"The old Twitter regime wouldn’t dream of limiting traffic to certain websites or making it harder to read linked material."
Unless that material or those websites didn't follow The Narrative. Hell, I was permanently banned, as was a truck driver friend of mine, and we were both very small fish on the platform. Apparently some SJW decided we were 'racists', a funny accusation, and that was it. Twitter breezily ended our time there. No traffic or linking websites for us. Many regular people like us had the same experience.
Reading Taibbi's Twitter files, and a few of the others, it was like reviewing all of the soft (and not so soft) censorship of hardcore libertarian / paleoconservative material from 2006-2013. The Twitter Files version was rougher and more overt, but the goal was the same. I see the same Musk Derangement Syndrome you do, and not only is it amusing, it's interesting watching people get the treatment that Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondi, Stefan Molyneux et. al. got a decade earlier. Welcome to the party everyone! Being a real conservative, not a neocon warmongering stooge, meant you got shadowbanned, censored, slandered, and stifled since very early in the W Bush administration.
I'm with you big time when it comes to Twitter. It's slipping badly. Now that the Cult of Everything Free is over, and the subscription model is obviously the way going forward, Musk seems to be clumsily trying to get the platform going.
"They are not creative people". Exactly right. They might be technological geniuses, but they're not creative at all, and it shows.
"Musk, of course, never understood the fundamental power of Twitter and this is why he’s doomed to fail. . . . Twitter once created its own meta-narratives and discourses; it defined, for a time, entire news cycles . . . Twitter did understand, before Musk, its value as a place where people who worked in the written word industries—newspapers, magazines, books—could chat and network. The old Twitter regime wouldn’t dream of limiting traffic to certain websites"
Ok, but the old Twitter was unprofitable and losing money at an unsustainable rate. So maybe it wasn't such a great business model?
It's been reported in many places that Musk wants to turn X into WeChat, which most of us in outside of China have no reference point for because we don't have anything like it. That may or may not work, but it is a plan. Strange that you make no reference to it.
I keep wondering if my dwindling interest in Twitter and the general keepings-up with online culture is due to myself getting older and more jaded, or if because online culture is not what it was even just a few years ago, where you go on Twitter and find all sorts of articles (many of them bad, but that's what also made it secretly fun, so you could hate on them). A New Yorker piece just came out about how the internet's not fun anymore because there seems to be less spontaneity and non-algorithmically determined discussions anymore.
"The old Twitter regime wouldn’t dream of limiting traffic to certain websites or making it harder to read linked material."
Unless that material or those websites didn't follow The Narrative. Hell, I was permanently banned, as was a truck driver friend of mine, and we were both very small fish on the platform. Apparently some SJW decided we were 'racists', a funny accusation, and that was it. Twitter breezily ended our time there. No traffic or linking websites for us. Many regular people like us had the same experience.
Reading Taibbi's Twitter files, and a few of the others, it was like reviewing all of the soft (and not so soft) censorship of hardcore libertarian / paleoconservative material from 2006-2013. The Twitter Files version was rougher and more overt, but the goal was the same. I see the same Musk Derangement Syndrome you do, and not only is it amusing, it's interesting watching people get the treatment that Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondi, Stefan Molyneux et. al. got a decade earlier. Welcome to the party everyone! Being a real conservative, not a neocon warmongering stooge, meant you got shadowbanned, censored, slandered, and stifled since very early in the W Bush administration.
I'm with you big time when it comes to Twitter. It's slipping badly. Now that the Cult of Everything Free is over, and the subscription model is obviously the way going forward, Musk seems to be clumsily trying to get the platform going.
"They are not creative people". Exactly right. They might be technological geniuses, but they're not creative at all, and it shows.
"Musk, of course, never understood the fundamental power of Twitter and this is why he’s doomed to fail. . . . Twitter once created its own meta-narratives and discourses; it defined, for a time, entire news cycles . . . Twitter did understand, before Musk, its value as a place where people who worked in the written word industries—newspapers, magazines, books—could chat and network. The old Twitter regime wouldn’t dream of limiting traffic to certain websites"
Ok, but the old Twitter was unprofitable and losing money at an unsustainable rate. So maybe it wasn't such a great business model?
It's been reported in many places that Musk wants to turn X into WeChat, which most of us in outside of China have no reference point for because we don't have anything like it. That may or may not work, but it is a plan. Strange that you make no reference to it.
I keep wondering if my dwindling interest in Twitter and the general keepings-up with online culture is due to myself getting older and more jaded, or if because online culture is not what it was even just a few years ago, where you go on Twitter and find all sorts of articles (many of them bad, but that's what also made it secretly fun, so you could hate on them). A New Yorker piece just came out about how the internet's not fun anymore because there seems to be less spontaneity and non-algorithmically determined discussions anymore.
Mastodon—whose name you should feel free to spell correctly—isn’t shrinking and doesn’t hate the written word.