy about Twitter is a great one. Absolute utter abdication of responsibility by Twitter dot com management leads to a power structure very similar to the one you see with real-life warlords, with attention as the controlled resource.

― stet

Brilliant pattern recognition and analogy drawing there, broderick and stet. Good work!

the thing about all these huge platforms is theyre impossible to moderate profitably you would need to pay millions of highly trained people around the clock so they just pay thousands of poorly trained ones say fuck it and get rich

Tumblr porn ban truly underrated butterfly effect here

― scampish inquisition (gyac), Monday, January 4, 2021 7:50 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

*ahem* just fyi the ban isn't being as strictly enforced anymore

do i have a tumblr beefcake blog i "curate" on my other laptop while i wfh? truly, who can say

I was going to say, the “porn” ban happened two owners ago. Who even knows what’s going on with moderation

one more quote from that article that resonated:

Bean Dad is very simple. It means one thing — your website is poorly run. That’s it.

It means that context collapse has gotten so bad and the scale of your trending algorithms are so completely out of whack that a total moron tweeting about beans can create the same level of discussion within your community as the Trump Georgia call. It means that your users are so desperate for your made up internet points that they would consider turning an extremely mundane story about using a can opener into a TWENTY-THREE tweet thread and are also so vicious and insane and bored that they would turn that thread about beans into a national scandal.

I mean... maybe people are so fucking tired of harbingers of societal collapse over which they have zero agency (Trump Georgia call) that they jump on goofy freakshows for kicks?

If all the bean dad energy had been converted to hectoring Trump with "have you no decency, sir" we'd finally have him!

i think at least part of his point is that twitter has almost no control over its user base and whatever the original purpose of twitter was (brief information updates?), it's now degenerated into "here for the trainwreck"

People have always loved irrelevant bullshit, I really don’t understand the hand wringing abt this story ...

otm