this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
978 points (98.5% liked)
Microblog Memes
5903 readers
3795 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Even worse is that Twitter/X still has an air of mainstream legitimacy since others built it into a household name before musk decided to vaporize billions of dollars to be able to enshittify it.
It was never a good platform. Mainstream media just liked it because they could rationalize any shit take they wanted to push by saying "thousands of people on twitter are concerned about X problem". Their audience didn't realize that those thousands is the same as one belligerent drunk at a bar who won't shut up.
A lot of the time they don't put any number on the people, and then it turns out they wrote a whole-ass article on what dozens of people on twitter are saying.
Yeah I was never really a user, or considered it particularly good. But I think the mainstream legitimacy was definitely there. Any company, media personality, celebrity, brand, etc was pretty much expected to have a presence there, and you’d see their @usernames displayed prominently even outside Twitter. Or even just the little bird icon so you knew to look for them there.
But we're there any better platforms that people were using? The problem was that all the alternatives were doing next tot nothing for countering disinformation. Twitter was the best of a bad situation.
You could always NOT use social media as a news source. Short form media is just ripe for manipulation.
A lot of creators are still there, and outright dismissed even alternatives like bluesky, let alone Mastodon, which many of them call a "tech-bro infested hellscape" (most of the techbros moved back to Xitter the moment thez were allowed to say the N-word).
I'm not parasocial to follow creators on twitter. I'd like it if they'd post their schedule to an RSS feed, but the lack of that isn't enough for make a twitter account.