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by ghaff 107 days ago
For whatever faults the old Twitter had pre-Musk, it did establish a certain critical mass for a certain type of short form threaded discussion which seems to be largely dead at this point.
2 comments

And it should well stay dead. Short form social media is just too good a fit for outrage farming.
Jack seemed interested in the protocol side of the house and making a good product that was in spirit of the internet, it also had a mix of people you might know IRL (with reasonable privacy defaults) and official sources/public figures. I don't think he was much interested in the censorship, it feels they got run over by a bunch of activist types during covid (who decided it was de rigeur to censor real doctors for perceived 'misinformation'). Jack started work on Bluesky and now is involved in Nostr

Speaking personally, supposedly Twitter now (X) still has a bunch of censorship and I don't especially like Musk (but what he did was valuable, showing Jay Bhattacharya he'd be put on a trending blacklist) and the site is... well, I should be able to follow threads without having an account but they crippled it so much. It reminds me of Instagram, "log in to see any PUBLIC page"

The censorship now is worse than what happened to Bhattacharya.
Court orders are different from psyops. The Bhattacharya thing, and the entire narrative around that stuff was essentially a psyop. Geo-restricting a Turkish politician because the authoritarian govt arrested him and gave a court order to restrict his account is - first of all - what all social media platforms must adhere to legally, and second of all is currently being contested by X in court.
I don't know if it was a psyop. Twitter banned tons of people during covid for completely ridiculous reasons, unless it was somehow all forced by court order or something
you don't know the people that are banned now but you knew the people back then. why do you think that is?