"They need us. We don't need them:" The fall of Twitter is making the trolls and grifters desperate
"They need us. We don't need them:" The fall of Twitter is making the trolls and grifters desperate
Mastodon would be my personal preference, but Bluesky seems pretty noisy to me, which seems like what people want from microblogging sites (I'm more of a reddit/lemmy/kbin style person, myself.) The question is whether Bluesky pulls a Google+ and stays invite-only for so long that they miss their own hype train.
I have come over a few Reddit communities who moved to Discord of all things. I don't get why. That isn't even remotely the same type of discussion platform.
I'm really not a fan of Discord. Why would anyone use a platform that's not accessible without making an account and requires an invite to each group? If it wasn't branded towards gamers I don't think it would have much appeal.
Discord has its uses but it's very much not the same. I often can't even find my question I asked an hour later.
At least for me, Mastodon replaced Twitter and Lemmy replaced Reddit. But then, I'm not "normal" and find the Fediverse to be endlessly fascinating.
I mean i moved to misskey/firefish which was awesome, but in my friend groups many of them just quit twitter & spent more time on discord, instagram, tiktok, etc. other places which they engaged w/ ppl 🤷🏿♂️ (fg age range: late millenial/gen z)
Most folks I follow went to Mastodon. I even met some new folks, including some that are local!
Some are still on twitter even though a small number of us begged/pleaded with them.
One went to blue sky.
This is speculation but I suspect people are already oversubscribed to social media and just spending a bit longer in other places they already go. So if they're on Discord, they're probably just spending more time there.
Offline?
If your main social network is on fire, you're probably just going to put the phone down and do something else, especially if you're not on another social network.
The learning curve with getting used to a new one might be a more than what most people really want to do with their time and energy, so they might just be curbing their Twitter use.
Always remember to never feed the trolls. It's a very basic Internet rule that we should have continued to follow. Block and move on
Sounds like a surefire way to get Donald Trump elected again.
Ignoring the trolls caused 2016 to happen. At that point, it became clear that the trolls have gathered in power, have organized politically and have explicitly made their methodology into the leading political force for the Republican party.
Ehhh… more like the opposite. The mainstream media engaged the trolls on a mass scale and the golden turd won.
That concept isn't what got Trump elected.
Cambridge Analytica got him elected. The superior data they had got him elected. He went out and promised the rust belt, among others) exactly what they wanted, and they took a chance on him after decades of being lied to by the Democratic party. Then combine that with the blatant gerrymandering, and you have a win for the greedy morons.
While that was happening the Democratic party was on a fools errand to try and flip Texas blue.
There are probably ways to counter misinformation without giving the bad actors involved any additional platform.
I thought it was the same thing that happens with these "content creator" in every niche. Over saturation requiring these greater extremes to get more attention.
Salon.com articles always sound like a 21 year old Redditor wrote them.
“The grifters that make up the troll-industrial complex are not okay.”
Who writes this lmao. Do they spin a wheel of buzzwords and just write a sentence with whatever comes up?
Yeah I mean if a 4 year old talks to me I can usually decipher what they are trying to say.
Amanda Marcotte is the author, a reasonably distinguished and well known figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte
Guess she just knows her audience is buzzword-craving 21 year old Redditors then.
If you write for salon.com, you are not distinguished. It's a basically a left wing tabloid and should not be misconstrued as a news website.
Could you elaborate exactly what you find problematic about that wording?`Those terms seems to be a pretty accurate description of the phenomenon.
It’s cringe and embarrassing to me. That’s all I’m saying.
I kind of like the "troll-industrial complex", but agree on your over take on the writing. Gone are the days when writers could produce great alliterations like "nattering nabobs of negativity".
The escalation may have nothing to do with the slow demise of Twitter. It may be the case that the liberals have gotten used to one level of trolling and ignore it. Trollers then have to become even more extreme to get their attention.
Twitter also recently started paying users who get more engagement like quote retweets, thus, people do would normally bash trolls via QRT are less likely to keep doing it
The escalation may have nothing to do with the slow demise of Twitter. It may be the case that the liberals have gotten used to one level of trolling and ignore it. Trollers then have to become even more extreme to get their attention.
Some day, we'll have a technology sub that isn't polluted with Twitter "news".
It's a tech company that is burning itself to a ground. Hard to take your eyes off of a slow moving car crash.
Sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and watch platforms combust due to their own arrogance.
Never understood why we call them tech companies to be honest. There is nothing technologically interesting at twitter. And if there is... it is never the subject.
Let's hope "X" continues down the path to it's own demise.
I'm still waiting for any article that talks about the tech that Twitter is supposed to be so famous for.
This is a bit of a learning experience though.
The big tech companies advocated during 2020 that they were not biased and should not be held responsible for policing the Internet.
Since then, FB swapped to Meta to cover up the documents showing FB is intentionally causing psychological damage our children because it gives them more clicks/view time.
OpenAI scraped the Internet, legally and illegally to power ChatGPT.
Twitter, a social media company known for free speech, was bought by Musk, a former Trump associate. Trump was reinstated during this period and dissent was banned.
Google decided to push web DRM to force us to use their software or else we can't access the Internet.
Sounds like they very much want to police the Internet. We just aren't putting the pieces together in a collective way.
I'm not a huge OpenAI fan, but it's not yet been determined that they acted illegally. I believe the matter is still being pursued in court.
On Reddit I've found most of the news about the big social networks is posted by only handful accounts, they also don't post other interesting things, so you can just block them.
I'm hoping that'll work on Lemmy as well.
That's just true of social media in general. 1% of the accounts generate 99% of the content.