Comment by roryirvine
20 hours ago
"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.
In what world should a citizen be required to provide their details to a foreign, for-profit company in order to view the updates provided by their government?
you shouldn't have to join a private group to get public information though; i think that is the op's point
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.