Der Untergang von Twitter: Wie aus einer „utopischen Vision“ für soziale Medien ein „giftiges Durcheinander“ wurde

And they said they have a plan to make money in a few years, no?

Some key points below:

>“I think back then it was definitely a utopian vision. Like so many of these founders, they really saw themselves as disruptors, as creating a space for genuine public discourse,” she says. “I think people really enjoyed it back then – it was a really fast-moving, innovative platform, you could get breaking news, you could follow and connect with people you really admired. It always had pockets of being a toxic swamp, even early on, but it wasn’t entirely like that.”
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>“It’s a very specific and limited audience,” Bruns says. “But the kind of audience you could reach on Twitter were journalists, politicians, activists, experts of various forms … often the people who are influential in other communities both online and offline.”
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>Belinda Barnet, senior lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, says: “It became a company that really made itself absolutely central to the news cycle. In essence, it became a tool that journalists in particular just couldn’t afford to do without.”
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>There have always been issues around misinformation and trolling, says Barnet, but the company adopted measures to try to combat some of the worst of the effects, by implementing what she calls the “three pillars”: blue tick verification of users, moderation policies and a trust and safety team.
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>“These things all worked in concert to make it reasonably reliable during a breaking news event, which is why people went there. Misinformation did go viral on the old Twitter, but they would often just kill the trend before it got anywhere,” she said.
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>All three of these pillars were dismantled swiftly after Musk acquired the platform at the end of 2022, Barnet says.
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>The trust and safety teams were among those fired by Musk in the wild weeks after he acquired the company for US$44bn and walked into the headquarters on his first day holding a ceramic sink. A video of Musk’s entrance was posted to the site with the caption: “Let that sink in”.
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>The approach to moderation also changed. Musk’s spat with the Australian government reveals something about his vision for X, which he sees as a bastion of free speech.
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>“They’re very reluctant to engage in any kind of moderation,” says Bruns. “To some extent that represents a broader sense in the US about free speech that it is an absolute good above all. Whereas elsewhere in Australia and Europe and many other places there’s much more about needing to balance the rights of free speech and the right to freedom from harmful speech. And for many otherwise quite liberal people in the US, that sounds like censorship, essentially.”
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>Ironically, X has suspended accounts of people who have criticised Musk, including the accounts of several high-profile journalists from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post who had been critical of him in 2022. At the same time, he banned an account tracking the whereabouts of his own personal jet using publicly available data.
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>“Elon wants it both ways,” says Barnet. “He wants it to be the original Twitter, which was indeed, absolutely crucial to the news cycle”, but also to “take away the pillars, the processes that Twitter had worked out over years and years are what is conducive to a community that can find facts.”
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>“It’s certainly already starting to transform into something that’s more similar to … platforms like Gab or Parler, or even [Trump’s] Truth Social where you’ve got far, far right people furiously agreeing with each other and furiously hating on everyone else.”

It’s pretty sad to see the site change so quickly over the past two years from something that was essential and potentially fun for some to something that’s less impactful and less fun.

It got ruined by bots, and people falsely accusing others of being bots. And the literal inability to prove that you’re not a bot, even with 50 captchas that are more complicated and time-consuming than your high school calculus and trigonometry tests.

The best thing we can do is learn how to co-exist with bots, stop being a cheapskate, hire human moderators to deal with rule-breakers – and then also split up the monopolies by simply hosting our own instances of social media sites, and encouraging others to join.

Small niche communities tend to fare better than large ‘free speech’ free-for-alls

Twitter had been declining but it only became a full dystopia after the sale to Musk. X isn’t Twitter anyway. It’s something else with the dregs of twitter’s user base held by inertia.

Poor leadership. Will be studied in business schools.

A post made 2 years ago when Elon bought twitter. Couldn’t have hit the nail on the head harder.

Millions of twitter users are upset by Elon Musk buying twitter.
Not because they fear they will be banned or censored.
But because they fear the people they disagree with won’t be banned or censored.

Reddit isn’t any better than Twitter lmao