1) why didn't you leave twitter when it was driving online hatred for literally years? Why were you happy to feed the quote dunk beast when it was fun for you but harmful to others? Do you really think it's worse now than it was when it helped elect a tyrant and fomented a coup? And if so, why?
I left Twitter years ago because it cared little about and misled its consumers and, as you point out, enriched itself off of hatred. Given that long-standing reality, good question whether it’s really worse now (was the “fact checking” ever effective?) How long can Bsky operate w/o a similar model?
2) why are you fine with the fact disability twitter & science comms twitter is still useful on x leven with x's many severe problems) but never successfully migrated here due to bsky's design choices re: marginalized groups? Could that be the online equivalent of the abandonment you practice irl?
3) why do so many of you look & act like the quote dunk intelligentsia who made x what it is today? And why do you seem not to care that you're relocating those same kind of moralizing, black-and-white-thinking rhetorical practices over here, to make your point that site is bad & this site is good?
If none of this applies to you, great. If it sticks in your craw be you see some of your behaviors in it, maybe sit w/that before yelling at others about things you didn't really care about until they made you feel personally threatened to an extent far less than most of the folks you're yelling at.
And yes, this is in response to all the barely-veiled sexist and racist comments you’re throwing at the author of this piece, which is honestly far more lucid and well-reasoned than most of y’all’s (not all, but most) reasons for yelling at people to leave: www.theargumentmag.com/p/we-have-to...
“Here’s a helpful thought experiment: Imagine if Musk banned every prominent liberal and left commentator from Twitter — if he kicked off Ezra Klein and Jamelle Bouie and Mehdi Hasan. Would we view this as beneficial or harmful?” —@jerusalem.bsky.social www.theargumentmag.com/p/we-have-to...
I shouldn’t even have to point out how many people excoriating the person above for this take re: twitter/x REGULARLY engage with and share substack posts without seeing anything wrong with that🥴
I am no longer a very active poster on x, & have a private account. I am also clear about the fact that the reason I did this is because the calculus of danger (to me) for posting there became too high, not because I’m suddenly too morally pure for that always-flawed, always-harmful-to-many site.
I keep an account there primarily to engage with & learn from disability activists & peers who are not as active or visible here. And I think it’s honestly telling & important that more folks here don’t understand or care how lacking this site is in that regard or how bsky’s design choices led here.
You want 'foreign affairs,' you keep a toe in that pool. Bluesky and Threads are notably US-centric, so 'summit' coverage was *not* as good.
Thank you! 🙏 I was just about to make that point in a comment to one of your previous posts in the thread, but decided to read on and here you are making it.
Great thread, Mar. Thank you for this. I miss nesvoid parts of old site; where disabled built community of support. Sad how it was ruined by these actions & shitty people. Some couldn't start over on new platforms & gave up, or have died. This thread feels like you gave them a voice. 🕯
The barrier to coming over here is definitely not easy for everyone and it should be recognised. Is there a way you see or think this could be improved or would efforts be spend better building elsewhere considering some censorship towards groups that has happened on here?
Good question—and I’m not sure (re: the choice you pose). One thing that I know would make it more likely for more people to come here and spend time building communities here would be the ability to private their accounts. This isn’t the only design issue but it’s one of the big ones.
I was thinking in the sense of community building efforts that would be possible with the AtProto protocol, but the one thing you bring up here is definitely the biggest weakness of Bsky. It's simply not build for privacy. And any limiting capacity is in the end a view-port decision. All posts are-
exposed through the "Firehose"-API. I prefer this website to Twitter, because it allows for building out in the open and has a certain amount of transparency about it. Twitter does offer restrictions of view-ability aka private accounts, but I simply don't trust the platform to adhere to it. I've-
seen feature failure more than once. Fx. blocking someone and I'd still see their posts in my feed or they'd be able to interact with my posts. Or feature removal ordered by Musk. Ex. changes of likes. I think neither platform is good for anybody who wants privacy, but for different reasons. Bsky-
mentioned above and Twitter, because whatever privacy is available is one buggy update or unhinged change demanded by Musk away from keeling over. To me it's merely an illusion of privacy on Twitter, but I completely understand why so many prefer it. It's still, however flimsy, a shield.
I might be mistreating, but didn’t pre-Musk Twitter have active policies (and bans) to limit the amount of toxic content? Didn’t Twitter repeatedly get into trouble with the right because of the alleged biases of the moderation process? I feel Twitter and X are very different beasts.
On the first, yes, that’s totally valid! And the people behind these policies both tried their hardest & were also pretty open about how these guardrails weren’t enough (if you’re interested, check out Anika Collier Navaroli’s accounts of her work trying to stop the spread of posts that led to J6)
On the second, they did, but that was largely a DARVO play run by conservative media activists. On the third, I agree too. I do also think there’s a lot of similarities, unfortunately.
Yes, old twitter could be toxic but the people who ran the platform were trying to improve it- things like the first ever bug bounty for telling them about how the platform added bias like the image cropping algorithm. A very different ethos.
Personally I left twitter a couple of years back when I saw it start affecting the way people I knew responded in the same way I left facebook years before that because I saw the same thing and the effect is far more pronounced now
Misremembering obviously, not mistreating