NOTE: I’d been working on this piece on and off for a few weeks while trying to move to NYC and settle into my new apartment, and just as I was about to publish it, Elon rate-limited Twitter and so, sensing a moment of weakness, Meta pulled up its launch date for Threads to yesterday. This piece doesn’t cover Threads directly, nor does it talk about the rate-limiting fiasco. It’s focused on why I think Twitter got so much worse over the past year. I thought about holding off and reworking it entirely to incorporate all that happened this week, but in the end I decided that it was cleaner to publish this one as is. If Twitter hadn’t botched so much over this past year, Threads wouldn’t matter. Still, like past pieces I’ve written on topics related to Twitter, you can apply a lot of the ideas in this piece to analyzing Threads’ prospects. And I’ll push a follow-up piece with my specific reactions to and predictions for Threads soon-ish. Follow me on Substack to get a note when that drops.
Twitter: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
How tweet threads cured my writer's block: Twitter as a medium for sketching
Twitter is a powerful <b>medium for sketching</b>: a tool for fluidly developing ideas in realtime. What can we learn from its design? I think it shows us the power of 1) the right constraints, 2) low barriers to starting and finishing, and 3) a social context.
Spark - Take back your timeline
Social media is addictive and manipulative. It's time for social that puts the user in control.
Twitter’s Pre-Musk Plans Mirrored Elon’s Vision—Until He Abandoned, Trashed Or Ignored Them
Today, the new book by NY Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, comes out. If you’re at all interested in what went down, I can’t recommend it …
My 2024 thoughts on the state of social media
I see a continued fragmentation of social media as people leave X(Twitter).
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.
The Future of Twitter: Q&A with Jack Dorsey
An in-depth conversation on 10 years of tweeting, the importance of live media, and “the puddle.”
Nicky Case: The Attractors Behind Disasters
How to Fix Social Media by Injecting A Chunk of the Blogosphere
Not all hour-long podcasts are worthwhile, but I found this one by The Atlantic’s Matt Thompson and Alexis Madrigal to be pretty compelling. The subject: how to
Jacky's homepage on the DARPA-created, commerically-available Web. - Jacky Alciné
In your Web browser, of course. And not all of me; that'd be weird! You're using Firefox, right? You can catch up by email with 112 other folks, on a social network in the Meta, commonly known as Facebook, Threads, Blacksky in the Atmosphere or X, commonly known as Twitter as I continue to share and work on all things towards history, open digital technology, culture — and everything in between. I write essays of varying length; most recently I wrote "On the Notion of Shutting the Fuck up". I keep notes weekly and (near) daily links. Here's what I use on the regular.
Some thoughts on Social Networking and Usenet
A little while ago, I wrote a thread on glitch.social about ephemerality of posting on social media as compared to Usenet. It got a little bit of traction, and one person asked if I could post more about Usenet clients. I haven’t gotten to it until today, and I thought I would post on my blog instead of on glitch. The original thread wasn’t really about Usenet clients; it was mainly about how posts on Usenet expired, which is contrary to people’s current expectations about social media, but actually worked very well.
Twitter Thoughts For You
I previously have written back in March 2022 about how I use Twitter, and back in April 2023 about Twitter and its then-new algorithms, which have changed again.
The Next Twitter Is Just Thousands of Smaller Twitters
One of the biggest open-ended questions in the tech world is whether Twitter is truly dying—and if it is, what will replace it. Last December, I argued that whatever came next might feel like Twitter in certain ways, but that ultimately there was probably no way to recapture the lightning in a ...
The echo chamber effect on social media
Significance We explore the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and the formation of echo chambers. To assess the different dynamics, we perform a comparative analysis on more than 100 million pieces of content concerning controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The analysis focuses on two main dimensions: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation in homophilic clusters of users dominates online dynamics. However, a direct comparison of news consumption on Facebook and Reddit shows higher segregation on Facebook. , Social media may limit the exposure to diverse perspectives and favor the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers. However, the interaction paradigms among users and feed algorithms greatly vary across social media platforms. This paper explores the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and echo chambers’ formation. We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook.
Twitter died a long time ago and X isn't worth it. Before I made the jump, my ego was holding me back. I was too concerned with vanity metrics. I finally realized if you're posting stuff people want to follow, then they'll follow you, even when you leave. siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/kelsey-hightower-b…
Open-source champion Kelsey Hightower on the promise of Bluesky
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