Great article with loads of reasons to take some time with Twitter (which I have typically avoided as being just another social media network)-- thanks for enlightening me!
To each their own is a good rule, but personally, I've never been a Twitter fan, ever since the beginning. I think it was a mistake for intelligent people to abandon forums for any form of social media.
A bit of background: I began working online in 1995, and built one of the first emailed newsletter services, which I later sold for a tidy sum to a big company. Then I spent years coding my own forum network and blog network platform software from scratch, and too many websites to ever possibly remember. Point being, I've had some time to think about all this.
Social media is great for the average person who wants to share photos of their dog and engage in random chit chat with friends and family. There's real value there, for those folks. But social media was specifically designed to discourage, and even prevent, the kind of in depth ongoing conversations that intelligent people, especially those who do it for a living, should be using the net for. I do have a Twitter account today, but only because Substack allows me to post links to my new articles on Twitter with exactly no effort. Same for Facebook.
I was hoping Musk might manage to kill Twitter with his incompetent drama queen antics, but that's probably a fantasy.
I know this isn't going to happen, but my dream would be replacing Twitter with a single discussion forum designed specifically for intelligent people. No ads. No algos. No wacko billionaires. No twerps and trolls. Invitation only. In depth conversations. I tried to build just such a place, but everyone is addicted to blasting out clever little tweets on their phone these days, so I faced reality, and let it go.
From my perspective, as far as intelligent dialog goes, the net is in a process of decline. I'm encouraged by Substack, and blog comments are a good compromise. But we already had the best platform for intelligent discussion, forums, and we threw it away.
What's coming in the future is that all social media content will be reduced to the word "me". But then people will complain that's too verbose, takes too much time to type and read, and is hard to submit from an Apple watch, so those two characters will be cut in half to the letter "I".
Great article with loads of reasons to take some time with Twitter (which I have typically avoided as being just another social media network)-- thanks for enlightening me!
Thanks for reading Karen. It’s getting cold up here in Maine and I’ll start up the Sunday shows soon.
To each their own is a good rule, but personally, I've never been a Twitter fan, ever since the beginning. I think it was a mistake for intelligent people to abandon forums for any form of social media.
A bit of background: I began working online in 1995, and built one of the first emailed newsletter services, which I later sold for a tidy sum to a big company. Then I spent years coding my own forum network and blog network platform software from scratch, and too many websites to ever possibly remember. Point being, I've had some time to think about all this.
Social media is great for the average person who wants to share photos of their dog and engage in random chit chat with friends and family. There's real value there, for those folks. But social media was specifically designed to discourage, and even prevent, the kind of in depth ongoing conversations that intelligent people, especially those who do it for a living, should be using the net for. I do have a Twitter account today, but only because Substack allows me to post links to my new articles on Twitter with exactly no effort. Same for Facebook.
I was hoping Musk might manage to kill Twitter with his incompetent drama queen antics, but that's probably a fantasy.
I know this isn't going to happen, but my dream would be replacing Twitter with a single discussion forum designed specifically for intelligent people. No ads. No algos. No wacko billionaires. No twerps and trolls. Invitation only. In depth conversations. I tried to build just such a place, but everyone is addicted to blasting out clever little tweets on their phone these days, so I faced reality, and let it go.
From my perspective, as far as intelligent dialog goes, the net is in a process of decline. I'm encouraged by Substack, and blog comments are a good compromise. But we already had the best platform for intelligent discussion, forums, and we threw it away.
What's coming in the future is that all social media content will be reduced to the word "me". But then people will complain that's too verbose, takes too much time to type and read, and is hard to submit from an Apple watch, so those two characters will be cut in half to the letter "I".