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"They need us. We don't need them:" The fall of Twitter is making the trolls and grifters desperate (www.salon.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 477 points 3 years ago (4 children)

It's a tech company that is burning itself to a ground. Hard to take your eyes off of a slow moving car crash.

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  • [–] 99 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and watch platforms combust due to their own arrogance.

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  • [–] 52 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    We'll save you a seat, but you'll need to bring your own popcorn.

    Anyway I'm glad this shitshow happened because it was a much needed boost for federated software like Lemmy.

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  • [–] 25 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    These were weeks where decades happened.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    And remind ourselves that it find very easily happen to the fediverse! All it takes is mass defederation, some vulnerability, anything ego driven.. humans still run this platform and it wouldn't take much to bring it down.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    the Fediverse is growing, but still small. If anything (as much as I'm personally enjoying it) at this stage of growth, it would be still statistically likely to fade to irrelevance in a few years, so it would not even be big news. Seeing a couple of the Big Socials being dismantled this way at the same time is... something else. I'm getting tired too of all this coverage about Twitter and Reddit and start wishing Lemmy had filtering by keyword, but rationally I know it's granted.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I believe some of the apps do have keyword filtering, but idk which ones.

    Might be worth looking into if it’s something you want to avoid.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    thanks, I was starting to look into some of the apps, but so far I haven't found one that works better for me (on Android) than the mobile web version. I have never looked specifically into keyword filtering though.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 years ago

    I definitely can't log on without hearing about how any even remotely popular instance is actively working to create an echo chamber for the right by defederating anything that might even consider allowing a community to the left of centrist dems.

    I think, given what I've seen so far, is that there's going to basically be faschie status quo lemmy and then everyone else lemmy.

    Because capitalism is so great and superior if you let it's adherents so much as think there's literally any other option it all crumbles to dust immediately 😂

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  • [–] 50 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Never understood why we call them tech companies to be honest. There is nothing technologically interesting at twitter. And if there is... it is never the subject.

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  • [–] 30 points 3 years ago

    So I think the main thing is scale—they're tech companies (in the category they're in) because of the engineering required to build & maintain something that operates at the scale they do

    And IMO at least in the early years it was pretty impressive what Twitter was capable of in terms of technology.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I'm still waiting for any article that talks about the tech that Twitter is supposed to be so famous for.

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  • [–] 30 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    What Twitter did well I think was handle the non-trvial problems of scale, and did a fairly credible job of content moderation. I can find fault with a lot of how they handled that but they did honestly try. Becoming the dominant platform is always largely luck, but had they not adequately handled scale and content they would not have lasted for so long. Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.

    Twitter like it or not has been pivotal for connecting people around the world especially those with less developed infrastructure. The Arab Spring events would not have happened without it. Which is why I think the Saudis were happy to give Elon money. They knew he'd either make it more friendly for them, or kill it and they'd have a hold on him because of the money he owes.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    Content moderation is a people, process, and technology problem.

    Their content filtering/categorisation was also quite good. They're one of the few sites I can think of that had a bit more clarification than a basic "NSFW/Sensitive Content" tag, even if it came rather late, so if something was marked correctly, you could get an idea of what kind of NSFW content it was, without unblurring the image.

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