11 Comments

I'm glad you are on mastodon. I think the most important thing at this point is to stay together. Twitter will lose relevance when the people who made it important have moved to and empowered a new platform.

Expand full comment

Who wrote this!

Expand full comment
Jan 17, 2023·edited Jan 17, 2023

I notice Substack offers a link to tweet but not to post on Mastodon. Seems like an easy first step to making better use of Mastodon. Twitter became an outrage machine and clickbait factory, and in my view focused journalists on peers and the political class — with little true connection to people outside those worlds, especially to local audiences, and few features to help users.

Expand full comment

It already was a very small hellsite with a flailing business model, un-compelling product roadmap, and lack of vision. The Chief Twit is revealing his own shortcomings as a product manager. This is a business school case study in real-time.

Expand full comment

I disagree with how this article paints Elon Musk. Since he has owned the company for several months now, he has somewhat proven himself. He has made the recommendation algorithm open source, this should help prevent twitter from controlling it's user's brains (or at the very least be doing it transparently). He has also made a large effort to remove the bots from twitter, so fringe opinions are no longer being artificially amplified by troll factories. To say he is manipulating the user's feed for some ultra-conservative agenda is preposterous. You could say he is trying to tilt the discourse to what the users actually think, by restoring some semblance of freedom of speech. An important right which has been under attack in recent years.

Expand full comment
Dec 1, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2022

I never gave much thought to Twitter or Elon Musk before he bought Twitter, but curiousity led me to start using the platform recently. So far the only bullying or hate speech I've seen was directed by Left-wing activists against people who had questioned or disagreed with them. Meanwhile, Twitter is being repopulated by thoughtful, intelligent, caring people who were booted off because they didn't adhere 100% to Left-wing ideology. Maybe there are Nazis out there just waiting to flood Twitter with hate, maybe they're already doing it and I just haven't run into them, but so far the haters are MIA, unless you count the previously mentioned Left-wing activists. BTW, I've admired your work for years, and I still do. I disagree with you on this point, but I benefit from being exposed to ideas I disagree with. So thank you for your work and your perspective.

Expand full comment

Sorry George but you have no idea what you're talking about. I have been on Twitter for a decade and have never seen a Pro-Nazi post...Elon shared whatever image he saw with carrier pigeons in it he wasn't promoting Nazis. Twitter is a marketplace of ideas in a democracy which runs across a wide spectrum and fringe ideas are rarely shared unless we amplify them.

Expand full comment