Arguably one of the greatest shortcomings of today's intellectual environment is the widespread failure to understand how digital power works. You can reclaim a bar/town hall/public square by showing up. You ABSOLUTELY CANNOT do that with a digital platform.
Ohh, that is interesting indeed! My impression was that various digital spaces were trying to achieve just that: eshops by adding reviews, YouTubers by getting subscribed, adding chat to Zoom, Bluesky by using likes, repost, etc. One can argue how successful those efforts are.
So, how about working on improving the way people can ‘show up’ and claim their presence and opinions in a digital space? I know, lot’s of work to be done: proving (digital) identities, privacy, liquidity democracy. One of the bigger digital challenges for our society, right?
In any of those examples, would you say that people have the *power* to show up?
MySpace and beebo and others show leaving will have an impact. musk can only support the place for so long. once trump finishes his 2nd term truth socal is dead.
Every time I see more posts from that article it comes off even worse wtf? Ditching Twitter = deplatforming yourself? Did musk write that shit himself
A bar doesn't become a Nazi bar on its own, the owner of the bar allows, and perhaps encourages Nazis - the owner is culpable. The only solution when your favourite bar becomes a Nazi bar is to find another bar, and perhaps lock the doors on the Nazi bar and burn it to the fucking ground.
Twitter is like a Nazi bar at which the owner can snap his fingers and make sure that only the Nazis are visible. Being there accomplishes two and *only* two things: * Support Nazis relevance. * Deliver money to the Nazi bar owner. That's it, and it cannot physically be any different.
A lot of sex workers need eyeballs to get clients and twitter has more eyeballs, especially of dudes with money, than Bluesky. So at least one other thing being on twitter accomplishes is allowing some people, who aren't Nazis, to eat. This post was brought to you by nuance.
"Like"?
Right. In real life the only thing the bar owner can do is make you leave.
I think this is largely correct, but it neglects of impact of liberals getting out the message "you're being conned." It may be limited in scope/visibility, but with millions of liberals leaving, there is much less pushback against the worst lies.
It's worse. It's a Nazi bar in which the owner can snap a finger and reduce all the non-Nazis voices by 80%, then come in and say "excuse me? I can't hear you!". The obvious biases aren't that dangerous. It's the infinite ability of the owner to make it *appear* like a normal chat space.
Agreed — if you couldn't hear yourself you'd leave!
Trying to understand digital spaces through analog metaphors can be a great intuition pump but it's important not to take it too far. We can take a simple model of persuasion — @jerusalem.bsky.social's only point — as forming with some probability upon exposure, in a network of interacting people.
In a public square, there is no hierarchy. Everyone can talk to everyone else at about the same rate and so all beliefs in the group get a comparable chance to spread, based on frequency in the population and and probability to convince. That's nice! Low epistemic Gini, lovely model.
(Yes I know, culture, pre-existing norms, tyranny of structurelessness, etc. none of that matters here.) But if that's your mental model for how Twitter works, you're just going to be flat out wrong. Twitter has a strong hierarchy and it's entirely driven by what the platform *makes* relevant.
Ironically, the pundits who love echoing one another's belief that Bluesky is an echo chamber are the very same who fail to understand that Twitter is specifically designed to echo certain views strongly and completely dampen others. It ultimately has an epistemic Gini of 1.
Whether you choose to take seriously political commentary from people who don't understand power in the 21st century is entirely up to you of course. But I wouldn't recommend it.
Incidentally, I think Ted might have a point here. (Stubborn prickly diva? Me?) bsky.app/profile/tedu...
Analogies for computer things are necessary when people are so stupid they don’t understand the computer thing. But we should be past that now. How many people still need to think of a car as a mechanised horse? Ffs. People are stupid.
I disagree, a good intuition pump is a good intuition pump. People often have no other way to approach invisible components of computer architectures.
Yes. But that’s my point. Did people still need to think of cars as horses in 1940? 50 years after the invention of the car? Why don’t people understand computers yet. We have entire generations who don’t know the before times and they still don’t understand them.
But we’ve also done a terrible job of making tech accessible. Too hard too fast.
This theme of finding new places is going to be big. I already work so hard to cultivate a little niche of the social media verse that brings me joy. Knowing that it can, and probably will, be taken away, is a face punch. So many wonderful and smart people I want to keep hearing from, and no way.
And you don’t need to. Digital spaces aren’t real. It’s not physical land that needs to be defended. If the digital town hall or public square you use goes to hell, just form a new one somewhere else. Nothing of value will be lost.
Eating at McDonald's won't make their food healthier or their labor policies better. Solution: Don't eat at McDonald's.
the way to reclaim the Nazi bar is to have a non-Nazi purchase it from Musk, which will happen approximately never
I'm still hearing from people on the EC that they stay on X because "theirs is the last voice of sanity". They never asked themselves whether posting on X: 1) alongside Nazi content frames both sorts of content as of equivalent value 2) legitimises the disinformation X promotes...
I don’t know how we change that perception, because they are really the last pillar of legitimacy it has. A social network’s legitimacy is derived from its posters, so they are propping up the filth that’s taken over Twitter.
3) feeds bad actors with content they can distort and turn against them 4) traps their followers in a toxic environment....
And for what? If they post links noone will see it, so does anyone really think a meme's going to convince anyone of anything in such a politicised, toxic environment?
Indeed! And it's great that you call out the information deficit model too. I strongly suspect that the deep motivation is loss aversion: people just don't want to lose hard-earned followers and clout. Of course, the truth is that it's already gone...
I unfollow people that still post there. I also won't read newsletters on Substack. There is an opportunity cost to staying on toxic and harmful platforms.
Exactly. It's a whole intersection of cognitive biases, really: sunk cost, obviously, but also optimism bias, status quo, confirmation, metric overfocus, loss aversion... Btw, the above arguments, plus what to do about it, here: myhub.ai/items/x-stra...
Every person still using Xitter has agreed to give money to Elon Musk, a man that very much knows the difference between a Nazi salute and a "from the heart" gesture, who chose to do the former as his candidate for President was sworn in.
