If I'm reading my timeline and think "geez, this person sure does post a bunch of political stuff I don't want to see" I either mute specific keywords, or just unfollow the person. Back on Twitter I was aggressive with keyword muting - I don't care about Marvel or people having passionite topics about "MCU", so I muted those phrases and my timeline was free of them.
ehhh, sort of. i tried a few of these before the musk takeover, and it was pretty disappointing. it was essentially a way of opting into more of the trash algorithm-recommended tweets in your timeline. instead of just the normal "recommended for you" stuff, you'd also have "recommended for you because you follow X".
It would be nice if someone with minimal tech skills could just spin something similar up. Related forums could link to each other, like the webrings of the past lol. That would be the ideal structure of interactive communities on the web, at least to me.
Meanwhile, my wife is playing the long game on Twitter. She has a specific way of using it that just works for her. She follows a few hundred people, and she's followed by ~5k people, mostly "nobodies", but a handful are impressive: researchers, journalists, politicians, authors. She has conversations with "household names" daily. She even orchestrated an interview been a well known researcher and an ex NYT journalist on substack. Yet she's an be absolute nobody.
There is a rule of thumb about online services and software: Don't fight the developers, because they have more power than you. If your usage is no longer compatible with the vision of the developers, stop using it. You may find temporary workarounds that make the service useful with a lot of effort, but it won't last. The developers will eventually find new innovative ways of ruining your experience.
Science Twitter was already dying before the takeover, because it was not compatible with the increased focus on recommendations. Musk simply accelerated the process.
Neither of these feels like I'm "fighting with the developers". It's such a trivial thing to do. And almost all social media apps do this. Instagram does this[0], it looks like Tik Tok only allows an algorithmic feed[1], it seems like Reddit has recommendations on by default but I'm seeing mixed things[2], LinkedIn does this (not that linked in is a model to be followed in any regard). In fact, Facebook is the only major social media company I know of that doesn't spit out an algorithmic feed by default.
So, if having to go to a new tab is "fighting the developer", then I think we've failed extraordinarily in this regard on all fronts and Twitter isn't doing anything new here.
[0]: https://help.instagram.com/505299634436870
[1]: https://support.tiktok.com/en/getting-started/for-you
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/xhxkdc/how_do_i_only_...
Remember when Facebook was about staying in touch with the people you know? Then there was a huge controversy when they introduced the algorithmic feed, made it the default, and always reverted back to it despite user preferences. Today it's a wasteland full of recommendations, promoted content, influencers, silly videos, controversial topics, and other forms of spam, with some interesting content randomly sprinkled around.
Defaults are important, because they influence people's expectations. If algorithmic feed is the default, it encourages posting certain kinds of content and discourages others. Eventually even your manually curated feed will be full of content that would be successful in the algorithmic feed. That is what happened to the part of Science Twitter I was following. People started posting less and eventually left, because Twitter was discouraging the kind of content they were posting.
As for Reddit, I don't consider it a social media platform. It's more like a collection of unrelated message boards that share the same underlying technology. I'm vaguely aware that there is a front page, and I sometimes visit it accidentally, but I never go there on purpose.
Is it? That's not my experience at all; I'd say Facebook has mostly dropped out of the news because it's quietly kept chugging away at what it's good at.
If you care about science twitter, I wonder if that was the best criteria for filtering your content.
> And this is after aggressively curating my feed
If you're "aggressively curating [your] feed", just mute/block them
Musk has no real idea of the impacts of technical decisions on the platform, but he realized the tweet visibility threshold was too short bac when even his own tweets weren't seeing engagement.
Since then he's created a scheme to grant slightly better longevity to the visibility of tweets by "verified" accounts, but it's really smoke and mirrors... Tweets anyone makes (Except for Elon and his selected Twitter "buddies") only are visible for seconds and to small audiences of people... It kills interaction, growth, and engagement for everyone else, but gives the illusion that the site is still vibrant (because it makes everyone tweet more often).
Deception of this kind will just make everyone burn out and not come back... It defeats the very purpose of Twitter, as visibility of ideas is the only payment most people get on the platforms to begin with, the main problem is that most people on the platform don't know they're mostly invisible, and dropping their tweets into a waste bin.
And the platform is really showing its lack of moderation, even compared to how little it was moderated in the past. I don't really want to click on webdev tweets and find replies full of hate speech and weird pornography.
> This is why Twitter didn’t end up implementing a lot of safety features that went hard after neo-nazis because republican figureheads would have been swept up in such a ban.
The same argument can be, and has been made about the radical left and Antifa supporters. Since Twitter was managed by leftists, wouldn't it be more credible to say "democrat figureheads" or were you just making a partisan jab?
OTOH there are at least a few congresspersons who subscribe to QAnon.
The
Yes.
I get push notifications from people I don’t follow and my follow feed has people I unfollowed (though that’s not the nazis except for some that masked off)
Science Twitter in particular has mostly migrated to Mastodon (although it's split between a few different subgroups).
A number of other de facto Twitter communities have migrated to Mastodon. Some have stayed on Twitter. And some have basically died without moving anywhere else.
This is the big problem with Mastodon. Some people want highly curated communities on small instances, and it's great for that. But it's really bad for people who want to make us of network effects - as exemplified by the very phrase '______ Twitter'.
I hope you're enjoying inflation, then.
Genuinely asking because if I know my crypto history it basically says the opposite.
When the US was on the gold standard, the inflationary periods were during the California and Yukon gold rushes, which had the effect of "printing" more gold.
The inflation we see today in the US is due to massive deficit spending, which is enabled by fiat money. All countries today use fiat money, because then they can spend money without limit and without raising taxes. They always blame the resulting inflation on something else.
The value of crypto currency is based on supply & demand. To me it seems more like collecting Beanie Babies than being a substitute for money. We'll see how it fares in the next few years.
It's just like the government deficit printing fiat money.
Sounds like a particular advantage to me, unless you prefer your money to be worth about 3% of what it used to be.
Inflation hurts poor people, too.
What horror stories?
The wages of the poor do not keep up with inflation.
> inflation is a transfer of real value from the rich to the poor
No, it isn't. It's a transfer from the rich and the poor to the government.
This whole 'pining for the gold standard' is ridiculous. Do you want to go back to zero-sum economics because you don't like the Fed? Everyone hates the Fed, but it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.
> If there is no 'extra' money when we need it, economies stagnate
The banks create money as needed through supply & demand. This is complex subject, but the fact that the US economy thrived from 1800 to 1914 shows your dire predictions to be simply lacking.
> class mobility
Was very robust in the 1800s. The US moved scores of millions of people from poverty into the middle class, and a lot into the wealthy class.
May I recommend reading some history books about 19th century America.
> it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.
Your dire predictions didn't happen in the 19th century, and we didn't have endemic inflation.
When you read history do you skip over the parts that don't agree with your philosophy, or do you just assume you would be one of the robber barons?
Also, our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath. We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
> You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.
LOL. Read "Historical Statistics of the United States". You can download it for free from archive.org.
> our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath
So "we" stole railroads and steel mills and factories and shops and mills and textiles etc. from the Indians?
> We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
Spain looted enormous quantities of gold from S America and transported it to Spain. Did it turn Spain into a wealthy industrial powerhouse? Nope. Is Russia's oil extraction industry making Russia an economic powerhouse? Nope again. How about Saudi Arabia? Nope nope nope. Venezuela? Nopety nopety nope.
Your theory needs a lot of work.
The ability to control boom and bust cycles by messing with the money supply is the whole point. Of course the gold standard is awesome if we ignore the busts and only look at the booms.
Regarding the Spanish -- I fail to see how that refutes anything? They were a poorly run religious monarchy operating in the pre-industrial age. Cool. What's your point? Are you contending that vast amounts of free land are not conducive to rapid economic expansion under capitalism?
Except they're a failure at it. We have boom and bust cycles anyway. Remember 2000, 2008, 2022? Friedman also demonstrates in "Monetary History of the United States" that the hand of the Fed on the tiller results in less stability of the money supply.
The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.
> I fail to see how that refutes anything?
It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.
> free land
Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?
Those cycles weren't nearly as bad as the ones that came before it.
> The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.
Sure. You haven't explained why this is bad except 'inflation'. I think inflation is a small price to pay for relative stability.
> It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.
No it doesn't. It illustrates that idiotic people with a lot of resources can do stupid things with them.
> Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?
Poor people do become rich, but that doesn't refute that it is a lot easier to become rich(er) when you already have a lot of money.
Yes, and a lot haven’t gone to Mastodon. Where are they?
So basically it's the new Facebook