Almost every day, whether on Facebook open groups, or Fediverse instances I post something, and someone feels the urge to say “You’re wrong” and if I answer a stream of trolls and flamers will pile in.
Yesterday someone asked “How do I do A on site B” and I gave two links to articles speaking about how to do A on site B. I was then told that it was not helpful, and then when I answered back a flame war started.
Two authors wrote books. In these books they speak about whether Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk killed twitter. The answer is neither. If Twitter was alive and healthy it would never have been sold to an individual for four times its value, because its growth potential would have made this absurd.
Twitter died by 2007, with the advent of hashtags. That’s when twitter went from being a community of friends to being a community of strangers trying to get a million followers, and using hashtags to jump into conversations that they were not devoted to.
Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.
From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social.
Twitter and YouTube want to make it impossible to block report, or ignore ads. The reason I dumped Facebook and Instagram is that I saw more ads than content by friends. In fact I saw posts by five to ten friends, out of four hundred, but unlimited amounts of ads. This reminded me of how small my Instagram reality was, but also that others were wasting my time to make money for themselves.
There are two types of Twitter users. Those that are still using it daily, and angry with what Musk is doing, and those that quit weeks ago, and come back every now and then to see how things have changed, or stayed the same. I am surprised that to some degree the site feels the same and yet, of course, it isn’t.
I am surprised to see who stayed around, who is still using the site, and whether the community feels lively, or dead.
With the change in name from Twitter to X, and with the destruction of a recognisable brand mentioned in tens of thousands of podcasts, podcasts, episodes and millions of web pages I was curious to see how Twitter was, with the new logo. It took more than 24 hours to change the favicon, and whilst x.com does redirect to Twitter, it does not do anything else than redirect to Twitter.com. You can’t see your x posts there.
It’s interesting that we can stop using a website that is so integral to our lives for years. During the pandemic I quit facebook because I was flamed and trolled at a time when I needed friendship and support. Facebook has been known to make people depressed. During lockdown I decided to quit Facebook and Instagram.
Quitting FB and IG I quit them for two reasons. The first is that I no longer got anything positive out of them.
Yesterday Facebook, discguised as meta, and Meta, disguised as Instagram launched Threads. Threads is meant to be a twitter competitor. The paradox is that Facebook has always been a twitter competitor, and this has become more evident with every iteration of both social networks. It is paradoxical that Facebook would need threads, to compete with Twitter.
Not Available in Europe Threads, at the time of writing this blog post is not available in Europe because it requires data, which brings it in breach of GDPR rules.
Since 2006 I have been using Twitter every single day for several hours a day, reading up to ten thousand posts per day. Every time it failed I would know about it. Weeks ago I decided to stop using Twitter, so when it fails I read about it in articles. I am happy that I took a break from Twitter because if I was still thinking of it as a serious tool, I would feel heart break every time it failed.
Years ago we heard that Facebook was a silo. What was meant by this term is that FaceBook would pull content into its social network and behave like a portal, without allowing people to leave. It encouraged people to see the World Wide Web as Facebook and nothing else. For a while it worked.
Zynga and The Death of Conversation When FB was young, and vibrant it was a network of friends having a chat, until Zynga came along.