I suggest watching the video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo but the article has an OK summary.
Also a Mastodon shout-out in the video.
It remains insane to me that it’s so hard for so many to just, not use them. Truly, your life is not being enriched by twitter or Facebook. You can delete your account and I promise you won’t find yourself missing them.
Living rurally, the main thing I hear is “but marketplace”. It’s a pretty crucial way of getting cheap goods.
Honestly Marketplace is the best argument for FB today. How it has usurped Craigslist I don’t understand, maybe because it’s easier to navigate, but you’re right that it is the defacto modern market.
I don’t use it so I forget about it, but this is a good counterpoint.
Close, its never (or rarely) about cutting out bad habits.
Its about filling your life up with good habits.
Now go get a magic wand for your household. Edit: sharing is caring.
What’s frustrating about this “Your consumer habits are wrong, you should make them better” is that Twitter was (ostensibly) the space for the liberal intelligencia to go for journalism and debate and organizing until Elon Musk bought it.
Does anything stop a billionaire from buying up or shutting down the next social media platform? We can wax poetic about Lemmy/Mastadon as a decentralized and indie-operated environment. But crazy to think Joe Biden/Donald Trump can squash TikTok with a few swipes of the pen, that Feds can play wack-a-mole with ZArchive and Anna’s Archive and Wikileaks, etc, while insisting the main hosts for the most popular indie media sites are bulletproof.
Might as well tell people to stop using the internet entirely.
Ill defer to you.
Except lemme, ive had no social media for…3 years now.
In that time, ive taken up muay thai, gratitude practices, doestevesky, made more rl friends and started a new business.
From what little ive read, X/Twitter has never been for debate…but instead existed as a warzone.
Thoughts?
To me twitter started off as like how the facebook timeline used to be, people posted inane stuff about their day. The place for people to overshare. It was the evolution of early 2000s personal blogs now told in a daily stream of single sentence posts.
Then it became celebrity gossip and it continued to be that until celebrities got on and it became the text version of Instagram. As in it was a major advertising portal. Then the scammers/wellness/influencers came in (just like Instagram) and it became where people tried to get people on financial multi level marketing schemes and special pink salt that removes negative ions from your surroundings (that’s still advertising). Around that time Trump was a hot take artist on Twitter and managed to parlay that to the White House (he really worked the media well in 2015/2016 - Twitter was the ultimate guerilla advertising platform then). To that event, whatever good discourse was going on on Twitter was deep in obscurity by like 2012. It had been a culture warzone well before Musk bought it
Everything becoming a punchline, I associate that with twitter. Like no delays joking about sex trafficking and Diddy became a joke day one of his arrest. Joking like that became mainstream on twitter a long time ago
In that time, ive taken up muay thai, gratitude practices, doestevesky, and started a new business.
I mean, congratulations, I guess. I’m in Houston, so all of that just sounds like a ton of driving.
From what little ive read, X/Twitter has never been for debate…but instead existed as a warzone.
I’ve yet to hear of any bridges getting blown up because of a Tweet
Got a magic wand and can confirm, I spend a lot less time on my phone.
Thanks, Hitachi!
I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.
On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.
I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.
Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.
I agree with @wesker@lemmy.sdf.org in their comment. No one in real life is on twitter. Twitter is place that seems real because people on media convince themselves its real and give it substance.
No materially meaningful thing happens on twitter, and its perceived importance is a byproduct of media hyping it up.
Now meta… thats an altogether different beast. FB market place captured most of what used to happen on craiglist. Its how entire families organize and keep together.
In terms of analysis, I’m annoyed at Cohn here. This isn’t something we as individuals have control of. Her saying people individually have to make the difference is like saying you individually have to make the difference regarding climate change by making different choices, like recycling.
I get a lot of my business for my company from facebook marketplace and my facebook reviews. It enrages me that I have to use facebook to succeed, at least at this point in my business.
When I need to buy or sell anything for my farm activities, its pretty much the only game in town.
