Stack Overflow Culture

How Social Media Tricks our Brains — and Destroys our Politics - Aaron Ross Powell's Blog

Response to Alex Kings Blog Post: Open Source Motivations

My response and disagreement with Alex Kings blog post entitled "Open Source Motivations" about how he feels about contributing Plugins to WordPress.org

A Tweet Before Dying

The revolutionary internet is over, and we don’t have much to show for it. A new start is out there, somewhere.

Ingmar Rentzhog (@ingmar.wsocial.eu)

Criticism and scrutiny are welcome. But why so much hostility? Why assume the worst about our motives? I honestly don’t understand. If we share the goal of better social media, let’s talk about how to get there.

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For the past decade, Twitter has been a primary home of scientists on social media. In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform, causing many scientists to seek alternatives. Bluesky has been suggested as a good alternative to Twitter, but the phenomenon of academics switching social media platforms has not previously been studied. Here we report on the results of a survey distributed to scientists on Twitter and Bluesky (n = 813). Results overwhelmingly confirm that changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant, and that many scientists have abandoned it in favor of Bluesky. Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter.

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

The Weird, Fragmented World of Social Media After Twitter - The Atlan…

archived 7 Aug 2023 02:41:57 UTC

Leaflet, Blogging, and How to Fix Social Media - Aaron Ross Powell

Decentralization, network overlap, and why we should all blog, too.