Amid Twitter Chaos, Japanese Illustrators Flock to Weibo
sixthtone.com
sixthtone.com
Misskey.io has been suffering from downtime and struggling amidst it's massive growth in users. It's now one of the largest instances in the Fediverse I believe.
Nowadays misskey.io may be gaining some more popularity than pawoo, in part due to the interface and in part because pawoo is a bit of a mess in terms of moderation, lots of creeps there openly expressing their illegal sexual interests.
I don't really know exactly what makes Misskey more popular now: I doubt Japanese users are that concerned about the content moderation on Pawoo, though I could be wrong. It may help that Misskey was developed by a Japanese developer and is prevalently Japanese-first.
Misskey does have some neat features, though personally I find the interface to be dizzying and very busy.
I'm referring to creeps announcing in their bios that they're into real children (with them emphasizing the "real" part) and talking about what they want to do with them.
My japanese isn't good enough to tell if the situation with that sort of thing is bad on Misskey.io, but with Pawoo I think it gained enough of a reputation for it that there are a lot of english speaking creeps like that there.
There are other things, too. Pawoo is still somewhat integrated with Pixiv, but I believe they sold it to Russel in 2018 or so (can't recall) off the news of new Japanese regulation regarding social media that they did not want to be involved in. This seemed to be a huge blow as well.
Then there's the fact that for Japanese sites, moderating English-language comments is very hard. The rules and moderation standards would ideally be kept consistent between languages, but this requires somehow both good communication with moderators and also moderators that speak fluent English. I doubt there is much proactive moderation of English content on Pixiv/Pawoo/Misskey/etc., and the majority of it is probably mostly ignored by Japanese users of the platform anyway. It's not like Twitter isn't full of a lot of the same stuff, especially since Twitter suspensions are treated as a joke or at worst annoyance by the majority of the userbase. (And honestly, it is also unclear to me that Japanese users would overwhelmingly be in favor of moderating text comments that express illicit interests anyway, so as long as the text itself isn't somehow illicit. This could be a blatant mischaracterization but they seem to err on the side of less restrictions to speech in general when it's in the gray area.)
There are indeed some Japanese illustrator getting an Weibo account because:
1) They want to tackle the Chinese market and serve Chinese fans. Getting an Weibo account is a pretty legitimate way to do this, but I don't see they abandoning their original Twitter, Pawoo, Pixiv things; that doesn't make sense. Also... the Chinese market is quite sensitive. Once someone—anyone—finds out something you drew several years ago can remotely be interpreted as insulting China[1], or someone doesn't like what you're doing today in Japan and interprets that as insulting China[2], you're done there.
2) Pirate account opened by Chinese fans, used for storing unlicensed contents of the original illustrators. Although this seems to be against Chinese laws, in practice, the original author/illustrator can't do anything about it.
[1] The most famous example must be Winnie the Pooh...
What is alarming, at least to me, is that the motive of users jumping is better freedom of speech offered in Weibo compared to Facebook/Instagram or Twitter - users are fleeing into the last communist regime on Earth, for FREEDOM! There is something completely wrong about current Web.
On a side note, I've never been able to access content on Weibo at all (including those mentioned in the article). Links go to some looping Sina Visitor System.
The question is how many of each group are there? I suspect that many more are leaving than joining.
"Local man changes toothpaste, signalling six more weeks before collapse of empire."
For example, muted terms stay muted and the “For you” TL is actually relevant. I think these gains are structural improvements gained by slimming down and removing advertiser-driven garbage.
Seems pretty good for a first step but the core problems moderation and curation remain. I’m not sure I see a good path forward on these points given the current posture of the company. That’s probably why exodus events like this one will continue to build over time.
All of the bluecheckmark replies that get sorted to the top of every post are a form of "advertiser" driven garbage. Those garbage tweets are being put in front of you because someone paid $8 /month for it.
Is it OF people replying specifically to military/geopolitical threads (and if so, in ways that at least act relevant or just off-topic spamming?), or is it just their posts getting shoved to the top of the feed because they paid?
Even in the improbable non-spam explanation that they are sincerely interested and responding to the content, it is hilarious how they are consistently the featured content in an area that they clearly have no expertise in.
The threads, in order, are typically like:
- post by professional military analyst with 30 years of experience
- 10 replies by OF creators that pay for Blue
- 100 replies by other analysts and military hobbyists that didn't pay for Blue
Getting bombarded by Onlyfans types and crypto types has increased manyfold in the last few months.
Blue check promotion moves the dumbest, coldest takes anyone has ever written right to the top of the thread.
Even though Elon may not have had typical private equity goals in mind when buying Twitter, it does feel like a classic PE purchase where it has already been decided that the target is not worth investing in, and the new game is to wring as much value as possible from its walking corpse before tossing it in the trash.
No, my experience has been pretty much the worse of my time on that platform (a bit less than your period) including tweets that I follow only showing on the 'For You' tabs (because the site is obviously overloaded)
Most posts I see now are flooded with replies from Only Fans girls. There are constantly tweets in my feed from guys I don't follow with greek or roman statue profile pics, posting about how western civilisation is in decline with 20-photo threads of European architecture or other really silly examples. Half of the promoted tweets I see (a significant portion of my feed now) are for "10 ways you need to us AI or be left behind!" or similar.
It's really low signal to noise for me, but I guess if you're looking for listicles on why western culture has been ruined by "cultural marxism" it's never been a better time to be on Twitter.
Examples:
- I encounter numerous account like this per day on my "For you" tab: https://twitter.com/aitoolreport/status/1671606160313696256
- this sort of thing is constantly in my feed (I don't follow these sort of meme accounts, but I can see why the algorithm might boost them now ): https://twitter.com/engineers_feed/status/167623162488173773...
I've noticed that and I wonder what their agenda is. To radicalize western men?
https://intellectualtakeout.org/2016/04/are-we-the-last-men/
Which is part of Charlemagne Institute
https://charlemagneinstitute.org/intellectual-takeout/
Which is Koch Brothers backed
1. Edgy flame bait hot takes on an issue that will get people worked up
2. Someone saying something slightly wrong because they'll get more comments from people rushing to correct them
3. Professional quote-tweeters who will post a maybe witty take on #1 or #2
(maybe this is 99% of social media in general?)
There's still some alpha in the posts and I love the random accounts which drop info and niche insights faster than you can find anywhere else.
Outside of that, it feels more like I'm wasting time on nonsense. I'm not much of a fan of the alternatives, though and mainly use them to track a few people who moved off of Twitter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Tone
Sixth Tone is a state-owned English-language online magazine published by Shanghai United Media Group.
...
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Foreign Policy stated that Sixth Tone has a less staid and "saccharine" tone compared to many other English-language publications from China. She stated, "If webby U.S. media startup Vox were acquired by the Chinese Communist Party, it might resemble Sixth Tone".
Went digging a bit, and there seem to be at least some state ownership of Weibo through the China Internet Investment Fund [1]. Corporate structure and ownership in the PRC is far outside my area of expertise though.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Internet_Investment_Fund
> maybe there was a bigger migration to other platforms?
The article isn't at any point making the claim that all users are moving to Weibo.
It specifically mentions an identifiable set of artists, and then speaks about their experiences having migrated.
That's it
Are you claiming those facts or the reporting around them are in some way inaccurate?
Frankly, you seem to be looking for controversy where there is none. I'm as concerned about the behaviour of the CCP as anyone (and as an aside, the total disappearance of the Uighur story in the media is extremely concerning to me) but there's a point where it starts to veer into sinophobia.
If that is the level of conversation you seek, I will stay out of your conversations. I was happy to learn something about state-owned news outlets, thought the article was perhaps overstating things a bit by using “flocking” for ~20 illustrators, and also found the overall tone of the article to be oddly celebrant as opposed to factual. Make of that what you will and I will try stay clear of you from now on.
Twitter went from free rss feeds available for every microblog(twitter account) to paywalling access if you'd like to see whats new at a glance on several microblogs at once.
Fediverse's mastadon and tootdeck have no problem with allowing to browse and follow along multiple people's accounts and many fediverse instances have rss feeds as well, they have been doing it right for years.
The new tweetdeck is an inferior experience with even more frontend bloat, the old tweetdeck even worked on old and lightweight browers.
I pretty much haven't visited twitter once since the rate limits, and unless access to tweets change drastically, probably will never come back. While I'm using rssbridges as a stopgap, I'll be migrating to other ways to follow people's work where ever possible. It was nice seeing progress and updates on twitter, and I am hoping more people will move to other methods to post statuses.
I then switched to Ivory and it is very much like having twitter of old back - a single chronological feed of people I follow without the involvement of any algorithms. I know that the federated bits are there, but they have very little obvious impact on my experience.
I thing only killer feature is a more controlled way to feed actually active posts into my home feed. Instances already have enough information to do this, it's just a matter of figuring out a good scheme for it.
That said, the article is talking about 20 people who switched from Twitter. That’s not very many.
* add ominous movie soundtrack *
Twitter (as a useful platform) is over.
Looks like Twitter is just easy to bash nowadays, I'm not that a big user but I see, especially in the OSS / computer related profiles a lot of people putting their Mastodon address in the nickname and yet still tweeting, retweeting, liking in the same compulsory manner as they did before.
Most of them don't like Mastodon either due to not liking defederation drama, but instead they moved their socializing to Discord and Instagram, with a few chomping at the bit to get into BlueSky.
For what it's worth, this is a trend I observed long before Twitter introduced rate-limiting and the login gate, it just made it much worse. Ironically, clicking through on Twitter links other people posted was the one use case I ever visited the site for, and now that that doesn't work I simply rely on the vxtwitter summary or a screenshot.
But now they blocked checking things when not logged in, inertia has set in and I cannot even bothered to make the effort and don't feel like I've lost anything. Even for those accounts I followed.
I just think of paid blue checks spouting off nonsense while paying to do so and think to myself: "No ... that's not the bullshit I want to consume. I preferred the relatively democratic bullshit from before"
... and then I think: "Let's just cut the bullshit"
It is a shame, as it was entertaining.
Hasn't answered yet.
One example: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/im-nobody-calls-employer-elon...
Another: https://nypost.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-says-terms-like-cisg...
Meanwhile, besides its stability issues, there's the new problem that the top replies to every popular tweet are... well, pretty awful, because they're chosen by blue-check instead of popularity. That's a huge downturn in reading enjoyment.
Adam Schiff putting his fingers on the scale is something I’m not interested in either.
it's still very blatantly 'censored', just with different ideological front shouting about it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-...
And the story about the guy criticising Tesla who had their account suspended.
> At least 20 Japanese illustrators have launched profiles on Weibo since Elon Musk announced reading limits for Twitter users on Saturday.
You just can't take this article seriously. That's not even a blip in twitter's user base.
I also find it interesting that they are turning to Weibo, as this was a pending question. A lot of other mainstream artists started or repromoted their official Instagram account (I don't think there's serious surveys out there. Out of the 100+ I follow about half had comments on thinking of it as a backup plan), but for the artists that don't match Meta's rules the only other obvious choice was mastodon, and in Japan they already got burned a first time with Pawoo and the earlier mastodon boom.
Ever heard of the term "network effect"?
This alleged 'exodus' will be no different.
Even if Twitter goes down, it's users would rather wait for it to get back up than to 'leave' Twitter for something worse. The same is also true with Instagram.
Centralized platforms are much stickier with user retention. Significantly smaller sized or federated networks? Not so much. Which is why you always see an initial spike but retention always drops sharply.
Twitter is dramatically less relevant today than it was 7 months ago. Musk can post made-up stats claiming the most engagement ever [1], but across multiple industries the importance of Twitter has completely collapsed. In many cases it isn't being replaced by anything similar.
You are absolutely correct that there is a huge amount of stickiness. That's why Elon paid $44B for it. It would take some catastrophic mismanagement to truly kill the site, and Elon seems to be committed to doing that.
[1] Which will be intermixed with complaints about the bot problem, DDOS crawling, etc.
Which is more or less what you'd expect; that's what normally happens to dying social networks. Most people leaving LiveJournal didn't go to Dreamwidth or similar (ie Livejournal clones); they went to Twitter or Tumblr or other not particularly LiveJournal-like things. I think it's actually fairly plausible now that Threads acts as a drop-in replacement for Twitter, but it's also plausible that it's Twitter's Dreamwidth, and most users go to different sorts of social networks entirely.
Most of the people talking about Mastodon and other alternatives tweeting always seem to keep tweeting though. At least when I deleted my FB account I never went back. I didn't stick around to post on FB about how much I hated FB.