Twitter C/D

You all sound like you were bad at Twitter. I enjoyed my (admittedly highly curated) experience there greatly, made tons of valuable professional connections, and read lots of funny jokes about Danzig and Rob Zombie and interesting articles (and bought books) that people I know wrote that I might not have found out about any other way.

i think the best thing you can say about it is that it made the world a worse place by accident, unlike facebook, which did it deliberately.

I was good at it it was still ultimately bad for me at the worst of times, I eventually turned off RTs from almost everybody

ILX is a very small insular community (a good one!), Facebook is an abomination consisting of posts by discarded high school friends, Instagram exists solely for its users to promote themselves with flattering photos, and TikTok is just cute parody videos…

So, after Twitter what’s left of a real public forum in the larger world?

U say that like it's a bad thing

tiktok is good

Tons of places still use RSS, I am drowning in articles lol. Including tumblr for your shitpost-reading needs.

I use nitter to read twitter posts via rss.

So, after Twitter what’s left of a real public forum in the larger world?

reddit is bad

Less ppl should be heard from imo

that is definitely true, but twitter also allowed for voices you wanted to hear from

lets fire up the ol webring

https://neocities.org/

i left twitter in october 2015 and my life has been great except for when people remind me of or direct me to tweets. rest in piss

Hard agree

If it goes down I'm going to really miss it, it will be a huge loss. I know I won't ever again find connections to a lot of the people on it that I admire and like hearing from

https://i.imgur.com/SvrWVZL.png

“Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please? xx"

— text to Elon Musk from ex-wife, March 23, 2022 pic.twitter.com/lDrMtzUWrG

— Chad Loder - @chadlo✧✧✧@kolekt✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧ (@chadloder) November 18, 2022

I posited to bf a couple days ago that I suspected that Elon's attitude toward Twitter was likely coloured by an acknowledgement that the disappearance of the platform would be a net gain for people like himself-- it effectively is the best platform for people to express dissent against plutocrats (in a broad sense) like Elon himself. This isn't to say that I necessarily felt that he intentionally intended to cause it to fail, just that it was a deeper part of his subconscious approach to running the company-- like, "it's OK if I totally fuck this up"

otm. I think that in his totally warped way of thinking, if the site flourished under him it would prove his genius and if not it's because it deserved to die.

i think some have forgotten that the true way forward is X

it's massively iterating

As for my experience, I met my wife through Twitter and got exposed to some viewpoints I found genuinely enlightening, along with some of the most insane thoughts I've ever stumbled across in my life.

Black Lives Matter, protests for racial justice, whatever inroads leftism has made in the U.S. the last few years -- Twitter had a net positive impact on these events and others, didn't it?

Twitter is/was good for quick dissemination of news and information, useful during emergencies. When I worked for city government it was the absolute best and fastest way to get out info about weather, closed streets, all that kind of stuff. Not least because all the media also followed it, so they would immediately retweet to all of their followers. There isn't another platform that does that in the same way.

We need to start an I Love Traffic board

I mean, arguably Twitter is/was the only really useful social media platform, in terms of its potential to quickly convey news and information. I know that's not mostly what lots of people use it for, but in the case of e.g. political protests, natural disasters, war zones, it can come close to actually being the decentralized crowdsourced news system people fantasize about. Always with vulnerabilities to misinformation of course, but still a pretty valuable thing in particular situations.

ilx would be just as good at that if people were looking at it tho

We need a catchy name for our posts, like tweets. Lix?

How about Loves?

Zings, iirc

sry folks, its gotta be Posts, its the poster's way

I don't think Elon Musk would be ELON MUSK RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD without Twitter. Its disappearance might be a boon for Bill Gates (who won't have to be confronted with Epstein jokes) but Musk (like Trump) depends on public recognition for his entire ecosystem of scams.

Where's the thinkpiece on what this means for the Trump campaign.

All the people on my timeline are bidding emotional farewells and I can’t help thinking it’s going to be like passengers on a troubled plane making declarations of love to one another before an embarrassing failure to crash.

Meanwhile, I don’t know if I’m just a sicko but after 15 years with few exceptions I couldn’t care less if I never hear from any of these people again. Beatles Twitter is nice though, and that one guy who posts threads of old newspaper articles.

nobody declared their love for me, fuck

i don't think it will actually go down permanently, but that might just be a failure of imagination on my part. more so than other platforms, twitter has its own rhythm, its own language, which is maddeningly meta-referential and all that but still capable of produces flashes of insight, humor, and even a weird kind of poetry.

it is also an incredibly harsh and unforgiving space. definitely not a good platform for discussion. more just its own thing.

It may or may not have excruciating outages within days as a result of nobody working there anymore but if it does make it through this employee bottleneck event they’re just gonna completely fuck it up so tomato tomato

It may burn but at least

https://linktr.ee/drilreal

eephus! i like you pretty well!

hope this helps

i bet twitter doesn't die and doubt it will change much

okay

it's never died before, has barely changed in 15 years, and was consistently run by weird asshole dudes. i'm betting on continuity

has it lost thousands of employees in 2 weeks before?

Don't really get the people who go on about what a horrendous cesspit Twitter is - surely you only follow the people you want to follow. It's like saying books are terrible because some terrible books get published. Well you only read the books you want to. Have to say I find Twitter really good for following my niche interests, better than anything else I've found and I'll be sad it it dies.

Not to sound like musk here, but how many people do you really need to keep it running?

(I honestly have no idea)

How many people does it take to keep ILX running? Multiply that number by the ratio of ILXors to Twitter users.

I'm with Zelda.

i don't think its going to die completely but it has already "changed much" in terms of workforce and revenue and those changes will start to manifest on the actual site

on the one hand, it used to run with a headcount smaller than the current headcount, so why not.

on the other hand, it's a more complicated system than when they had 1000 employees, and it's not really designed to run with that many people any more, and the people who understand (and no how to make it simpler or fix it if it breaks) it are exactly the people who've left.

(left in a hurry without writing anything down or training replacements)