That’s why I loved TweetBot. No algorithm, just a chronological list of everything everyone I followed posted/retweeted.
And now I use Mastodon, because I can use Ivory, the Mastodon client by TapBits (the maker of TweetBot).
Of course you don’t have to use that app because Mastodon doesn’t have any algorithm. It’s just chronological. It’s great. There’s nothing stopping someone from making a client that has an algorithm. But the service isn’t trying to hide stuff from you and promote nonsense that someone paid for.
> i think the most important skills you need to survive on a site like twitter are social awareness and an ability to control your reflexive outrage, cringe and disgust.
Well therein lies the problem, no? Reflexive outrage, cringe and disgust are some of the strongest ways to engage your audience. Any rational social media owner (particularly one that owns an unprofitable hellsite such as Twitter) is going to capitalize on that, because Twitter isn't and was never a charity. It's an advertisement platform that deliberately limits your expression to prevent you from taking the attention away from the ads.
So now we're on X, and everyone somehow thinks things will gently come back together again. Why? Do we not see the smoldering corpse that Jack Dorsey left for us, expecting a spirit to rise from the ashes and thank the most pious @users?
I never used Twitter, so eulogizing it has always struck me as an uncomfortably postmodern compulsion. From the outside looking in, Twitter was disproportionately popular and relied on FOMO generated from lifestyle influencers to draw in the majority of it's users. It had no clear path to profitability, also relied on baiting people with sensationalism for ad revenue, and ultimately suffers from the same critical flaw of fickle centralized control that damned Twitter originally.
That’s why I loved TweetBot. No algorithm, just a chronological list of everything everyone I followed posted/retweeted.
And now I use Mastodon, because I can use Ivory, the Mastodon client by TapBits (the maker of TweetBot).
Of course you don’t have to use that app because Mastodon doesn’t have any algorithm. It’s just chronological. It’s great. There’s nothing stopping someone from making a client that has an algorithm. But the service isn’t trying to hide stuff from you and promote nonsense that someone paid for.
A good article, and one that I rather appreciated.
> i think the most important skills you need to survive on a site like twitter are social awareness and an ability to control your reflexive outrage, cringe and disgust.
Well therein lies the problem, no? Reflexive outrage, cringe and disgust are some of the strongest ways to engage your audience. Any rational social media owner (particularly one that owns an unprofitable hellsite such as Twitter) is going to capitalize on that, because Twitter isn't and was never a charity. It's an advertisement platform that deliberately limits your expression to prevent you from taking the attention away from the ads.
So now we're on X, and everyone somehow thinks things will gently come back together again. Why? Do we not see the smoldering corpse that Jack Dorsey left for us, expecting a spirit to rise from the ashes and thank the most pious @users?
I never used Twitter, so eulogizing it has always struck me as an uncomfortably postmodern compulsion. From the outside looking in, Twitter was disproportionately popular and relied on FOMO generated from lifestyle influencers to draw in the majority of it's users. It had no clear path to profitability, also relied on baiting people with sensationalism for ad revenue, and ultimately suffers from the same critical flaw of fickle centralized control that damned Twitter originally.