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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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There is a way that his investment could be nullified, if a few powerful players chose to do so.

Some Twitter alternative could be settled upon (doesn't matter which; let me make up "BuzzBuzz") and a news blitz saying "BuzzBuzz: the Twitter alternative everyone who's not a racist is fleeing to" (It doesn't need to be "racist," but I think that would be the most effective option) can be conducted, full of interviews of concerned citizens and celebrities and experts whose tepid support can be put alongside those who have no professional need to stay restrained, all distressed about the "unmoderated racist content."

And all at once, the "tweet on Twitter" bluebirds at the bottoms of articles on other sites get replaced with "buzz on BuzzBuzz" bees; search engines change their algorithms to keep up-to-date with what content is good; all the respectable normal people who don't want to be considered racist will hop over to BuzzBuzz, and the whole incident will go down in history as proof of the persistent, insidious power of racists, for they took over and destroyed Twitter.

Now. Of course it's true that all of that is nothing but a lurid fable. I would be astonished if anything even suggesting an attempt at that happened, much less with the speed it would probably take to succeed. But the point does remain that "established network" effects aren't so insurmountable if there exists some common signal people can look to telling them where to regroup. NYT+CNN would be more than sufficient, I think, but I am not so conspiracy-minded as to think they would really make the attempt.

It depends on if Twitter under Musk will really be that bad. History suggests you have to really piss off enough people so that all of a modal user's friends on a feed will see the complaints. See Digg and Tumblr for example.

digg and tumblr died because better stuff like Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram came along. I don't see the same happening with twitter.

digg and tumblr died because, as in the meme, they shoved a stick in their own spokes. There needs to be alternative stuff available, but there is also often a sudden shock: with digg the atrocious frontpage redesign, with tumblr the porn ban. (With LessWrong the end of Eliezer's posts...)

The digg frontpage redesign was also at the same time as some pretty big revelations about how content made it to the front page. Back when large internet communities cared about that sort of thing on principle rather than whether it was useful.

There was the meme with the DeCSS AACS decryption key. A bunch of Digg users wanted it posted, Digg did not want it posted. I kind of get why Digg did not want to become a home to a bunch of piracy stuff, and I did not realize or had forgotten they had DMCA letter demanding its removal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy#DMCA_notices_and_Digg) but going to war with their own users at the same time of these other controversies killed the camel.

What does it mean for them to succeed? People say that a lot of the draw of twitter is that it lets the common person talk with celebrities. If enough of a coordinated media effort happened like, the kayfabe will definitely look as if Buzz Buzz won, and there will be a bunch of the usual suspects declaring victory over racism.

Even if Buzzbuzz amassed only one-tenth the users of twitter (in real people, not bots), who's won? Keep in mind that knowing the true statistics and trying to publish them would probably be hatefacts. How would normies learn the user statistics? There are a lot of people who think /r/The_Donald's subscriber and active user counts were throttled and generally subreddit population numbers were astroturfed back then. These people also anticipate that Buzzbuzz's user counts would be inflated.

In short, wouldn't a world where barely anyone migrated to BuzzBuzz look very similar to a world where most people did?

Maybe I'm just a cynical biased culture warrior, but Elon's acquisition doesn't seem like it changes any culture- or Truth- producing institutions, so does it really matter which social media sites have more active users?

Would people actually jump ship?

For those who are already on Twitter, their retweets and followers and twitlords aren't going to go away. Activists will still feel like they're rallying the proles. Journalists get to participate in the Dialogue. Those are the "network effects" which keep people on board.

When BuzzBuzz^TM launches, it might be marginally more effective than Voat or Mastodon. That's a pretty low bar.

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