I have despised twitter since basically its inception.
The character (original) character limit fundamentally means you are strongly encouraged to limit conversation to basically soundbites, slogans, and pithy comments. Even though this was changed later, it still created a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.
While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.
It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.
Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.
Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of ‘content’ from every which way, which just became the norm for ‘social media’ design.
Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.
The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.
It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a ‘place’ with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god’s sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship… and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.
I am with you on almost all this, but I’m not sure about this:
a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.
Don’t you remember the many-part tweets? Super common and all but admitting how fucking moronic the character limit was. The character limit alone made Twitter a huge piece of shit that I always hated. And I’m with you that it never made anything better. People argued for years that Twitter was good specifically because of that limit. I never understood that argument in the least.
I have despised twitter since basically its inception.
While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.
It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.
Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.
Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of ‘content’ from every which way, which just became the norm for ‘social media’ design.
Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.
The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.
It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a ‘place’ with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god’s sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship… and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.
I am with you on almost all this, but I’m not sure about this:
Don’t you remember the many-part tweets? Super common and all but admitting how fucking moronic the character limit was. The character limit alone made Twitter a huge piece of shit that I always hated. And I’m with you that it never made anything better. People argued for years that Twitter was good specifically because of that limit. I never understood that argument in the least.
I thought it was quite good once upon a time.