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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I think most of the narrative for "Musk is ruining Twitter" is actually "Musk is allowing people that we hate back on Twitter". For some people - especially in the Blue Tribe - Twitter used to feel like a "safe space", run by friendly tribesmen and allowing them to get the respect they deserve (blue checks, etc.). Now Musk came and he's not their tribesman, the space is no longer safe, the blue checks are available to all kinds of plebeians and in short, the whole thing is ruined. I personally can't really sympathize and don't have an opinion on whether there's a kernel of truth in it or not - I have deleted my twitter account years ago once I figured out it doesn't allow to do anything I want to do, and using it just pisses me off.

I would not be surprised if the new BlueSky app stays in invite-only mode for precisely this reason. A private Twitter probably has more appeal/value to the blue media class than a public Twitter at this point. Like a super-powered Journolist.

Perhaps but then you run into the same failure mode ad Google+, which was a functionally great social media platform with a lot of good ideas and was very hot when it first launched. The invite only character made it exclusive and exciting...for a few months when everyone realized that the appeal of social media is having that un-gated garden of millions of other people to potentially interact with. Interest and use dried up as suddenly as it came and the rest is history.

Confirming that this is not a strawman; I've heard someone complain about this precise issue IRL.

the space is no longer safe,

That's completely untrue. Thanks to the megablock 'nuke' feature built on the request by Mike Solana, you can find a particularly retarded tweet and then block everyone who liked it.

E.g. this way even people who were being hunted by the deformed NAFO trolls for daring to disagree on the glorious eastern crusade against the subhuman vatniks could lower the risk of brigade mass reporting to essentially zero.

Same thing with reddit really. The laptop class managed to push out all the right leaning mega subs and now its 'theirs'. Only the barest figleaf of political neutrality is given and only milktoast conservatives are allowed to come into the town square. (There's still a few wild far right 'cabin in the woods' style subs like /r/cwr still around)

Yes, Reddit has been left-leaning for a long while, but because of subreddits, for a while the red tribe had been allowed to exist in their own bubbles. But it could not last and it didn't. Now it's probably the leftest of the social media platforms (at least if we take the major ones). Even not explicitly political subs - like local ones - are insufferably woke. But still there's some quality content in some subs. On Twitter, I can't really find many redeeming features.

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