[karaterobot]

I guess I didn't define what I think the problems with Twitter are, and now I don't have time for a long message. But, in short, I think that format encourages echo chambers, shortens attention spans, and rewards bad behaviors like bullying, cheap shots, ungenerous reading, etc. None of those are directly related to bots (though maybe bots are a symptom of the same issues). Nor did they emerge with Musk. That Elon Musk wanted to control Twitter might even be diagnostic of a certain kind of basic problem with it—or a basic power—but I'd have to think about that a little more.

[swed420]

> But, in short, I think that format encourages echo chambers, shortens attention spans, and rewards bad behaviors like bullying, cheap shots, ungenerous reading, etc. None of those are directly related to bots (though maybe bots are a symptom of the same issues). Nor did they emerge with Musk.

Having avoided twitter throughout its entire existence for these reasons, I absolutely agree.

Political commentator Matt Christman has a great vlog episode about the inherent problems with platforms such as Twitter, including the societal cost of being an impediment to real progress.

MIND FORCE: FIBONACCI SNIPER | CushVlog 4.29.30:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsuTh1aK7Tc

https://cushvlog-catalog.vercel.app/transcript/OsuTh1aK7Tc (transcript)

[maxerickson]

Twitter was trying to boost engagement before Musk bought it, and several of the changes they have made since then supercharged it.

Bluesky isn't yet aggressively working to boost engagement. There's the discover tab, and feeds, but those are more opt in types of things. Blocks also work differently, perhaps increasing the echo chamber effect, but also tamping down on squabbling.

[android521]

what you need is blogs or essays. But the audience has become too small so there are fewer writers

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not the audience, it's the monetization. Why are so many things that ought to be a blog post now a YouTube video? Because YouTube has video ads, which pay better.

And it's not just from the perspective of the creator. Lots of people would write blog posts for free, if people would read them. But then Google dumps them out of the search results in favor of YouTube videos that take ten times as long to tell you the same info, and then the bloggers stop writing because nobody is reading.

What we need is a search engine that goes back to giving people what they're looking for instead of showing what pays the search engine company more.

[sofixa]

> And it's not just from the perspective of the creator. Lots of people would write blog posts for free, if people would read them. But then Google dumps them out of the search results in favor of YouTube videos that take ten times as long to tell you the same info, and then the bloggers stop writing because nobody is reading.

I disagree with this take. I hate learning by video unless it's for physical stuff where seeing it is useful (e.g. how to wire something), and thus I always prefer text content when searching for information (due to the higher flexibility in moving at my own pace instead of the narrator's).

I've never had issues with Google pushing videos too much in search results. You have an initial "videos" results block I just scroll past by, and that's that.

The much bigger issue is the narrowing attention span of people. Thanks to social media, like Twitter, but also Stories, Shorts, Snaps, Reels, TikTok, etc. people's attention span is going down. Many people would prefer watching 10 tiktoks instead of spending 10 minutes reading a blog post.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I've never had issues with Google pushing videos too much in search results. You have an initial "videos" results block I just scroll past by, and that's that.

The issue is that some large portion of people don't do that, they watch the video because it's listed first. Which drops the readership of the later-featured blogs below the threshold where the author keeps making them.

[verzali]

Substack, maybe?

[swed420]

Although platforms like Substack alleviate some of the issues mentioned above, there still remains the most important issue of all:

FOR-PROFIT CONTENT CREATION

When I reflect on how awesome the web used to be, the one common theme was the creators were doing it for free, because their passion for whatever they were creating was simply that strong and authentic.

Fast forward to today's hellscape, and we can see the main reason there's a firehose of mediocre/low quality content is because everybody is desperate to make a buck.