Comment by leakycap

i see your perspective. Until Musk , it included the scope of publishers that were 1-3 degrees removed from mainstream media and Hollywood.

Post-musk it’s been rebooted into engagement farms and quasi-right-wing influencers.

For the first few months it felt refreshing because all of the once censored (or downranked) spicy content now received visibility.

Now it’s pretty repetitive and lame in its own way.

Every time I open my mute list I resent using the app.

To be honest though it is still by far the best place to get "news" about (very recent) current affairs. Obviously there is an incredible amount of disinformation on it, but if you can filter that out mentally (though I don't know how possible that is), you tend to get a far more 'real time' take on things.

Me and a friend were talking about this before - for big news stories I/we would instinctively put rolling news on. Now it's usually Twitter I check.

This is compounded by the fact that so many political events 'happen' on Twitter/X (and for Trump, Truth Social then screenshotted onto Twitter). Even without Trump I would say the majority of UK political 'intrigue' is done directly on twitter.

So I think it's actually the other way round; media outlets use it quite a bit because instead of press conferences and what not a lot of news comes straight onto it.

Btw, this isn't too say traditional journalism doesn't have a place - it absolutely does and most of the current affairs content I read is on that. But for 'fast moving' events Twitter has managed to keep its place in my eyes, which I'm surprised about to be honest. Bluesky does not have anywhere near the same momentum which really shows you how important network effects are.

Social media is obviously censored and editorialized. Twitter files was just a turning point – I’m not saying it was a liberation.

Yes it’s been corporate for a long time. Now it has a different sort of editorialization – hard to describe it. Yeah maybe influenced by a cabal of techno-libertarian VCs like Musk & Theil – hopefully that will be better revealed in a follow up expose

It was certainly corporate beforehand, though. Maybe you preferred that version if it– that’s fine. (Edit: grammar)

Reddit really doesn't.

I commented on a particular sub (in opposition to what i think the core hivemind is there) and was immediately banned from about 30 others.

Reddit is the most insular, single minded set of communities I've seen on social media. I dont think you can claim diversity if the userbase all wall themselves off from each other with bots.

reddit is like the most censored part of the internet at the moment.

[flagged]

Nowadays Reddit is a far left echo chamber that will downvote you into oblivion for voicing an opinion as controversial as "men can't get pregnant"

"a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find."

I think you forgot the /s. Plus reddit is mostly bots now driving engagement, with AI slop splattered everywhere. It went from bad to worse in just a few years. I scan the homepage without an account every now and then and it's awful.

> It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.

This happened on Quora until almost all western users left. Initially it was nice to have diversity of users and opinions, but then people started using Indian parlance that only other Indian users could understand (started referring to salaries as crore, relationship advice would reference Indian actors, etc.)

OT but why isn't longnow format LSB(LS Digit) first? 8102, 2102, etc. The problem is that years as variables are often processed as left aligned fixed length MSB first, so it's hard to make year processing code robust over wide ranges of time. If it had been LSB/LSD first, overflow checks can be just a truncation.

8102 and 2102 clearly belong to same age, 5491 and 8391 are more far apart but it's visually apparent that they share two LSDs, and a C program that displays rate of return of a 01-year bond will only have to care at most "654" part of year 654321 entered by user.

"02012" is more perplexing and it can be longer by whole 16 bits[than regular notation] or so[on some systems].

edit: edited for basic clarity

this was my take as well. twitter nostalgia not reality. I put the egalitarian age at around 2009 but you're right Kony-2012 was a huge pivot for social media