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How Elon Musk can unlock the value of twitter, you all live in a bubble edition.
Here's a theme I've been seeing in multiple comment threads here, the theme being the assumption that motte users and the leftist journalists they follow are typical twitter users.
This is based on a totally false idea of what the heck twitter actually is. Go look at the top 10 accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_accounts
There are 2 celebrity businessmen (one of whom became a celebrity politician), 1 celebrity politician, more celebrities, plus Narendra Modi. If you go further down the list of top twitter accounts and drop stuff that's clearly the result of a well placed "follow me on twitter button" (e.g. @youtube, @pmoindia, @cnn), you discover that twitter is mostly celebrities and sports.
From a logged out incognito account on a US VPN, the top 10 trending topics are currently NFL (6), pro wrestling (1), NBA (1), happy birthday taylor swift (1) and business (1 topic about SBF). Of the UI tabs twitter has chosen to put on the trending page, they are "For You" (celebrities plus some tweets about TV shows, with a little news mixed in), "Trending" (celebrities and sports), "World Cup", "News" (which includes celebrity news), "Sports" and "Entertainment". (India is not much different.)
This even fits the anecdotal stories that have made it into our bubble - after Musk fired the moderators, twitter Japan was suddenly a bunch of anime, j-pop and k-pop.
Here's another hint that you're in a bubble: a significant chunk of the anime that's trending is stuff like "My Dress Up Darling" or "Kaguya-sama: Love Is War -Ultra Romantic" instead of the ninja stuff beloved by western nerds. I'm in a bubble too! I once looked up forums for an anime about cooking with the goal of recreating recipes from the show. What I got was a bunch of discussions about who male protagonist everyman diner chef should have sex with - texas A1 steak girl, high class french food girl and rural japanese cuisine good girl.
So here's how Musk can unlock the true value of twitter.
Fire the moderators to save money and let everybody post a bunch of Happy bday taylor swift I :heart emoji: u.
Downweight replies that match
n(.*[i1l].*)g+(.*e.*)rso you can only see them after digging through 10+ pages of "I :heart emoji: u Rihanna".Stop trying to put leftist cause of the week at the top, and allow twitter to fully exploit for engagement that which it already is: celebs and sports.
Allow Apple and Ritz Crackers to place their advertisements between taylor swift birthday wishes (by anyone but Kanye, next year Kanye is probably fine) and discussion of how awesomely Asuka punched the heel of the week on WWE.
Don't worry about the journalists leaving. Twitter matters to journalists, but journalists matter very little to twitter. Their excessive influence is actually mostly a historical anachronism - they were early adopters and spread it to the mainstream, but they are no longer very important. Also they can't leave.
I don't disagree with the general point, but popehat had 300k followers. See e.g. elton john, who left twitter bc of elon's antics, and whom elon replied to asking him to come back!
Also, western nerds loved kaguya-sama
also, your regex is wrong, you meant n[i1l]+g+e+r - that regex matches any string that has 'niger' in that order, meaning this sentence fits the regex! And the parens don't do anything, they're capture groups
re: my regex having lots of false positives, that's fine. You go to the bottom anyway. There's no shortage of people to populate the top of the replies to Tom Cruise and Drake.
I stand corrected on what western anime nerds like.
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Rural Japanese cuisine good girl is best girl. Seriously, her story arc was the best thing about that series.
In any case, I think this is an interesting question. I think we need a term for the sort of hyper-online partisan political engagement culture. I have no clue what it could be. In any case...would Twitter be better off if it basically ignored that? I think the argument you're making...and I agree...is that it seemed that it leaned in to that culture over the last few years, pretty hard, and maybe it would be better off if it didn't. And I think that lack of value...I'm certainly seeing people want to leave Twitter because frankly, they don't want to be in a space that they see as fundamentally hostile to them. And I'm thinking...welcome to my world where practically every place is hostile to me.
In any case, I do think that's where things are heading to some degree, is a deprioritization of politics overall. And honestly that's a good thing. That's where most of the toxicity comes from.
If anything, this seems like this is fundamental to how Twitter is designed: the differences between it's "shouting into the globally visible void" versus, say, Facebook leaning into connecting before content visibility emphasizes seeking the most viral content to maximize engagement. That said, I do think Twitter has leaned into that premise in deliberate ways: they could probably make modest changes to minimize pile-ons (especially of non-public figures), but seem to have decided that amplifying, for example, the Covington debacle.
To its credit, Facebook seemed to make some deliberate choices about 5 years ago to reduce the amount of rage-bait political content and emphasize the friend graph over re-shared content. I think Twitter must want to be the home of low-quality political hot takes over, say, a centralized equivalent of RSS for link aggregation, although maybe that wouldn't pay the bills.
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RIP Nigerians. But good point about bubbles vs mainstream.
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Twitter has suprinsgly weak moderation compared to most sites. Moderators only get involved for certain accounts for more serious matters. I think twitter should stop trying to fact check things or be an arbiter of truth. Usually it makes no one happy. Reddit is the opposite, being a huge site that is very closely moderated.
Surprising to who? They're there to control the spread of memes and information, their structure lets them do that effectively without bans and content removal.
surprising to people who think twitter censors anything that that is not politically correct. reddit is way worse in this regard
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