Lotta talk about replacing Twitter.
The better dialogue is how to get people to re-evaluate how they engage with the internet.
Personally, I'm convinced of two things:
- You can't 1:1 replace Twitter unless it's a similar top-down walled garden.
- Most people probably shouldn't want a Twitter replacement, since Twitter is bad for us.
Instead of finding/molding/creating a replacement, we should encourage people (and ourselves!) to focus on what they like most about internet interaction.
Re: "Twitter is bad for us"
Most people only know to engage with the internet via the primary monoliths; Facebook, Twitter, etc. Anyone who's been active online before those platforms existed knows much better on how high-quality an online community can be.
Look at Reddit. The large subreddits are broadly cesspools; they're more targeted by spams/trolls/brigades, they attract the worst actors, and they're much harder to moderate effectively.
The small subreddits are often excellent communities, since they don't attract the nonsense, and can be moderated more effectively just because the numbers are lower.
So many people can't even begin to grasp this because all they know about online interaction is their experience with the top-down walled gardens.
The monoliths can exist, but using them exclusively (which most people do!) just feed a bunch of garbage into your brain.
It's the equivalent of having only eaten fast food when you eat out. It sucks but if it's all you know, it's still food you didn't have to cook yourself so cool. But there's much better food out there with some effort!
@thatianelliott 100%. My perspective is absolutely narrow.
Just to frame my thoughts perfectly though: Twitter was good. Something like Twitter can be good. Twitter is/has been/will be less good, if not bad.
The main bads are: less security/stability/moderation due to reduced staff (and Ellie's whims), higher propensity to scams due to verification meaning nothing, and more toxicity than ever before.
Still very possible to find something good in that, just...harder.
@chrisabides @thatianelliott Good and Bad Things both surface organically when you throw a bunch of people together.
But how we deal with Bad Things determines how sustainable the environment is for Good Things.
I feel like it’s somehow worse that the big platforms have slowly degraded to their current state. The worst things are usually dealt with, leaving a lot of questionable middle ground that slowly wears you down.
If you’re lucky, one day you wake up and go, “You know what? This isn’t what I signed on for.”
@chrisabides @thatianelliott I think this still happens with smaller communities, but there’s not as much pulling you in to engage even when you aren’t in the right frame of mind to.
Healthy communities have people come and go all the time as their priorities change.
Christopher
Ian Elliott
Nicholas Bering