The New New Reading Environment

I think the world is fundamentally divided between people who want to be heard, and people who want to be right.

With all due respect to the editors of n+1, people who do well in media are almost always, with very few exceptions, of the former category.

Funny to read that only "hucksters and marks, the passive and the desperate" are still using twitter, only to be begged to tweet a quote from it in the middle. Who is the huckster and who is the mark here?

I don't deny people the right to hate Musk, but just speaking about Twitter specifically:

1) He is turning Twitter into exactly the kind of service that social media and privacy reformists have been asking for. Flipping the economic model from "user as product" back to "platform as product" is capitalism at its healthiest. The subscription model is the best way to monetize the platform without selling user data. You hate this? You prefer the model that drives the engagement economy that emotionally abuses and manipulates people, while selling them out?

2) His takeover turned over some rocks and rooted out a lot of bots and political manipulation/censorship. Yes, Twitter was more stable before, but it was also a walled garden controlled by mainstream media and government officials in an unethical manner.

3) Twitter is now a more ethically managed shithole that doesn't manipulate audiences for narrative alignment.

That means a lot of people who liked Twitter before, because it was censored and narrative-driven in their interests, now have to contend with the reality that not everyone agrees with them or likes them. That also means they are exposed to more of the toxicity that was always there.

4) They're open-sourcing the algorithm, which is absolutely what should have been done years ago for a communication tool that's so ingrained in political discussion in the West. It will get better at rooting out spam and garbage content with the help of community contributers, it just takes some time.

In my opinion, the author is essentially complaining about the growing pains of what real reform looks like. They don't want reform; they want censorship, manipulation, and privacy abuses.

I don't know if Twitter will survive this, but anyone serious about living in a healthy society should be rooting for their current management to succeed, or to at least inspire a better successor.