Comment by maelito
21 hours ago
Once upon a time I used Twitter's API to scan for tweets that were talking about a particular Wikipedia page. Doing semantic analysis, I did insert the tweets in the right place of the page. I did it as a student, using the free API. Twitter was the open, technically respected network with a great engineering blog. Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
"The world's town square", where everyone could gather and see what was going on.
And, for more than a decade, it appeared to work pretty well. Governments, media outlets, public-facing services of all kinds came to rely on it as their main way to talk to the public.
But now it's impossible to use without a login, most of that value has been lost.
The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a proprietary platform to become so central again.
I always cringed at that framing anyway, for two reasons. First, it was obvious to me that it was a private, centralized, closed-source, piece of software whose owner(s) could always manipulate or take away from people they didn't like. Second, it's genuinely depressing to think that the modern marketplace of ideas was supposed to take place in 180 (or whatever the hell it is now) characters or fewer. Yeah, sure- let's hash out the complexities and nuances of life and society in single-sentence messages. And we wonder why everything has become "polarized" and rage-bait-y. When all you have room to write is "This thing is bad", what the hell else are you supposed to do?
What a stupid platform. I can't believe it's still so popular.
Never had an X account, never will.
Now I'm completely locked out of police reports & municipal updates in my area because it's the only platform they post on.
You say completely locked out, but be fair, that's a choice you're making. I don't particularly like Facebook but there are a few things I can only keep up with there, so I have a minimal account for that purpose.
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That's what we call cutting off your nose to spite your face, and it's generally not a good idea, but it is completely on you.
I don't understand why they are so dead set on this anti-user short term profit seeking design. During the acquisition wasn't the general sentiment that "I understand this won't be super profitable but I'm doing it on principle"? Trying to chase this boyish fantasy of creating the "everything app" is incompatible with "worlds town square". Those are two different problems with different solutions.
Yeah, exactly. I feel like there must have been a better way to make the town square thing work.
I heard that ads on Twitter used to be much less profitable than on other platforms because the lack of a login wall meant they weren't able to track their viewers so precisely. Fine. But, at the same time, they hosted so much valuable content that contextual advertising might well have made up much of the difference. But Twitter's support for that was apparently very basic, with only very simple keyword targetting available.
It might not have been enough once they were loaded up with debt by Elon, but before that they would only have needed a relatively small uptick in income to make them more consistently profitable. And that could have made the town square version of Twitter a sustainable business for the foreseeable future.
And now we all have to deal with the rotting corpse of X, making it much harder for whoever or whatever wants to build any new form of public realm in that area. So more than just an opportunity wasted, it's acting as deterrent to trying again.
That's what Elon said, but it's clearly not what he was thinking, which was more along the lines of "this would make a brilliant propaganda megaphone."
This was around the time when he started to be openly post-truth (talking about how twitter was overrun with bots and he was going to save it and shortly afterwards feigning surprise at the same when he wanted an excuse to wiggle out after the market moved against him, continuing to push the "government censored twitter" narrative when the Twitter Files revealed the truth to be almost the polar opposite, talking about building an un-biased Grok and then getting caught with an "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" size thumb on the scale, etc). When someone starts being openly post-truth like this, they stop deserving the benefit of the doubt. This wasn't a boyish fantasy, he knew exactly what he was doing, and it was saying one thing while thinking another.
> The best thing to do is to learn from what happened, and not allow a proprietary platform to become so central again.
In the spirit of that, here's some brainstorming:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
It's amazing how the far left refers to historical center as "far right", and dismisses the views of the majority of the population.
> Once upon a time I used Twitter's API
Once upon a time Twitter used to have RSS/Atom feeds for each account.
* https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.h...
> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
You people are completely out of touch with reality. You cannot accept that the reason of why we’re voting for the “far” right is because we experienced a whole decade of uncontrolled immigration policies that permanently reshaped the way of living of previously homogeneous countries.
The free API was closed off well before Twitter ownership changed hands. Even the paid API became untenable for many early users well beforehand.
The writing was on the wall for Twitter well before musk got involved, sadly.
Just Europe?
At the moment.
Already succeeded in the US. Now it’s a project of whether it can be used to maintain power. Right wing populist movements ebb and flow quite readily:
Hopefully I’m correctly sensing the shifting of the winds.
Meta platforms are more responsible for atrocities in other parts of the world, e.g. Myanmar.
Has always been a political project only the politics changed.
API access etc are business issues. Can't mix them up.
As opposed to the Jack Dorsey days of twitter where you would be banned for mildly right wing opinions, even if they were factually correct. That wasn't a political project?
Reminder that the Bluesky firehose is open even for unauthenticated users: https://artifacts.vza.net/emojihose/
> Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
Certainly the policy of the opposition has nothing to do with the backlash. No definitely not. It's certainly just dumb people being tricked by the bad guys.
If these people could just get properly educated and shielded from the bad ideas surely they'd see the light.
There's a reason the owning class is almost always pushing the same kind of narrative, and the reason is that it's serving them, not people at large.
So you're saying that the current management of Twitter does not favor politically-right messaging? Otherwise, your message is a non-sequitur.
The comment you replied to made no statement about the effectiveness of the project. It's like saying that George Soros is engaged in trying to elect left-wing leadership; nobody denies that.
I'm saying the right wing push and it's attractiveness doesn't come from the top down.
Media is a bottom up industry, successful media is the media people want to consume. If right wing media is popular, it's because right wing messages are popular.
Acting like the media are the tastemakers is a convenient way for people to avoid looking in the mirror and doing any kind of self reflection.
The right wing is making a push in Europe because Elon Musk has a trillion dollars, not because the parties in power have done anything wrong. Their ideas are only unpopular because the bad man is lying to them. If it wasn't for all this fake news, everyone would see that I am obviously correct and we'd have 100% support.
X and it's right wing lean isn't the problem. People are attracted to right wing politics because they don't like what they currently have. The problems isn't that an alternative exists, the problem is the people don't like them.
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The correct answer is, "Of course he did not; free expression and free speech only exist for people who subscribe to doublethink. All other opinions are thoughtcrime."
I’m curious about the original comment now
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Slippery slope into gulags.