Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
I think you're confusing the app with some of the people that use it. That's no different than blaming guns for murder.
There is no distinction between the app and the people that use it because the addictive nature of it is built into it from the very start. The cigarettes analogy is the better one. Literally everything about the app is designed to get you addicted. How many likes did this person get? How many retweets did this person get? Let's read the comments to see how this person is being treated? It's a social scoring system where the most extreme thoughts are often rewarded. You see people start get to get twitter fame based on the fact that they get a lot of likes, retweets, comments. You see people get retweeted by Justin Timberlake, or put on Fox News or CNN or a sports show. For many, the natural next step is to try and have your tweets go the same way.
If you look at how Twitter operates, the entire operation is designed to get you addicted to it. You don't even know most of the people with whom you are reading/reacting/interacting with on it which is a major difference from Facebook. Twitter is a collection of people who are addicted to getting mad at each other online, and finding people who are very likely to get mad at people online with them, and breaking NBA news.
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
The thing that made Twitter a killer app was that it put your voice on par with the voices of Joy Reid and Tucker Carlson. And that's exactly what the erstwhile gatekeepers of information could not and cannot countenance. Twitter undermined itself with the blue check system. That was really the beginning of its downfall.
The most powerful people are terrified that Musk will return it to its original promise. I'm not sure if he can or if he will, but one thing I'm certain about- it won't be worse than it is now.
By the way, you can thank drunken Tony LaRussa for the blue checks.
No one really cares though. Twitter was, and still, is dominated by people who are popular on twitter because they have a job that elevates them. Of course some random person on their lunch break can tweet "If Disney really wanted to protect kids from danger they would stop forcing parents to spend $12 on a hot dog at the parks" and get it trending and retweeted by Kid Rock but it will be forgotten in a couple hours anyways.
Twitter has the chance to be an efficient information sharing service but it's just pretending to be that anyways as virtually every feature is designed to trigger an emotional response under the guise of information sharing to get you more and more addicted to it. In the short term, it may make you feel better, but like any other addiction, it takes a long term toll and becomes very difficult to break out of.
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