@coffeegeek@flipboard.social
I'm not into social media in general, but I did join Mastodon recently in an effort to make new friends. It's fantastic! With no inscrutable central entity in control of the system it's... I don't know how to explain it. There's no algorithm.
As a side effect, now when I visit Youtube the recommendations seem to screech like the tabloid newspapers at the supermarket checkout line.
I don't understand this take at all. Do you use Twitter, or is this conjecture from reading headlines?
E: the article has a great list of reasons why they've dropped Twitter, it's well justified, I think it's unfair to accuse them out of hand of "virtue signalling" and being intellectually dishonest in light of that.
- the policy of suspending accounts that link to competitors like mastodon or threads - the secret throttling of traffic to sites with viewpoints that Musk doesn’t like (eg NYT, substack) - raising lawsuits against those who publish negative reports about Twitter (Ie the ADL) - trash talking former employees of Twitter - refusing to pay contractual severance packages of former employees of Twitter - the removal of headlines from external URLs (probably done to prevent users from clicking out of the app) - displaying ads that aren’t labeled as ads - using spammy low quality ad networks - putting even the most basic features of the API behind a paywall that starts at 100 USD a month - the subjective yet real change in atmosphere of Twitter. You don’t have to be around long to notice an increase in the number of trolls and toxic white supremacists who will jump into your threads.
The zeitgeist was already on the fence about whether they wanted any single company to have so much of their data. But Musk has made it pretty clear that his business and ego is more important than being a company that independent thinkers and conscious users want to be tied to.