Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you'll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
What do normal people - people who don't pay for twitter, or sneer at rationalists - think of Twitter atp?
Went on to Twitter (my mistake) after seeing Inside Out 2 because it's the latest kid's movie to feature [trope that I found passe that I can't figure out how to spoil inline] and I see a post on my feed from "HBD Chick".
And I'm like okay, that has to be "happy birthday, right?". Nah, her third retweet is creamy porno redux.
Just like all the other right wingers and embarrassingly enthusiastic neoliberals and occasional Musk fans, I don't follow her or anybody that follows her, there's literally no connection or personal interest.
I feel like the post Elon shift is really understated for how bad the site's gotten. Like I see more people talk about how Instagram reels is racist than I do about the average twitter replies section. I know a lot of left leaning people fled for bluer pastures, but I'm surprised you don’t see more buzz about it from regular, non-power users.
First of all, most of my "normal" acquaintances never used Twitter anyway.
Most of the ones that did just quit when it got weird and dominated by useless suggestions and creepy ads.
I had one friend last week in a group chat go "Twitter is so racist nowadays innit", to which I said ye, why you still using it, and he responded "you're right" and stopped.
I wish I knew any normal people so I could give input.
Personally my Twitter pre-Elon was pretty curated. I never really "got" a big part of it unless it spilled over in other channels (I never heard of "Black people Twitter" on Twitter, only from Buzzfeed or similar). I also disengaged from US political Twitter hard after the 2016 election. So it's possible I could still be using it and swearing over bots etc. without being overly affected, but I locked my account as an act of principle shortly after he took over.
Same here - I had a very small universe curated for myself. I didn't leave immediately, but when I did, there were a whole lot more weird ads and bots and stuff in my feed. I think that I only ever saw prøn once, and I was actually shocked that it even existed on Twitter.
Elon Musk Begs Advertisers to Return as Twitter's Revenue Plunges
It's pretty amazing that this so-called genius spent $44B on a company without apparently knowing anything about how the market it operates in (advertising) actually works.
@blakestacey @techtakes
“"I do shoot myself in the foot from time to time, but at least you know it is genuine, not from the PR department,””
He is the PR department.
I assume some PR departments of potential advertisers saw that and went 'lower the twitter spend more!', I'm imaging the Futurama joke where Fry talks to investors while stock price tally is running live behind him.
Twitter's main issue is that it's not really very big. It wasn't big even pre-Musk. If you have the choice between advertising on a really big social network (Meta (=FB, IG, Whatsapp...)) with a functioning trust & safety team and ad brokers who take you seriously and don't accuse you of being woke, and one which has way smaller reach, no T&S to speak of, and whose owner can use his outsized influence to call your CEO a pedo whenever the ketamine kicks in, the choice is clear.
42 upvotes? In 2 hours? There is some serious weirdness going on here.
I got boosted by Charlie Stross...
Ah right, I didn't see that as im directly on awful that explains
I only saw it because I follow him on Masto.
Fedi is weird.
now at 79 upvotes on awful.systems, but only eleven upvotes are visible from lemm.ee.
Fedi is weird!
@gerikson @Soyweiser It is funny, because by 99% of media sites Twitter was always one of the Three Big Ones: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Those were the social networks that were linked TO, and also the social networks media followed. MAYBE Linked In, if it was a "business" publication.
I realized Twitter was for weirdo wonks when the local "Idol" reality show just had IG links for the contestants (Sweden). There might be markets where Twitter is locally bigger, but in Sweden it was always a niche thing.
Twitter had outsized impact because it's where the journalists hung out, and structurally it was much more everyone in the same place than FB/IG
@dgerard Plus you get to write articles about "Twitter Storms" about your articles.
I used to hear about it IRL and now I don't idk
not a single fucker ever calls it anything other than twitter
Note: all the talk I mention is online talk. Nobody in my irl life talks about social media dynamics ever, thank GOD
Only time non-online people I know IRL talk about it is when they ask me the most basic of basic stuff.