It was never a good platform. Mainstream media just liked it because they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying “thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem”. Their audience didn’t realize that those thousands is the same as one belligerent drunk at a bar who won’t shut up.
Yeah I was never really a user, or considered it particularly good. But I think the mainstream legitimacy was definitely there. Any company, media personality, celebrity, brand, etc was pretty much expected to have a presence there, and you’d see their @usernames displayed prominently even outside Twitter. Or even just the little bird icon so you knew to look for them there.
A lot of creators are still there, and outright dismissed even alternatives like bluesky, let alone Mastodon, which many of them call a “tech-bro infested hellscape” (most of the techbros moved back to Xitter the moment thez were allowed to say the N-word).
But we’re there any better platforms that people were using? The problem was that all the alternatives were doing next tot nothing for countering disinformation. Twitter was the best of a bad situation.
they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying “thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem”
A lot of the time they don’t put any number on the people, and then it turns out they wrote a whole-ass article on what dozens of people on twitter are saying.
It was never a good platform. Mainstream media just liked it because they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying “thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem”. Their audience didn’t realize that those thousands is the same as one belligerent drunk at a bar who won’t shut up.
Yeah I was never really a user, or considered it particularly good. But I think the mainstream legitimacy was definitely there. Any company, media personality, celebrity, brand, etc was pretty much expected to have a presence there, and you’d see their @usernames displayed prominently even outside Twitter. Or even just the little bird icon so you knew to look for them there.
A lot of creators are still there, and outright dismissed even alternatives like bluesky, let alone Mastodon, which many of them call a “tech-bro infested hellscape” (most of the techbros moved back to Xitter the moment thez were allowed to say the N-word).
But we’re there any better platforms that people were using? The problem was that all the alternatives were doing next tot nothing for countering disinformation. Twitter was the best of a bad situation.
You could always NOT use social media as a news source. Short form media is just ripe for manipulation.
A lot of the time they don’t put any number on the people, and then it turns out they wrote a whole-ass article on what dozens of people on twitter are saying.