I think if we’re honest with ourselves, the “service” most reporters provide on social media is entirely self-serving. A one-way firehose of signal boosting and self promotion.

“Look at me! I wrote this story. Click on it!”
And then you ask them a question, or have a correction, and nobody reads it, because Wired doesn’t care about building a community, just reaching a consumer. It’s fire and forget.

We already have a tool for that, it’s RSS. What value does reposting a link here provide?

@Haste I wasn't on Twitter before its downfall, but from what I've heard I got the impression that microblogging was a two-way street with journalists, scientists and 'common' folk.

It probably was more like you are suggesting though. But it does make me wonder if early Twitter really was less self-serving in a way.

@odd I’m not sure. I wasn’t on Twitter in the early days. By the time I got there it already sucked. lol

I did get to experience invite-only Bluesky, but I can’t really comment on it from a reporting standpoint because I only used it to shitpost. Which was very community oriented, but totally devoid of professional value.

Mastodon really is the only place I’ve had any interest in my work and I just assume that’s cause I’m pals with folks that live in Seattle here.

@Haste @odd when twitter was smaller, two way conversation was indeed more common, there was
more a vibe of experimentation and play- and the rules were a bit different than how it is now:

no pictures, no replies, no retweets, no search, and history only could go back about 100 posts.

as soon as retweets, replies and search got added, the vibe got less fun because retweets let dumb throwaway remarks go “viral”, blind replies turned virality into pile ons, and search enabled kiwifarms style analysis of targets