Casey NewtonI had hoped by now that the media would have begun to divorce Twitter. Instead, some journalists are doubling down.
Some thoughts on why:
https://www.platformer.news/p/why-journalists-cant-quit-twitter
Carlos Rodríguez@caseynewton If they could somehow monetize 4Chan they would be on there too.
TurboDave@caseynewton Eventually journalists on twitter will be like the stoner and goth kids hanging out at the dead mall.
felix (grayscale) 🐺@caseynewton My general impression is that journalism is heavily biased toward "story-telling", and big, noisy characters are good for stories. When someone's career is about telling stories, it's hard to convince them that a "good story" is an unimportant sideshow, a distortion of reality.
Lora Kolodny@caseynewton The user experience is familiar. And the network isn't elsewhere. For many of us, there's no safe place online anyway. So we're just there like we're still on Insta and Whatsapp too.
Adam Cook@lorakolodny @caseynewton My two cents - Lora reports on Musk and Tesla for CNBC and has consistently been uniquely insightful in surfacing confirmed and potential public safety issues as it pertains to Musk's businesses.
Lora tirelessly asks the tough questions.
As a public safety advocate, I value that immensely and I think that it is, in fact, a public service that Lora continues to speak on that, on Twitter.
This is life and death stuff here and Twitter still has outsized reach.
INVISV@caseynewton Journalists have been down this road before, in a sense, with Facebook's pivot to video. Everyone was being pushed that way, and it was increasingly clear it was a bad idea, undermined their independence, and would make their employment all the more precarious, but out of desperation (?) they did it anyway.
Twitter claims that it still drives clicks, and maybe it does, but I've heard that it's declining and at some point someone who looks at the hard numbers will realize it's time to move on.
Peter DeVries@caseynewton It’s disheartening. Just curious if you’ve thought about including “Those good toots” in your newsletter rather than (or in addition to) tweets?
louisgray@caseynewton inertia is a huge thing here. And old habits are hard to break. When my mind is lazy, I still type in reader.google.com or even friendfeed.com because that's what I want to visit.
Until there are sustained outages or mass account issues and deletions, it's unlikely the power users will walk away from the site for moral or outrage purposes.
I deleted the app (and FB too), locked my account and deleted my history because that site doesn't deserve my content any more.
Argot_Robbie@caseynewton @mmasnick Having witnessed the 2003 war cheerleading, and the 2016 election coverage, I'm surprised that a single journalist has quit Twitter.
Ministerofimpediments@caseynewton Journalists can do whatever, but eventually they’ll be talking into an empty room. Money issues will catch up to Twitter. Regardless of whether companies, journalists, politicians, influencers, or personalities pay (or not)…regular people won’t. They may not want to leave and they’ll put up with all kinds of bs to stay, but if he charges for Twitter…they’ll go. Meta already knows this. He doesn’t. He burned $24B. There isn’t a workable plan. And he won’t change.
That’s it.
That’s it.
Marc Heiden@caseynewton Appreciate you being one of the exceptions.
Alex K@caseynewton
I am so glad that you came over Casey and stuck around! This snippet is perfect, especially since so many journos have been complaining all day about how now Twitter sucks for real time news.
Unfortunately I can't completely kick it because local reports and gov accounts are still on there.
Adnan@caseynewton This line!!
> "but all lack the animating force of Musk as a main character, rampaging across the timeline each day like a Tesla-driving Green Goblin."
Thank you for my early morning laughter choke :D
Word of Mouth 
@caseynewton I think maybe what journos who won't leave the twit don't get is that most people don't use Twitter, at all. So, as long as journos don't base stories on tweets, they can stay on Twitter for all I care. When they do base stories on tweets, I don't read them. And since I don't watch cable news, I can't be passively programmed that way.
So journos... go ahead and tweet. I might see it on Mastodon.
Chris Williams@caseynewton it’s wild to see how much pain people will take instead of just leaving and finding something else. No way I’m going down on the ship a billionaire is purposely sinking.
John Yates@caseynewton I logged out of twitter last November. I still have no intention of ever logging back in.
aardvark
JJ Peterson@caseynewton well, they’re not really journalists at this point, just influencers. Journalism is hard, telling us how you feel is very natural for these kids because they’ve been taught that’s what matters in journalism.
E. Hatt-Swank@caseynewton
Good piece. I left twitter a while back and don't miss it -- I mostly used it to keep up on breaking news events, and I have found that I can get that with Mastodon (best for discussions, ideas) and Post (basically a headline/link feed). But i was never making money off of twitter, so I can understand why some people keep a presence there. No excuse for casual food/sports/pets/etc posts though!
Good piece. I left twitter a while back and don't miss it -- I mostly used it to keep up on breaking news events, and I have found that I can get that with Mastodon (best for discussions, ideas) and Post (basically a headline/link feed). But i was never making money off of twitter, so I can understand why some people keep a presence there. No excuse for casual food/sports/pets/etc posts though!
Dwight Silverman@caseynewton Casey, Mastodon natively doesn’t support quote-posts but several apps have implemented a version of it that works well, including @MonaApp and @IceCubesApp. Check ‘em out.
Dan Gillmor@dsilverman Apple only, sigh...
@dangillmor Trunks supports quote posts on Android. So does Subway Tooter but I haven’t tried that.
Maria Bustillos@dsilverman Too bad none of the web clients does it (or am I wrong?)...
@dangillmor I don’t know, don’t use them. But will explore.
amey
Rick Ellis - AllYourScreens@caseynewton The decline of Twitter has made things more difficult for me because I'm now juggling audiences across Twitter, Mastodon, Post & Spoutible
FWIW, I've found using the ELK web interface makes the Mastodon experience much more pleasant. Although as you say, the lack of a reply quote feature is a minus
The ironic thing is that while the perception in the public is that quote tweeting leads to an increase in bullying, multiple studies dispute that. What matters is a chronological feed
AccordionBruce@AccordionBruce @caseynewton Twitter engineers did a bunch of user studies and found that a chronological feed made dunking and abuse a lot less likely. It apparently has something to do with the tweets being more in context, rather than some random thing popping up. And that out of context quality encourages people to dunk on the tweet. It sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but apparently they have a lot of data to support it.
@aysrick @caseynewton
Rational / sequential conversation leading to less abuse seems reasonable 🤷🏻♂️
Nix that feature!
@aysrick @caseynewton
I always read chronologically with #Tweetbot
And can’t really make sense of Twitter now without that app
Even without all the other changes, reading algorithmically I lose interest. It’s just noise with no order
@AccordionBruce @caseynewton For all of the complaints about Twitter, the original approach of offering either an algorithmic feed or one that mostly just offered people you followed or who followed you made 99 percent of the users relatively happy. I honestly don't understand the approach they're using now. You can only see some of the people you follow in the "following" feed & the "for you" feed is mostly just random garbage..
Andrew Briscoe@caseynewton That place is unreal. Good riddance!
Zeh Fernando@caseynewton Level headed analysis. Well done.
ProtectiveHen@caseynewton Thank you for trying to build critical mass here. This place so far seems the most lively/interactive Twitter alternative. I am still using Nitter to follow a few key folks but have not cracked my Twit account in months...
That Anonymous CowardWell to be fair, all the Sex Workers I know charge extra for scat so getting it for free must be exciting...
Derek Powazek 🐐@caseynewton cockroaches are hard to kill, but they are still bad business
Shoq 🌿@caseynewton The good news is, the Fediverse isn't a competitor of Twitter. It's an increasingly sustainable effort to build an alternative to the social networks we've known; one where journalists will soon have to maintain a parallel account just for professional cred, standing, and access to trusted resources and info. It's going to be a long road, but with help from forward looking journos like you, we're already on that road and moving right along. Wherever we're going, we'll get there :)
Dusty Beo@caseynewton Change is difficult
Antonio Páez 🇲🇽🇨🇦"Mastodon is boring, fascism is tremendously entertaining, wheee"
Extinction (our fate)@caseynewton Musk at least puts a face on "enshittification" this way. That's how I would interpret the poop emoji. He knows he's ruining what some consider public property, and he's doubling down. What the corporate media and other users aren't doing with enshittified platforms is abandoning them at a high rate. And that keeps the enshittification rolling. It's going to get worse before it gets even worse. And that stink may not ever come off its users let alone the "enshittification as a service" that we call Twitter.
author_is_ShrikeTron🔠💉x5@aka_quant_noir @caseynewton saw the same "rationalization" happening as TFG shat on the office and Presidency.
"Edgelord is becoming Twittdential".
@ShrikeTron @caseynewton Yup, he's flooding the zone with poop emojis and smearing them on the walls of his establishment.
Stefan Petit-Freres@caseynewton For many it's become an addiction. It makes sense when you think about the many years where the platform is used to report/record. Being pulled into the day to day sensational drama (since 2016). It's rewarded paparazzi like behavior.
I do think eventually Twitter will push its limits too far and people will eventually have enough. Though I think the bar for that will manifest itself into something crazier than having press excited to share the shit flung in their f̶e̶c̶e̶s̶ faces.
Jeffrey P. Bigham 🔥🔥@caseynewton i have seen way too many people be like, "what's with this doge?" … that response is exactly what is with that doge, also plus maybe a little crypto price manipulation
stoicmike@caseynewton Once you close your twitter account and don't look at it anymore, it's surprising how little you miss the media that remain on it.
Laimis@caseynewton I am shocked how many well known people have stayed on the platform.
Inertia is just too hard to resist, huh? It's inertia, it's fear of losing following, fear of losing income due to lack of following. But you would think some of them would take this as a test of resilience, a test of their values,etc. But nope, none of that. So few moved and I respect them.
In many ways if they are able to rebuild a following here, they would be basically indestructible. But few want to try it.
CTD@caseynewton I liked the DALL-E illustration at the start of this post in the email, and asked MidJourney for the same prompt…
Griff Ferrell@caseynewton We have kind of a running gag.
Anytime someone has an insightful take on a problem with the internet they will get the look, because they know it's coming...
Are you new here?
@caseynewton
Isn’t the other answer that it is addictive and it’s designed to be addictive?
Using Mastodon, I realise how much less drawn I am to use the app - and how easy it use to use for a little bit and then disengage.
Isn’t the other answer that it is addictive and it’s designed to be addictive?
Using Mastodon, I realise how much less drawn I am to use the app - and how easy it use to use for a little bit and then disengage.
Gaurav@caseynewton Elon is going to make sure these journalists’ commitment to Twitter is received with high costs in the form of outages, exposure loss, uncertainty and logo changes to doge!
Andy
newsorpigalJournalists are an invertebrate species. They lack a backbone.
Jeri Dansky@caseynewton They don't care that they are supporting an owner who gleefully promotes Nazi, fascists, TERFs, and antivaxxers. Seems they have a very different ethical calculus than I do.
(I know some communities have some real issues with moving off Twitter. I'm not at all sure American journalists have the same need to stay.)
Maxime Lenormand@caseynewton This is a really nice read.
I'm still active on Twitter, and am still wondering what gets me back even amidst the chaos. Inertia is one aspect, network effect is another. Most interesting people (to me) still hang out there... so I do too.
For all the negative talks about recommendation algorithms, Twitter's is (for now) still really good at making me find new interesting people
It could also be that we just are still all there to see the fall as it happens
@caseynewton
Spot on, lack of an easy to use alternative made the inertia worse. I know some journalists I follow on Twitter are here but impossible to find and follow unless I have theirs specific address/handle
Spot on, lack of an easy to use alternative made the inertia worse. I know some journalists I follow on Twitter are here but impossible to find and follow unless I have theirs specific address/handle
andrzej_jozwik@caseynewton You are, after all, one of them, right?
@caseynewton I hope Mastadon becomes a go-to source for journalists and sparks conversations, but this is a task for all pundits and people who spark debates in the public sphere. #Mastodon #media #Twitter
Move forward or die!@caseynewton these individuals are more attached to their perceived reach (based on the number of followers) than to the integrity of their craft. They are giving air to the cesspool #EMuskovy is creating instead of letting it die. This is exactly what he is betting $44B on, that he can keep enough vain “influencers” around to keep enough eyeballs engaged while he brings his disinformation machine to life so he can wield a “digital sledgehammer”to serve his purposes.