> "what made Twitter great" was the easy to digest brands, the non-anonymous accounts sharing their day, and journalists/other named professionals
You should be in sales lol, just sell the B2B folks on ads and sign them up for multi-year deals like Spotify, by selling a tiny set of uber celebrities and brand names that no one gives a shit about enough to switch platforms. Forget what the users are doing which is posting as much as ever.
I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes. Apparently Meta is the competent one now because they pigeonholed a cloned feature on their platform + the alternative is no longer cool among the tech crowd on a niche programmer/startup forum.
Honestly FB being as successful as it was for so long should get some credit. Nothing sticks around forever and they generated massive amounts of wealth. It's wayyy bigger than Twitter still. As I say with Twitter even if they did lose 30% of their users that's still hundreds of millions of people using your website.
> the big expensive Metaverse plan was cancelled.
Has it really? Do you mean the scale/timing of their play (too much too early) or more generally.
>I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes. Apparently Meta is the competent one now because they pigeonholed a cloned feature on their platform + the alternative is no longer cool among the tech crowd on a niche programmer/startup forum.
The intelligentsia hates Musk far more than Zuckerberg right now, and will cheer on anything that could potentially hurt him. There's also some wishful thinking that Threads will institute the sort of mass censorship of right-wing speech that was present on Twitter, but it seems unlikely that there will be very different standards than what you see on Facebook, which is often derided as a right-wing boomer-infested hellscape.
I chuckled quite a bit when I realized Musk was buying Twitter to put an end to the totalitarian censorship practiced by the left. And unsurprisingly, Musk is now the big adversary.
Having enemies or groups to disagree with is more important than you think. If the lbgt2s can't shitpost nazi content they soon discover the differences between each of themselves and attack each other. A tribe needs an enemy
There's been no mass censorship of right wing speech anywhere in the US. There has been censorship of both mis and disinformation performed independently by companies who didn't want their customers to die for preventable illnesses or become the next Unabomber due to Russian influence campaigns.
There was a recent study that was floating around the news showing that this, never happened. The study went on to show that actually conservative viewpoints were boosted by social media algorithms.
What actually was happening was mass hysteria, and a political base being radicalized by a cult like leader who claimed every single thing was "lugen press", and anything bad that happened was an attack on them.
Maybe that content was boosted by algorithms which were trained on engagement. The content was indeed popular, if only because it was contrarian. Contrarian viewpoints flourish if people believe that the press doesn't hold government to account. But that is a different topic. Algorithms vs direct influence.
But there were still propaganda efforts, especially for the topic of mis- or disinformation. It served as an excuse to curb content. Trump decried the press, but at the same time he was correct in that the media tried to smear him with a Russian collusion story and promoted and suppress certain other topics. This isn't about conservative vs democrat, this is just underhanded political play. So the worst part is that he was partially correct about the press being instrumentalized. If they just reported critically and honestly, he would never have had an argument here.
Another bad result from this is that this of course might strain the relationship of a country being accused to meddle in elections. It turned large parts of the domestic populations against an imaginary enemy. Not saying that this is relevant for current developments.
You could maybe excuse the press because they have been fed with false info. Checking sources is their job, but worst of all, is that they now claim that voices need to be censored because of misinformation, just as they spread it themselves. I doubt they mean their own and I can fully understand the lacking trust in large press companies.
The press did not try to smear him with the Russian collusion "story". That story is and was very real. The Mueller investigation lead to dozens of criminal charges, of trump appointees and foreign Russian agents. Whoever convinced you otherwise had a successful propaganda campaign and you are one of millions of victims.
The probe did not find collusion, but that isn't the point.
The fact that he was put under that much scrutiny is political play. We have diverging opinions here, but I believe if there were any serious failings, we certainly would have heard of it. People tried to smear him with some failings of alleged contacts. Everyone even slightly connected could be smeared with allegations like that.
But the fact remains that A: The probe did NOT find collusion and that B: the probe was launched on falsified information that was created to start a political prosecutions. That is in my opinion something far more serious than anything the probe laid open and furthermore should obviously be discouraged.
That's not a "conservative" viewpoint. That was a politicaly insensitive take to have that lead to asian hate and violence at the time. I still don't think that the lab leak theory was ever proven to be true. I think the official stance is "it could be".
I don’t really care about the ideology; my point is that it was wrongfully suppressed.
> That was a politicaly insensitive take to have that lead to asian hate and violence at the time.
Is there literally any evidence of this at all? The virus originated from China either way, and if anything, it’s less offensive to blame a mistake at a virology lab rather than the general sanitation level of Chinese wet markets.
The lab leak theory was politically insensitive to the people who backed research at that specific lab. That’s it.
Another example is the leaked contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which have since been confirmed to be authentic. Censored as “disinformation/misinformation” at the time, turned out to be completely true, and again, censored because it was embarrassing to specific powerful individuals.
It's news to me that Twitter mass censored right-wing speech. They did at one time have some standards against hate speech (though they barely enforced them), but certainly nothing against right-wing speech.
You should be in sales lol, just sell the B2B folks on ads and sign them up for multi-year deals like Spotify, by selling a tiny set of uber celebrities and brand names that no one gives a shit about enough to switch platforms. Forget what the users are doing which is posting as much as ever.
I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes. Apparently Meta is the competent one now because they pigeonholed a cloned feature on their platform + the alternative is no longer cool among the tech crowd on a niche programmer/startup forum.