Kinda similar to me. I was on the verge of quitting but then I switched to a different tablet and needed to re-buy the third party app I used as official Twitter was the worst. I didn't do that straight away (still haven't), realised I didn't miss it and decided I was done.
I stopped using it around 2020 or maybe 2021 when I realized the algorithm was just serving me stories to make me angry and engage with them. Once I stopped using it, my mental health was better... My mental health is still shit, but I realized Twitter made it worse lol And so I haven't really been on social media since, except those platforms where I just talk one to one to people or in groups. But nothing like Twitter anymore. Kinda sad, met some cool people there. But I've been mostly better since disengaging with Twitter.
@@Freak80MC Yeah, I noticed that too regarding the algorithm and it was early 2022 when I quit, so roughly the same timeframe. I only followed about 20-ish people, all music, movie and TV related just so I could keep up with the latest info. I was constantly pushed unrelated stuff that seemed designed to make me react negatively. I don't have any mental health issues and knew how it made feel, it must have been horrible for those like yourself. In my time on there I did see some good happen. People finding lost things, getting genuinely helpful advice and so on but unfortunately it was swamped by all the crap.
Frankly the downfall of Twitter has actually opened my eyes to how much I *don’t* need social media as a whole. Not to shame anyone else, if you spend a lot of time on social media or rely on it for income. For me personally though, as a shy teenager, social media was my escape and means of finding friends. As an adult now, having learned about myself and my mental health, I’ve grown more distant from social media sites, deleting Twitter long before Musk got his nasty paws on it. It really kind of opened my mind to how much we let these corporation owned websites dictate so much of our lives, including our politics, our social circles and our mental health. Again, no shame to anyone else. I still use social media and I won’t pretend otherwise, but I am finding myself much less enamoured by it than I was in my youth. Hopefully we can all learn that these websites don’t own us, and they never should. We have the right to leave them to burn.
I deleted all of my social media a couple of years ago, YT is basically a streaming service for me and I have WhatsApp as it's basically the default way of communicating where I live.
Twitter's character limit is also not very useful for much beyond potshots either, and that is not useful for communication. Sometimes brevity is not useful, and unless political debate is to be reduced to quips and soundbites then there's nothing much to be gained from Twitter for some things - I don't want to write novels on a platform, but I would like to be more comprehensive than what 320 characters allows me. Heck, I have written short fanfics that can take up 2000 simply through emotional nuance and trying to convey something more than what bluntness alone would get - while a tale doesn't need to be essay length, I'm not Ernest Hemingway trying to write a six word story
I completely get what you mean. I’ve slowly realized I don’t like social media really and am distancing myself from it. I plan on deleting RUclips next year and just going without it for a bit
Former British Prime Minister David Cameron once said in radio interview: "Too many tweets make a twat", as the reason why he never used Twitter. It's the only true and sensible thing he ever said whilst in office. If only Elon had listened to him.
Tumblr still very much exists. It has a much smaller but still quite interesting and active community. It's still the place I go to see NEW stuff that hasn't been posted to other platforms ad nauseum.
I started using tumblr this year and it's by far my favourite of the big social media platforms. It feels much easier on there to craft an experience that is defined by niche communities. And it's nice to have the ability to write and read long posts with people who nerd out about the same things you do.
I got into Tumblr recently and it's like a haven. No matter how niche your interest is there's a small community you can find around it, and you essentially unlearn cringe culture. Its ofc by no means perfect, but that's true for every platform.
@@HoloFizz Somebody once posted "Tumblr is where people go to talk about STUFF. Every other platform is where people go to talk about themselves." I think that difference is what makes it great
@@dexmartin4358 oh that's a good way of describing it. That's definitely been true to my experience, and it's why I've made a couple genuine friends on Tumblr -- we connected over shared interests in a way that hasn't happened for me on other platforms.
And however small the userbase is now compared to its heyday, Tumblr's shitposting and meme culture is still the best you will find on any social media platform. Just look up Goncharov for proof.
Thanks to Twitter I got to chat with Ruth Buzzi, Mark Hamill, et al. (even if only briefly), as well as discovering that a few people I was a fan of, were also fans of mine, which was a very happy surprise. It was a good thing... originally.
It's been gone for awhile. Some are only leaving now for bluer skies, but it was effectively dead when Lex Luthor spent 44 Billion for it, knowing he could then dominate it, and use it to shift the overton window away from decency and truth. Will other platforms take its place? Possible. But I hope someday we have a better more user friendly service, because we settled for Twitter, but it had Tons of issues even before it became X.
Twitter was also more marketable, when the name or something similar in this case 'Tweeting' becomes a verb, it solidifies its existence. No one is going to 'Skeet' on BlueSky. As a tangent, if I'm not wrong, Twitter technically owns all the accounts so they can just take your handles without asking. Although, that's not really a reason to not hold onto the handles, just something extra to take note of.
I remember this brief time in 2016 -- you know when, and maybe it persisted over the next year or two -- when people were recognizing all of the systemic failures of of media (both social and old) to combat bigotry, fascism, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, etc. This was when I first saw people refer to Twitter as the "global town hall," usually in the context of, "this shouldn't be managed by a for-profit corporation." Everyone seemed to recognize that serious reformations were needed. And then... nothing happened. Anywhere. Things just got worse, and worse, and worse. Jack Dorsey could have turned transformed Twitter into a nonprofit, built around certain ideals, like the Wikimedia Foundation -- a nonprofit, charitable foundation dedicated to maintaining Wikipedia in accordance with specific ideals. Instead, he sold it to an infantile bigot who proceeded to make all of the existing problems a thousand times worse. The problem with being forced to rely on billionaires choosing to do the right thing is that *they never do.*
My dad once referred to Twitter as “the Cheers! theme song platform for entire generations who have no idea what Cheers! is.” (You wanna go where people know our troubles are all the same…)
I don't really use Twitter, i have discord for chatting with people and tumblr for fandom stuff (the fandom I'm most active in rn is waaaay better there anyway, same amount of activity, but waaaay less toxic) It's a shame so many creative folks are losing parts of their audience though
Do not morn or celebrate the passing of a corrosive presence. Look to the future to fill the void with something healthier, more meaningful, and good natured.
I found such a warm and welcoming community of horror fans on Twitter, especially during the pandemic when we were all staying in. From 2020-2021, I would host weekly watch parties and for a lot of us, it was the highlight of our week!
I did, long ago, look into Twitter, opened an account. Tried to sign in to cancel it, couldn't remember the password. Wasn't worth the effort to recover it. But my understanding is that back in the day, it was a useful communication tool for anti-establishment groups in many different countries. I suspect that's why Leon got funding to acquire and gut it.
A great eulogy for a strange place from another time! Thanks for sharing. I think Twitter and Tumblr having "gotcha" culture (esp. Twitter, where your response is on top of what your responding to, but Tumblr's culture of this is so deep) both made me a better-off and worse-off person. Like I learned so many things because I was so afraid of getting "gotcha'd" (or because some Twitter thread started off functionally saying "read this or else you're bad".) It was emotionally taxing and maybe kind of toxic, but I learned so many important things that way. But certainly in my last few years of using Twitter I was absolutely paralyzed from saying anything most of the time. I lived in fear of making some innocuous tweet like "I watched this show and I liked it" and being "gotcha'd" because some cast member/director/show runner/co-writer whose name I don't even know said something terrible once. Like I think it made me a better person and I learned so much but I think that living with that kind of culture for years has really done damage to my ability to interact with other people online. Especially to absorb new information that is presented in anything approximating the Twitter/Tumblr "Good people pay attention to issue XYZ, bad people don't care" kind of way, I have this new knee jerk reaction to avoid consuming the info at all costs.
i feel that all the potential for good you mentioned is better served by non-algorithmic, non-corporate social media. there is a good reason the Fediverse is full of queer people (from the very beginning, some queer people were even involved in the protocol design), and there is a good reason that when you look away from Mastodon (which is the most well-known and the most corporate-friendly part of the Fediverse) you find that the Fediverse is even more queer. there won't be another twitter, but there could be better things if people put stock in them. my Masto and Fedi friends have been meaningful and helpful, and when i recently moved to another country almost all of my new local friends i got thanks to these platforms. they can be equally lifechanging, if not moreso.
Twitter gave me the chance to talk with people I never got the chance to, including your fabulous self and creative folks from my childhood. I love the communities but it is sad to see it go downhill.
Same! I got offers for work and people I'm still talking to years later from being on twitter. A lot of people migrated across to Bsky with me, but I do mourn the good parts of what it once was.
If there's ever another Twitter, it'll probably be based around an emerging technology in the same way that Twitter was based around the smartphone instead of the browser like earlier social media platforms. You could then see all the same ingredients come together: engineers more interested in building something than worrying about how it might actually be used, investors who are initially more interested in growth than profitability or sustainability and a public looking for a simple and participatory way to play with their favorite toy.
After 12 years of medical gaslighting, less than a year on Disability Twitter got me a diagnosis. Like you, Vera, I couldn't understand the appeal of microblogging. But I took note when Twitter was cited as a resource for those organising across the Arab Spring. I was most into it around 2018, when we were campaigning for abortion rights in Ireland. So I am thankful for those islands of hope and change. We'll find more spaces to make the change we need.
Reddit and RUclips is my go-to now for anything. For trending, Tiktok. It felt freeing to be rid of FB and Twitter. If i need to shout at the void, A digital journal.
So what? Seriously. So what? This analogy is like meeting someone in a waiting room. Maybe you keep in touch, maybe you don’t. It’s not the waiting room that makes the relationship, it’s the people in the relationship. Black folks are thriving on other platforms, we good. ✌🏽
Great analysis! Never having used xitter myself, though having been kept at least somehow up to date on the topic via reddit, there are at least two people I interact with on a regular basis (both once active users of the platform) who actually said "farewell, Elmolf!" and switched to reddit exclusively (which can be, by design, even more of an echochamber, but rather of one's own choice than that of algorithms sorting by user engagement) back when xitter was sold. They're good people :) You're most likely correct in stating there will never be any platform as present in general discourse as xitter used to be. Which is, of course, some kind of loss per se (not for me, but still). However, keep up the good spirit, thank you SO MUCH for your work, and - lots of love from Bavaria, Germany (excuse my English, there might be some mistakes in it).
Bluesky had real potential to be a good contender, but their latest fuck up with Jesse Singal has been the final drop for many of the users who made it the destination platform for many of those leaving twitter.
Twitter has been the first social media site I’ve properly mourned. My entire job industry was on Twitter, and when I left that industry, Twitter was how I stayed connected. It was our network-y break room. I always hoped I’d come back, but my industry has left Twitter en masse, and there’s been no one space where the industry has re-gathered.
The sciences and medicine and academia are _really_ struggling with the decline of Twitter, for exactly this reason: It has been *_the_* communication medium for those fields for a decade, and for a lot of people and a lot of uses it was a vast improvement over listservs. Everybody I know in those fields is trying to find somewhere else to be, but it’s fragmenting the communication. The particular benefit of Twitter in those fields was promoting cross-disciplinary communication and fortuitous connections, something that domain-specific listservs that require proactive joining just can’t do.
I used Twitter for 5 years, the only 100% good thing that happen is someone convinced me to watch Hilda on the day it premiered. And the irony is the 5 years 2018-2023 I was on Twitter was the life span of the show Hilda. I'm glad I quit using Twitter the same week along with Bella Ramsey. It would be nice for the internet to stop being creepy towards the two main The Last of Us cast leads for having a lot of dad roles and lesbian roles.
I've been on tumblr for a long, long time. I was there when it died - because of the nsfw ban, driving out artists, queer communities, and other weirdos (affectionately). Tumblr has gotten a bit of a revival, because twitter went to shit, but tumblr will never be the same either. Platforms, as big as they may seem, are not guaranteed to last forever. At least in the way you fell in love with them. It sucks, but that's the internet. We're all just ultimately playthings to the coorporations that decide the algorithm knows better.
The timing of this is apt. My company put me on some training about how Blue Sky is the new twitter. The presenter was unprepared and ruffled by my question of 'why do we want to engage with our users like we used to do on Twitter?' To clarify I work for a place that provide in house services for our staff. The alternative to Twitter for communication is just talking to our sections of our large workforce which some are too lazy/ introverted to do. In general though I think it's worth pointing out that after all these years of social media I think people are tired of de-personalised communication. There's a reason why Whatsapp groups are the fastest rising 'social media'. People are realising that social media is a massive drain to both your time and mental health so if you are going to engage with it, it better be with people you know or people with similar interests. When you said about Twitter being used for celebrities it's worth thinking about how that's now been replaced by podcasts where again it's more of a humanising way of communicating with the world.
Twitter was specially useful during emergencies, because you could follow how the event developed and post need in real time. Now all that is lost and there's' no other platform doing that, I as long as I'm aware.
I keep hearing this. Thankfully I never _needed_ it. But when I _wanted_ to follow an emergency (one that wasn’t directly affecting me, but either affected others I know or was of interest for some other reason), I found it extremely difficult to figure out how to find the relevant info. Who do I trust? And if they’re the same traditional sources (like FEMA, NOAA, other government agencies, or traditional news outlets) I’d turn to before Twitter, I can still do that by looking at their webpages or listening to broadcasts or signing up for email alerts - what does/did Twitter bring to the game?
For me Twitter used to be the place I'd go to further interact with friends I made in forums, and in later years Discord. I've always thrived more discussing stuff in enclosed circles like a forum thread or a Discord channel, and so I made my timeline a reflection of that: very few follows of people I already know or, in a few cases,I didn't but just stumbled upon and found very cool fellows. And you know what? For a few years it worked out very well, I got what I wanted to out of the place. Aaaand then it got toxic. It probably always was, but in the months leading to the musky guy's purchase I started noticing a ton of animosity all around, more than before, and it started to reach a point where I would close the app feeling so much worse than when I opened it. Then the manchild bought the site. And I knew very well than from that point on it would only get so much worse, so... I took it as a sign to leap out. And I wish I was wrong in my prediction, then it wouldn't be the hellscape we can see now. Then for a while there was this cool blog documenting the downfall of Twitter since its purchase, "Twitter is going great", sadly it stopped posting because the host has a life and couldn't keep up with so many levels of clownfest. It was through this blog that I learned of the Bluesky project, and I instantly signed in. At first you needed an invitation, so as soon as I got mine I jumped in and tried to use it as old Twitter. But it died very fast. I wanted a new Twitter, but it seems the fruit wasn't ripe yet. The harvesting, of course, was the infamous Xodus, which I took with my open arms. More than a year later than I wanted to, but never too late. Now I feel back home, I have my timeline of close friends, with no algorithm trying to push me into stuff I don't want my timeline to be (which Twitter in its lasts months before the manchild was already pushing, another thing that was putting me off). There's barely any toxicity, now I feel I can chill out and post stuff whenever I feel like it. It's refreshing, in a way. Is Bluesky free of guilt? Of course not. But it lets me *choose* what I want to see, and that's the main thing I seek, there's enough despair in our lives for me to want an algorithm to shove it down my throat even more.
Thank you for the video, Vera! It is undeniable how big and influent Twitter has become. And despite it having its share of problems in the past, Elon Musk did really make Twitter so much worse. When I did use the Twitter constantly around ten years ago, the thing which I most like about it was be able to interact with artists, writers, game developers, creators, etc. It is almost funny how even after losing my means of access to my account (password and recovery e-mail) and not using it for many years, the account is still up. Considering the current "hellhole" the Twitter has become and how you cannot access it without an account, instead of creating a new one, I do prefer to just stay away from it. What people should be aware is: social media platforms (plural) are important. However, a single one is not indispensable. And, soon or later, they end. When Twitter eventually goes down for good (it could be in the next year or in ten years), its users will just go someplace else. And, finally, even if Blue Sky is able to become the next best thing after Twitter, it will also suffer under the effects of "enshittification" because it is what always happens under capitalism...
Twitter was so much fun in its heydey and that goodwill delayed my leaving, but I'm glad I finally did now that Bluesky and Threads are getting better at feeling more immediate. Not necessarily a good incentive to look for, but effective to get me to stay for sure
I agree that there won't be another Twitter, but there will be something else to fill the void. LJ migrated to Tumblr, Vine format went to Tiktok, etc. Sure, the next iteration won't be the same as the previous one, but there will be something to cover the needs of people who were driven out of Twitter. In this sense, Bluesky looks more like Dreamwidth -- a platform functionally the same as LJ that is (was? is it still alive?) much smaller and never grew enough to replace LJ, not the way Tumblr did, even though it's very different.
I've never gotten Twitter, I still don't get it, and I will NEVER understand people who preferred it to tumblr. Maybe I'm just too wordy, but tumblr has been consistently the best social media site ESPECIALLY for fandom IMO since 2011. We killed that within us which cringes and it's fantastic. Fandom on twitter was and is uniquely insufferable, like all the people too annoying for tumblr, too pedantic for reddit, and too heinous for 4chan migrated there. No one will ever convince me twitter gave enough good to the world to balance out the bad.
@@l.g.2888 totally agree about tumblr being especially suited to fandom. The banning of NSFW art etc was unfortunate, but in terms of how the platform functions and the culture of it, fandom communities really seem to thrive there
I’m with you about Twitter: I never really understood why it was so appealing, because every time someone showed me something really worth my time on Twitter it wasn’t actually _on_ Twitter - it was a link to content elsewhere. Or, later on (as in: years later, as the platform evolved), it was a lengthy thread that would’ve been _so_ much easier to read as a single post. In theory, Twitter could be a great way to find these things and connect with people, but I’ve never gotten the knack of it. How do you find the people talking about stuff that interests you or sharing new ideas or breaking news? Particularly in the latter category, it won’t be the same people every time. And I never got good at using lists and filters to drink from the firehose. I tried several times to set things up to be more topic-focused instead of person-centric, but without any sort of standardization of hashtags that was basically impossible. And to the degree that I was successful at any of that, it was largely dependent on features that TweetBot provided and either weren’t available directly on Twitter, or were much harder to use. So when Twitter killed TweetBot, I just gave up on Twitter. I tried using the website a few more times after that, but I just couldn’t get the signal-to-noise ratio above like 1%, which just wasn’t worth my time.
Unfortunately, I’ve found Tumblr almost as impenetrable. I occasionally find really great stuff there, but for the most part I just kinda haphazardly flail about, trying to figure out how to connect things or follow conversations. Every time I dip in, I have to relearn how to get from a response to the thing they’re responding to. It’s very chaotic to me.
@@natbarmore Tumblr isn't good for what I'd call free for all chat, like Twitter was. We just recently got threaded comments. Since you can't separate notes on original post from notes on a reblog if you have something to say you either create your own post or join the reblog chain. I prefer it this way tbh, Twitter was always too "noisy" for me, when I just wanted to follow specific content creators. My tl flooded me with posts from people I follow mixed with random sponsored crap, comments from people I follow, their likes, all seemingly in random order, suggested posts etc, it was overwhelming. I still have Twitter, but I use it exclusively to manually check a single account I follow there and run as soon as I'm done.
I’m about 18 minutes in, so you might get to this, but are the Twitter numbers accounting for bot accounts? I read recently that people are using bots for community notes now, so those have to be very active accounts
I found out about blue sky from a post on Lynda Carter’s twitter account saying she was on blue sky so I got it now I follow u also cause I respect your opinion but that doesn’t always mean I agree with it and can respectfully agree to disagree and it nice u will discuss the classic era of doctor who even if it’s reviews of selected serials
I'm torn, i was never really active on Twitter, it never appealed to me, and I've left most other social platforms, except RUclips, but i really want to support if my favorite creators who are making the jump to bluesky and are trying to rebuild followers etc.... but it's just not the sort of platform i enjoy, and I just don't have the time or spoons to interact with another platform
I used it for podcasts and stuff in recent years I've been trimming back my follows I plan to just use it for that eventually because like you said people flee to different places
as a memeber of gen Z, (just turned 23!) I would like to add to this conversation that my whole generation NEVER took to twitter. Like twitter was something that my mom had, and like something that politicians interacted with. And when we (gen z) became adults all of our needs were met by the platforms we already have. I don't have statistics but after a cursory check with all of my friends I would wager 2% or less of gen z was ever on twitter.
The initial 140-character limit was chosen because a traditional SMS message is 160. I can’t entirely agree with everything that Elon did, but the problem with Twitter was how a free platform makes money to stand on its own two feet. One thing about Facebook is that everyone you care about is on it, so if you post something, everyone will see it, and you can chat with your friends because they are there. It also means you only need one account, whereas now, when every community is using their own Mastodon instance, it becomes a lot more work to ensure that the people you want to see your message do it. You also claimed that the breaking point for you was that you could no longer opt out of AI training. It strikes me that you never were, anyway, since they own the platform. I assume you transfer the copyright to them so that they can reproduce it and, therefore, show it to people.
I only got into Twitter in late 2021 when Bolsonaro lost the election in Brazil and I wanted to follow what was going on with the people camping before military bases asking for an intervention to change the results, culminating with the destruction of 3 government buildings on January 8th 2022. But haven't logged in even once since the change. Totally not worth it.
If he honestly is taking major action based on that idea, he’s an even bigger fool than I already thought. Which I didn’t think was possible but here we are.
@@marocat4749 imo any platform where names are unimportant is great for discussion, though companies are getting increasingly better at astroturfing, so they may not last forever. I miss a lot the 2000s Internet where everything had a dedicated forum to it. Reddit is probably the last remnant of that type of Internet, but they're trying to change to fit better with their actual goal (creating AI training datasets).
I remember the beginner phase of Twitter. I didn't get it either. I remember when Ashton Kutcher was the most famous user of the platform. Been off Twitter (fully deleting my account) for years now. Don't miss it. I have bluesky but it's mostly politically oriented and that can be a bummer so I go there sparingly. I also have threads but given the plans Zuckerberg has for Facebook and their other platforms presumably I might have to delete that soon.
Even before the rich idiot bought it, I've always been of the opinion that I don't hate myself enough to get a Twitter account. The character limit is so baffling. I had a tremendous amount of secondhand embarrassment whenever I saw a "thread" on that site. How utterly demeaning, having to resort to that when you want to say anything of any substance. Like, imagine writing a letter to a loved one, but instead of stationary, you just have a stack of Post-it notes. Absolutely miserable.
@@CouncilofGeeks You're really gonna make me explain it 😭 You said "trans-focused" but it sounded like "transphobic" for a second, which obviously wouldn't have made sense
They were never town squares to begin with. They’re hotel ballrooms. Town squares are controlled and managed by the people who use it for their interests, the betterment of society. Hotel ballrooms are controlled and managed by the owners, via the algorithm, who use it in their best interests, profit.
@@Laurabeck329the Science fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” it was an alien word to mean a thing beyond understanding. Sort of super-understanding. Or Internalizing the concept.
I get what you are saying and agree with you on all fronts except that Twitter was the biggest platform. Twitter had about 200M active users (mostly in America and the EU) as compared to Facebook and TikTok which have over 2B active users. So yes Twitter was the largest app in the microblogging sphere but it never had the stranglehold on the world's attention like WhatsApp or Snapchat.
Tumblr was perfectly fine and then they did the idiotic nsfw ban and all the artists in the fandom chose twitter for some reason, and thus everyone's mental health took a hit. I'll never not be a bitter little prune about it.
I mean the reason they picked Twitter was obvious: it was the largest platform not banning NSFW content. Though over time they would simultaneously let the porn bots run riot and suppress NSFW.
I guess it made sense from the pov of doing commissions. From a purely fandom pov, there were other promising platforms. But tbc I'm laying the blame on Tumblr. Each person did what they deemed best. It just didn't make sense to me. The bot problem getting worse on both twitter and Tumblr who had just driven away nsfw and queer creators was really the icing on the cake. I don't wanna be too cold because I know a lot of people lost a home there like I fear losing discord some day, where I went when other social media became too much. I have community there with friends I met there and elsewhere, including twitter. For me, it felt like it gave me that sorta despite its nature, but that wasn't everyone's experience. Hopefully something will fill that void one day.
I am NOT saying corporations are people, but I feel like continuing to use the name "Twitter" is like deadnaming. It might just be my cis-self being overly sensitive to that?
In short: yes it is overly sensitive and a misapplication of principle. Because you're right. Corporations are not people. They have no feelings, no desires, no soul, and have no claim to the basic respect and dignity that should be ascribed to a human being. Besides, if you want to really go down that road: it doesn't map on anyway because Twitter didn't choose to change its name. A new name was forced on it by its new business daddy who never cared what Twitter wanted because he'd tried to rename other things "X" before and people had been in positions to stop him. So we don't know what Twitter actually wants. Though of course, in reality, Twitter doesn't want anything. Because it's a corporation.
@ladywifiofbadfun Corporations are made up of people. Corporations themselves are not people. We don’t have to treat the actual corporation like it’s a person. Nor should we.
Twitter, the only thing that we deadname with a clean soul
We refuse to accept their Proper Noun!😉
Well, Twitter and the Sears Tower. Turns out that “X” is pronounced “Twitter” and “Willis” is pronounced “Sears.”
That's because Twatter isn't a person and, y'know, Musk.
my breaking point was randomly unintentionally not using it for a day and realising i was happier
Kinda similar to me. I was on the verge of quitting but then I switched to a different tablet and needed to re-buy the third party app I used as official Twitter was the worst. I didn't do that straight away (still haven't), realised I didn't miss it and decided I was done.
I stopped using it around 2020 or maybe 2021 when I realized the algorithm was just serving me stories to make me angry and engage with them. Once I stopped using it, my mental health was better... My mental health is still shit, but I realized Twitter made it worse lol And so I haven't really been on social media since, except those platforms where I just talk one to one to people or in groups. But nothing like Twitter anymore. Kinda sad, met some cool people there. But I've been mostly better since disengaging with Twitter.
@@Freak80MC Yeah, I noticed that too regarding the algorithm and it was early 2022 when I quit, so roughly the same timeframe.
I only followed about 20-ish people, all music, movie and TV related just so I could keep up with the latest info. I was constantly pushed unrelated stuff that seemed designed to make me react negatively. I don't have any mental health issues and knew how it made feel, it must have been horrible for those like yourself.
In my time on there I did see some good happen. People finding lost things, getting genuinely helpful advice and so on but unfortunately it was swamped by all the crap.
Frankly the downfall of Twitter has actually opened my eyes to how much I *don’t* need social media as a whole.
Not to shame anyone else, if you spend a lot of time on social media or rely on it for income. For me personally though, as a shy teenager, social media was my escape and means of finding friends.
As an adult now, having learned about myself and my mental health, I’ve grown more distant from social media sites, deleting Twitter long before Musk got his nasty paws on it. It really kind of opened my mind to how much we let these corporation owned websites dictate so much of our lives, including our politics, our social circles and our mental health.
Again, no shame to anyone else. I still use social media and I won’t pretend otherwise, but I am finding myself much less enamoured by it than I was in my youth. Hopefully we can all learn that these websites don’t own us, and they never should. We have the right to leave them to burn.
I deleted all of my social media a couple of years ago, YT is basically a streaming service for me and I have WhatsApp as it's basically the default way of communicating where I live.
Twitter's character limit is also not very useful for much beyond potshots either, and that is not useful for communication. Sometimes brevity is not useful, and unless political debate is to be reduced to quips and soundbites then there's nothing much to be gained from Twitter for some things - I don't want to write novels on a platform, but I would like to be more comprehensive than what 320 characters allows me.
Heck, I have written short fanfics that can take up 2000 simply through emotional nuance and trying to convey something more than what bluntness alone would get - while a tale doesn't need to be essay length, I'm not Ernest Hemingway trying to write a six word story
I completely get what you mean. I’ve slowly realized I don’t like social media really and am distancing myself from it. I plan on deleting RUclips next year and just going without it for a bit
I agree, just youtube and discord for me currently. I left twitter and tumblr many years ago and it's only been good for my mental state
Former British Prime Minister David Cameron once said in radio interview: "Too many tweets make a twat", as the reason why he never used Twitter.
It's the only true and sensible thing he ever said whilst in office. If only Elon had listened to him.
Tumblr still very much exists. It has a much smaller but still quite interesting and active community. It's still the place I go to see NEW stuff that hasn't been posted to other platforms ad nauseum.
I started using tumblr this year and it's by far my favourite of the big social media platforms. It feels much easier on there to craft an experience that is defined by niche communities. And it's nice to have the ability to write and read long posts with people who nerd out about the same things you do.
I got into Tumblr recently and it's like a haven. No matter how niche your interest is there's a small community you can find around it, and you essentially unlearn cringe culture. Its ofc by no means perfect, but that's true for every platform.
@@HoloFizz Somebody once posted "Tumblr is where people go to talk about STUFF. Every other platform is where people go to talk about themselves." I think that difference is what makes it great
@@dexmartin4358 oh that's a good way of describing it. That's definitely been true to my experience, and it's why I've made a couple genuine friends on Tumblr -- we connected over shared interests in a way that hasn't happened for me on other platforms.
And however small the userbase is now compared to its heyday, Tumblr's shitposting and meme culture is still the best you will find on any social media platform. Just look up Goncharov for proof.
Thanks to Twitter I got to chat with Ruth Buzzi, Mark Hamill, et al. (even if only briefly), as well as discovering that a few people I was a fan of, were also fans of mine, which was a very happy surprise. It was a good thing... originally.
It's been gone for awhile. Some are only leaving now for bluer skies, but it was effectively dead when Lex Luthor spent 44 Billion for it, knowing he could then dominate it, and use it to shift the overton window away from decency and truth. Will other platforms take its place? Possible. But I hope someday we have a better more user friendly service, because we settled for Twitter, but it had Tons of issues even before it became X.
Calling him Lex Luthor is giving him too much credit
@@BonJoviBeatlesLedZep justin hammer :(
He'd probably consider it a compliment since Post Crisis Lex is based on Trump
@@marocat4749 Getting closer, I prefer Biff Tannan.
Twitter was also more marketable, when the name or something similar in this case 'Tweeting' becomes a verb, it solidifies its existence. No one is going to 'Skeet' on BlueSky. As a tangent, if I'm not wrong, Twitter technically owns all the accounts so they can just take your handles without asking. Although, that's not really a reason to not hold onto the handles, just something extra to take note of.
I remember this brief time in 2016 -- you know when, and maybe it persisted over the next year or two -- when people were recognizing all of the systemic failures of of media (both social and old) to combat bigotry, fascism, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, etc. This was when I first saw people refer to Twitter as the "global town hall," usually in the context of, "this shouldn't be managed by a for-profit corporation." Everyone seemed to recognize that serious reformations were needed.
And then... nothing happened. Anywhere. Things just got worse, and worse, and worse.
Jack Dorsey could have turned transformed Twitter into a nonprofit, built around certain ideals, like the Wikimedia Foundation -- a nonprofit, charitable foundation dedicated to maintaining Wikipedia in accordance with specific ideals. Instead, he sold it to an infantile bigot who proceeded to make all of the existing problems a thousand times worse.
The problem with being forced to rely on billionaires choosing to do the right thing is that *they never do.*
Jack Dorsey is nothing but another oligarch. He was ALWAYS about the benjamins. Period.
That's fine. I use both Bluesky and Threads now and I don't doomscroll anymore. I actually just have fun.
My dad once referred to Twitter as “the Cheers! theme song platform for entire generations who have no idea what Cheers! is.” (You wanna go where people know our troubles are all the same…)
good. tbh.
we dont need another twitter.
we need spaces for groups of people. because town squares do not work on the internet.
I don't really use Twitter, i have discord for chatting with people and tumblr for fandom stuff (the fandom I'm most active in rn is waaaay better there anyway, same amount of activity, but waaaay less toxic)
It's a shame so many creative folks are losing parts of their audience though
When I joined Bluesky, you were the first person I looked up!
Do not morn or celebrate the passing of a corrosive presence. Look to the future to fill the void with something healthier, more meaningful, and good natured.
I found such a warm and welcoming community of horror fans on Twitter, especially during the pandemic when we were all staying in. From 2020-2021, I would host weekly watch parties and for a lot of us, it was the highlight of our week!
*Saul Goodman voice*
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
I did, long ago, look into Twitter, opened an account. Tried to sign in to cancel it, couldn't remember the password. Wasn't worth the effort to recover it. But my understanding is that back in the day, it was a useful communication tool for anti-establishment groups in many different countries. I suspect that's why Leon got funding to acquire and gut it.
Leon is the best way to refer to that person I have seen so far
A great eulogy for a strange place from another time! Thanks for sharing.
I think Twitter and Tumblr having "gotcha" culture (esp. Twitter, where your response is on top of what your responding to, but Tumblr's culture of this is so deep) both made me a better-off and worse-off person. Like I learned so many things because I was so afraid of getting "gotcha'd" (or because some Twitter thread started off functionally saying "read this or else you're bad".) It was emotionally taxing and maybe kind of toxic, but I learned so many important things that way.
But certainly in my last few years of using Twitter I was absolutely paralyzed from saying anything most of the time. I lived in fear of making some innocuous tweet like "I watched this show and I liked it" and being "gotcha'd" because some cast member/director/show runner/co-writer whose name I don't even know said something terrible once.
Like I think it made me a better person and I learned so much but I think that living with that kind of culture for years has really done damage to my ability to interact with other people online. Especially to absorb new information that is presented in anything approximating the Twitter/Tumblr "Good people pay attention to issue XYZ, bad people don't care" kind of way, I have this new knee jerk reaction to avoid consuming the info at all costs.
i feel that all the potential for good you mentioned is better served by non-algorithmic, non-corporate social media. there is a good reason the Fediverse is full of queer people (from the very beginning, some queer people were even involved in the protocol design), and there is a good reason that when you look away from Mastodon (which is the most well-known and the most corporate-friendly part of the Fediverse) you find that the Fediverse is even more queer.
there won't be another twitter, but there could be better things if people put stock in them. my Masto and Fedi friends have been meaningful and helpful, and when i recently moved to another country almost all of my new local friends i got thanks to these platforms. they can be equally lifechanging, if not moreso.
Twitter gave me the chance to talk with people I never got the chance to, including your fabulous self and creative folks from my childhood. I love the communities but it is sad to see it go downhill.
Same! I got offers for work and people I'm still talking to years later from being on twitter. A lot of people migrated across to Bsky with me, but I do mourn the good parts of what it once was.
If there's ever another Twitter, it'll probably be based around an emerging technology in the same way that Twitter was based around the smartphone instead of the browser like earlier social media platforms. You could then see all the same ingredients come together: engineers more interested in building something than worrying about how it might actually be used, investors who are initially more interested in growth than profitability or sustainability and a public looking for a simple and participatory way to play with their favorite toy.
I'm still on Twitter, and I have no issues with it.
Me too
After 12 years of medical gaslighting, less than a year on Disability Twitter got me a diagnosis. Like you, Vera, I couldn't understand the appeal of microblogging. But I took note when Twitter was cited as a resource for those organising across the Arab Spring. I was most into it around 2018, when we were campaigning for abortion rights in Ireland. So I am thankful for those islands of hope and change. We'll find more spaces to make the change we need.
Reddit and RUclips is my go-to now for anything. For trending, Tiktok. It felt freeing to be rid of FB and Twitter. If i need to shout at the void, A digital journal.
So what? Seriously. So what? This analogy is like meeting someone in a waiting room. Maybe you keep in touch, maybe you don’t. It’s not the waiting room that makes the relationship, it’s the people in the relationship. Black folks are thriving on other platforms, we good. ✌🏽
Maybe Bluesky will be something like Twitter used to be?…. I can hope
I always feel like I get the most balanced perspectives from Vera. Great video.
We dont need another twitter its good to have a first new thing. Why be the next Twitter when you can be the first you :)
Great analysis!
Never having used xitter myself, though having been kept at least somehow up to date on the topic via reddit, there are at least two people I interact with on a regular basis (both once active users of the platform) who actually said "farewell, Elmolf!" and switched to reddit exclusively (which can be, by design, even more of an echochamber, but rather of one's own choice than that of algorithms sorting by user engagement) back when xitter was sold. They're good people :)
You're most likely correct in stating there will never be any platform as present in general discourse as xitter used to be. Which is, of course, some kind of loss per se (not for me, but still).
However, keep up the good spirit, thank you SO MUCH for your work, and -
lots of love from Bavaria, Germany (excuse my English, there might be some mistakes in it).
I was literally on Bluesky when I saw this
Bluesky had real potential to be a good contender, but their latest fuck up with Jesse Singal has been the final drop for many of the users who made it the destination platform for many of those leaving twitter.
that's why you don't trust corporations with your social media.
Twitter has been the first social media site I’ve properly mourned. My entire job industry was on Twitter, and when I left that industry, Twitter was how I stayed connected. It was our network-y break room. I always hoped I’d come back, but my industry has left Twitter en masse, and there’s been no one space where the industry has re-gathered.
The sciences and medicine and academia are _really_ struggling with the decline of Twitter, for exactly this reason: It has been *_the_* communication medium for those fields for a decade, and for a lot of people and a lot of uses it was a vast improvement over listservs.
Everybody I know in those fields is trying to find somewhere else to be, but it’s fragmenting the communication. The particular benefit of Twitter in those fields was promoting cross-disciplinary communication and fortuitous connections, something that domain-specific listservs that require proactive joining just can’t do.
I used Twitter for 5 years, the only 100% good thing that happen is someone convinced me to watch Hilda on the day it premiered. And the irony is the 5 years 2018-2023 I was on Twitter was the life span of the show Hilda. I'm glad I quit using Twitter the same week along with Bella Ramsey. It would be nice for the internet to stop being creepy towards the two main The Last of Us cast leads for having a lot of dad roles and lesbian roles.
I've been on tumblr for a long, long time. I was there when it died - because of the nsfw ban, driving out artists, queer communities, and other weirdos (affectionately). Tumblr has gotten a bit of a revival, because twitter went to shit, but tumblr will never be the same either. Platforms, as big as they may seem, are not guaranteed to last forever. At least in the way you fell in love with them. It sucks, but that's the internet. We're all just ultimately playthings to the coorporations that decide the algorithm knows better.
The timing of this is apt. My company put me on some training about how Blue Sky is the new twitter. The presenter was unprepared and ruffled by my question of 'why do we want to engage with our users like we used to do on Twitter?'
To clarify I work for a place that provide in house services for our staff. The alternative to Twitter for communication is just talking to our sections of our large workforce which some are too lazy/ introverted to do.
In general though I think it's worth pointing out that after all these years of social media I think people are tired of de-personalised communication. There's a reason why Whatsapp groups are the fastest rising 'social media'. People are realising that social media is a massive drain to both your time and mental health so if you are going to engage with it, it better be with people you know or people with similar interests.
When you said about Twitter being used for celebrities it's worth thinking about how that's now been replaced by podcasts where again it's more of a humanising way of communicating with the world.
I have never posted on Twitter, and I have only stayed because there are a few artists that I still can't seem to find elsewhere.....
I'm on Bluesky and threads and deleted the twitter app a while back. Sadly my Bluesky feed is a bit empty Altough I do scroll through Doctor Who sky
Nowadays I usually join Facebook groups if I want to join a community. That or Reddit communities... if I'm feeling desperate!
I've been trying to use BlueSky and especially Mastodon a lot more.
I tend to find better interactions on Mastodon. There's much less hate boosting, and using it doesn't leave me angry.
I've heard good things but I cannot get used to the interface on that one.
@@CouncilofGeeksthere are some reader apps that may help, but that doesn’t make finding a solid instance easier
@@CouncilofGeeksthere's *so many* alternative interfaces to try, that's why open source is great!
Twitter was specially useful during emergencies, because you could follow how the event developed and post need in real time. Now all that is lost and there's' no other platform doing that, I as long as I'm aware.
I keep hearing this. Thankfully I never _needed_ it. But when I _wanted_ to follow an emergency (one that wasn’t directly affecting me, but either affected others I know or was of interest for some other reason), I found it extremely difficult to figure out how to find the relevant info. Who do I trust?
And if they’re the same traditional sources (like FEMA, NOAA, other government agencies, or traditional news outlets) I’d turn to before Twitter, I can still do that by looking at their webpages or listening to broadcasts or signing up for email alerts - what does/did Twitter bring to the game?
For me Twitter used to be the place I'd go to further interact with friends I made in forums, and in later years Discord. I've always thrived more discussing stuff in enclosed circles like a forum thread or a Discord channel, and so I made my timeline a reflection of that: very few follows of people I already know or, in a few cases,I didn't but just stumbled upon and found very cool fellows. And you know what? For a few years it worked out very well, I got what I wanted to out of the place. Aaaand then it got toxic. It probably always was, but in the months leading to the musky guy's purchase I started noticing a ton of animosity all around, more than before, and it started to reach a point where I would close the app feeling so much worse than when I opened it. Then the manchild bought the site. And I knew very well than from that point on it would only get so much worse, so... I took it as a sign to leap out. And I wish I was wrong in my prediction, then it wouldn't be the hellscape we can see now.
Then for a while there was this cool blog documenting the downfall of Twitter since its purchase, "Twitter is going great", sadly it stopped posting because the host has a life and couldn't keep up with so many levels of clownfest. It was through this blog that I learned of the Bluesky project, and I instantly signed in. At first you needed an invitation, so as soon as I got mine I jumped in and tried to use it as old Twitter. But it died very fast. I wanted a new Twitter, but it seems the fruit wasn't ripe yet. The harvesting, of course, was the infamous Xodus, which I took with my open arms. More than a year later than I wanted to, but never too late. Now I feel back home, I have my timeline of close friends, with no algorithm trying to push me into stuff I don't want my timeline to be (which Twitter in its lasts months before the manchild was already pushing, another thing that was putting me off). There's barely any toxicity, now I feel I can chill out and post stuff whenever I feel like it. It's refreshing, in a way. Is Bluesky free of guilt? Of course not. But it lets me *choose* what I want to see, and that's the main thing I seek, there's enough despair in our lives for me to want an algorithm to shove it down my throat even more.
Thank you for the video, Vera!
It is undeniable how big and influent Twitter has become. And despite it having its share of problems in the past, Elon Musk did really make Twitter so much worse. When I did use the Twitter constantly around ten years ago, the thing which I most like about it was be able to interact with artists, writers, game developers, creators, etc. It is almost funny how even after losing my means of access to my account (password and recovery e-mail) and not using it for many years, the account is still up. Considering the current "hellhole" the Twitter has become and how you cannot access it without an account, instead of creating a new one, I do prefer to just stay away from it.
What people should be aware is: social media platforms (plural) are important. However, a single one is not indispensable. And, soon or later, they end. When Twitter eventually goes down for good (it could be in the next year or in ten years), its users will just go someplace else. And, finally, even if Blue Sky is able to become the next best thing after Twitter, it will also suffer under the effects of "enshittification" because it is what always happens under capitalism...
Twitter was so much fun in its heydey and that goodwill delayed my leaving, but I'm glad I finally did now that Bluesky and Threads are getting better at feeling more immediate. Not necessarily a good incentive to look for, but effective to get me to stay for sure
I agree that there won't be another Twitter, but there will be something else to fill the void. LJ migrated to Tumblr, Vine format went to Tiktok, etc. Sure, the next iteration won't be the same as the previous one, but there will be something to cover the needs of people who were driven out of Twitter. In this sense, Bluesky looks more like Dreamwidth -- a platform functionally the same as LJ that is (was? is it still alive?) much smaller and never grew enough to replace LJ, not the way Tumblr did, even though it's very different.
Once Blue Sky expands the video lengths they will be a great platform as more people switch over, imo.
It's "Xeeter", take it or leave it. It fits perfectly, too, since it's where people go to make their Xeets.
I also like Xitter where people go to make Xcretions
I've never gotten Twitter, I still don't get it, and I will NEVER understand people who preferred it to tumblr. Maybe I'm just too wordy, but tumblr has been consistently the best social media site ESPECIALLY for fandom IMO since 2011. We killed that within us which cringes and it's fantastic. Fandom on twitter was and is uniquely insufferable, like all the people too annoying for tumblr, too pedantic for reddit, and too heinous for 4chan migrated there. No one will ever convince me twitter gave enough good to the world to balance out the bad.
@@l.g.2888 totally agree about tumblr being especially suited to fandom. The banning of NSFW art etc was unfortunate, but in terms of how the platform functions and the culture of it, fandom communities really seem to thrive there
I’m with you about Twitter: I never really understood why it was so appealing, because every time someone showed me something really worth my time on Twitter it wasn’t actually _on_ Twitter - it was a link to content elsewhere. Or, later on (as in: years later, as the platform evolved), it was a lengthy thread that would’ve been _so_ much easier to read as a single post.
In theory, Twitter could be a great way to find these things and connect with people, but I’ve never gotten the knack of it.
How do you find the people talking about stuff that interests you or sharing new ideas or breaking news? Particularly in the latter category, it won’t be the same people every time. And I never got good at using lists and filters to drink from the firehose.
I tried several times to set things up to be more topic-focused instead of person-centric, but without any sort of standardization of hashtags that was basically impossible.
And to the degree that I was successful at any of that, it was largely dependent on features that TweetBot provided and either weren’t available directly on Twitter, or were much harder to use. So when Twitter killed TweetBot, I just gave up on Twitter. I tried using the website a few more times after that, but I just couldn’t get the signal-to-noise ratio above like 1%, which just wasn’t worth my time.
Unfortunately, I’ve found Tumblr almost as impenetrable. I occasionally find really great stuff there, but for the most part I just kinda haphazardly flail about, trying to figure out how to connect things or follow conversations. Every time I dip in, I have to relearn how to get from a response to the thing they’re responding to. It’s very chaotic to me.
@@natbarmore Tumblr isn't good for what I'd call free for all chat, like Twitter was. We just recently got threaded comments. Since you can't separate notes on original post from notes on a reblog if you have something to say you either create your own post or join the reblog chain. I prefer it this way tbh, Twitter was always too "noisy" for me, when I just wanted to follow specific content creators. My tl flooded me with posts from people I follow mixed with random sponsored crap, comments from people I follow, their likes, all seemingly in random order, suggested posts etc, it was overwhelming. I still have Twitter, but I use it exclusively to manually check a single account I follow there and run as soon as I'm done.
The AI thing was the straw that broke the camels back for me. Bluesky is old twitter before the corn.
If all the bot accounts left Twitter it might be tiny.
I call it Twitter (currently X).
I’m about 18 minutes in, so you might get to this, but are the Twitter numbers accounting for bot accounts? I read recently that people are using bots for community notes now, so those have to be very active accounts
I found out about blue sky from a post on Lynda Carter’s twitter account saying she was on blue sky so I got it now I follow u also cause I respect your opinion but that doesn’t always mean I agree with it and can respectfully agree to disagree and it nice u will discuss the classic era of doctor who even if it’s reviews of selected serials
I made the move to Bluesky and I feel safe there.
Twitter flattened the world.
I'm torn, i was never really active on Twitter, it never appealed to me, and I've left most other social platforms, except RUclips, but i really want to support if my favorite creators who are making the jump to bluesky and are trying to rebuild followers etc.... but it's just not the sort of platform i enjoy, and I just don't have the time or spoons to interact with another platform
I used it for podcasts and stuff in recent years I've been trimming back my follows I plan to just use it for that eventually because like you said people flee to different places
I feel like I have to stay on Twitter because I don't know where else to go for SW
I never really use twitter. no one I'm close to did either. It's interesting to see how upset people are about it
Glad to see I wasn’t the only one. 😂😂
I had it for a bit but for me i just couldnt understand it like at all. Maybe it just didnt appeal like ever
Now we have blue sky
Good.
as a memeber of gen Z, (just turned 23!) I would like to add to this conversation that my whole generation NEVER took to twitter. Like twitter was something that my mom had, and like something that politicians interacted with. And when we (gen z) became adults all of our needs were met by the platforms we already have. I don't have statistics but after a cursory check with all of my friends I would wager 2% or less of gen z was ever on twitter.
The numbers are probably higher than you think because of older gen z and millennial-gen z cusp ppl
The initial 140-character limit was chosen because a traditional SMS message is 160. I can’t entirely agree with everything that Elon did, but the problem with Twitter was how a free platform makes money to stand on its own two feet. One thing about Facebook is that everyone you care about is on it, so if you post something, everyone will see it, and you can chat with your friends because they are there. It also means you only need one account, whereas now, when every community is using their own Mastodon instance, it becomes a lot more work to ensure that the people you want to see your message do it.
You also claimed that the breaking point for you was that you could no longer opt out of AI training. It strikes me that you never were, anyway, since they own the platform. I assume you transfer the copyright to them so that they can reproduce it and, therefore, show it to people.
I mean, in the anglosphere there may not be another. I feel like Weibo has far more of that than Twitter ever did. But, it's messy in other ways.
Weibo also has one massive issue that it can never resolve.
This was beautiful. Rip Twitter ❤
I only got into Twitter in late 2021 when Bolsonaro lost the election in Brazil and I wanted to follow what was going on with the people camping before military bases asking for an intervention to change the results, culminating with the destruction of 3 government buildings on January 8th 2022. But haven't logged in even once since the change. Totally not worth it.
I haven't had any social media since 2018: no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or any other BS. 🎉 and my life is better for it.
I think Elon is feeding AI because he fears Roko's Basilisk.
If he honestly is taking major action based on that idea, he’s an even bigger fool than I already thought. Which I didn’t think was possible but here we are.
I stopped using social media (exceptions being RUclips and Discord).
reddit isnt bad depending on the forum. twitch can be good for streams
@@marocat4749 imo any platform where names are unimportant is great for discussion, though companies are getting increasingly better at astroturfing, so they may not last forever. I miss a lot the 2000s Internet where everything had a dedicated forum to it. Reddit is probably the last remnant of that type of Internet, but they're trying to change to fit better with their actual goal (creating AI training datasets).
@@marocat4749 I like Reddit, but of course I keep to the fandoms I follow.
When a platform kicks out (even if it isn't intentionally) its artists and creatives, yeah, you know it's going down with the braincell exodus
I remember the beginner phase of Twitter. I didn't get it either. I remember when Ashton Kutcher was the most famous user of the platform.
Been off Twitter (fully deleting my account) for years now. Don't miss it. I have bluesky but it's mostly politically oriented and that can be a bummer so I go there sparingly. I also have threads but given the plans Zuckerberg has for Facebook and their other platforms presumably I might have to delete that soon.
Even before the rich idiot bought it, I've always been of the opinion that I don't hate myself enough to get a Twitter account. The character limit is so baffling. I had a tremendous amount of secondhand embarrassment whenever I saw a "thread" on that site. How utterly demeaning, having to resort to that when you want to say anything of any substance. Like, imagine writing a letter to a loved one, but instead of stationary, you just have a stack of Post-it notes. Absolutely miserable.
7:43
Vera Wilde was *WHAT*
I can't be the only one who misheard that
What the heck did you think I said?
@CouncilofGeeks It was less that I _thought_ you said it and more like my fight or flight reflexes reacted before my brain did lol
I'm still confused as heck.
I tried and I can't figure out what you heard@@WiloPolis03
@@CouncilofGeeks You're really gonna make me explain it 😭
You said "trans-focused" but it sounded like "transphobic" for a second, which obviously wouldn't have made sense
Kinda wish I'd experienced twitter when it was good but I used to hear about it and absolutely hate what I heard
They were never town squares to begin with. They’re hotel ballrooms. Town squares are controlled and managed by the people who use it for their interests, the betterment of society. Hotel ballrooms are controlled and managed by the owners, via the algorithm, who use it in their best interests, profit.
Discord is great
I go to RUclips for Korn too! A.D.I.D.A.S is a banger (hardly know her!)
IMHO "grok" is a *great* name, what's horrible is who's claimed it! If it were a small, independent, rebel group, I think you'd love it.
Wait what's the context for this?
@@Laurabeck329the Science fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” it was an alien word to mean a thing beyond understanding. Sort of super-understanding. Or Internalizing the concept.
Engagement for the engagement god!
Thank gawd!
I never used Twitter. I'm enjoying Bluesky.
I had no use for twitter when it was the new hot thing
Let's hope not. 😂
I don't care before and I don't care for it now.
I get what you are saying and agree with you on all fronts except that Twitter was the biggest platform. Twitter had about 200M active users (mostly in America and the EU) as compared to Facebook and TikTok which have over 2B active users. So yes Twitter was the largest app in the microblogging sphere but it never had the stranglehold on the world's attention like WhatsApp or Snapchat.
Tumblr was perfectly fine and then they did the idiotic nsfw ban and all the artists in the fandom chose twitter for some reason, and thus everyone's mental health took a hit. I'll never not be a bitter little prune about it.
I mean the reason they picked Twitter was obvious: it was the largest platform not banning NSFW content. Though over time they would simultaneously let the porn bots run riot and suppress NSFW.
I guess it made sense from the pov of doing commissions. From a purely fandom pov, there were other promising platforms. But tbc I'm laying the blame on Tumblr. Each person did what they deemed best. It just didn't make sense to me. The bot problem getting worse on both twitter and Tumblr who had just driven away nsfw and queer creators was really the icing on the cake.
I don't wanna be too cold because I know a lot of people lost a home there like I fear losing discord some day, where I went when other social media became too much. I have community there with friends I met there and elsewhere, including twitter. For me, it felt like it gave me that sorta despite its nature, but that wasn't everyone's experience. Hopefully something will fill that void one day.
and then there's the shitshow that Bluesky has been pulling this week. yikes😬
I don't like the format of Twitter/bluesky. I find it hard to navigate
Awww rats!
Maybe that's why Elon did it?
(jk, he's not that smart)
its xitter or shitter now?!
oh furry artist twitter
I am NOT saying corporations are people, but I feel like continuing to use the name "Twitter" is like deadnaming. It might just be my cis-self being overly sensitive to that?
In short: yes it is overly sensitive and a misapplication of principle. Because you're right. Corporations are not people. They have no feelings, no desires, no soul, and have no claim to the basic respect and dignity that should be ascribed to a human being.
Besides, if you want to really go down that road: it doesn't map on anyway because Twitter didn't choose to change its name. A new name was forced on it by its new business daddy who never cared what Twitter wanted because he'd tried to rename other things "X" before and people had been in positions to stop him. So we don't know what Twitter actually wants.
Though of course, in reality, Twitter doesn't want anything. Because it's a corporation.
@ladywifiofbadfun Corporations are made up of people. Corporations themselves are not people. We don’t have to treat the actual corporation like it’s a person. Nor should we.
ruclips.net/video/NyV54qfSZwg/видео.html This video really clarified my thoughts on this
Lol cornography 😂🤣🤣