You know it already, it's all over the news: Elon Musk has bought Twitter for 44 billion dollars.
I think it's a good moment to pause and reflect:
Do I really want to spend so much of my time and attention there?
How much money is that anyway?
What does 44 billions mean?
How to we make sense of such huge numbers?
The World Food Program USA asks another interesting question: How Much Would It Cost to End World Hunger?
They did the maths and found out $40 billion each year would be needed to end world hunger by 2030. So one Twitter would be enough to solve World Hunger for 2023. See ma', Silicon Valley could really make the world a better place!
I'm not saying Elon Musk will do that. He obviously won't.
As Shakespare used to say: to twitt or not to twitt, that's the real question.
Spoiler alert: I dislike Twitter for both accidental and structural reasons.
Why I dislike Twitter as it Currently Exists
The accidental reason for which I dislike Twitter is that for me its leaders are morally bankrupt. And here I'm speaking about both the Elon guy and the people before him.
They have insisted enough already that their meaningless "free speech absolutism" bullshit justifies somehow - mostly by trusting their ideology over their lying eyes - not doing the work necessary to adress the needs of women & other habitual suspects being harassed every day, all day long, on their platforms.
Or even when they allow their engineers to do the hard but necessary work of detecting fascist propaganda, they enable it... but only in Germany 🤦🏻♂️
I'm just scratching the surface here, if you want to know more, I highly recommend Mike Monteiro's book Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It.
Why a Twitter-like Service Wouldn't Work For Me
There is also an essential reason why I dislike Twitter.
At my worst, I am what Germans call Besserwisser and what xkcd readers call this dude:
So what happens when lots of people like me share an endless feed, designed by psychopaths for "engagement" over meaningful communication, on all polemical topics of the day, all day long, every day, forever?
Right, that cannot possibly end well.
Conclusion
My advice is to give up.
Latest comments (72)
I am pretty much distracted by the fact of the amount paid for twitter, or what you can do with the same money. It's like this: we humans have the power and the capital (alltogether) to fix the hunger problem, so why point just at one man? We should do it as humans. Don't point at others, point at yourself!
I gave the wrong impression that it was all of Elon Musk's fault. What I actually think is that Twitter was bad and in particular bad for me long before Elon Musk came along. The change was merely a good occasion to pause and reflect.
I don't think Twitter will change for the better now on the other hand, but I have compassion for Elon Musk who is clearly a Twitter addict just like I was. I hope he can log out of Twitter and spend more time with his 8 children.
You can't force others to think the same way you do ;-)
Lucky us, we found a way to get out of the loophole :-)
This sounds personal :) Twitter is not a root cause of your time wasting, but a lack of discipline. Invest in some good books
That's like saying alcohol and tobacco addiction has nothing to do with big companies making lots of money and lobbying against changes to their business model.
Of course addiction is also personal. It is always personal.
I think this is a great time to join Twitter. Elon should be able to remove the toxicity it has always suffered from, and the restrictions on free speech.
Can you explain why you mean exactly by "free speech" and whether that justifies for example women being harassed all day long on the platform?
If you invite someone at your home and he behaves like a jerk, do you encourage him because of free speech something?
I've never understood the phenomenon of Twitter. People told me to create an account in order to follow updates from tech providers/advocates and such, but I find newsletters to be better.
I think Twitter is a tool of sharing your emotions, but I think people started to treat it as some kind of source of truth. I hear tweets being cited in news, quoted in articles, used to accuse people... I think I am not ready to treat such platforms as anything more than entertainment...
I can try to shed of lights - keeping in mind that I hate Twitter the way an ex tobacco addict hates tobacco
The thing is, depending on your personality traits, Twitter can be genuinely super addictive
I also own the Hooked book by Nir Eyal and I always wondered why nobody clearly identified this concept. as sociopathic by design to the core. This always remembers me that there are people who think, this whole world is s huge Skinner-box and we are all little rats that beg for treats.
Note, that I still somewhat-actively use Twitter but I only follow tech related things and don't get involved with discussions. Maybe I am ignorant but on the other side that's also a consequence of the design
It is sociopathic indeed.
Beware that depending on how you do it, consuming social media without participating in it can even worse for your mental health than being fully into it.
Seems your tech skills are far superior to your understanding of history. Fascism is about censoring the opposition. Elon Musk plans to stop censoring on Twitter (moving away from fascism). Fascism is from the left (people argue whether Woodroe Wilson or Benito Mussolini was it's real father ... but bother were far left). Mussolini downgraded from Marxism to Socialism to partner with socialist Adolf Hitler. They controlled the media and all info. Compare this to a conservative speaker trying to speak on a college campus. In the 60s and 70s .. when colleges were filled with liberals ... the conservatives would have been invited to speak as a good liberal listens to the opposition and then calmly picks apart their arguments. Today's colleges are filled with progressives (not at all to be confused with liberals) who censor, burn, and shout down ... which are all fascist tactics to prevent the opposition from speaking. So stick to the tech as your belief in the new white-washed history is not becoming.
no
Please enlighten me, what kind of authors and books would you recommend so that I can better understand fascism?
Umberto Eco? Zeev Sternell? Raymond Aron? Elie Wiesel? Hannah Arendt?
Well, its leaders indeed were morally bankrupt, now thank the stars that African-American billionaire kicked them out.
And I can still skip what I don't like (though I still prefer to remain open to different opinions).
Did you speak out against Twitter the past 6+ years they've been shadow banning and outright banning anyone who spoke out against the Government/Billionaire/Corporate complex that is destroying and enslaving the world? Or is is only when the pedo loving, government boot lickers who run Twitter's censorship board are replaced by someone who might actually provide a balanced platform to allow free speech to return to Twitter do you post your article? Come on, be honest. Provide a link where you articulated a similar complaint before this one. Otherwise, you are exposed as nothing other than a fraud.
I thought people would say I'm too critical against Twitter so I'm glad you criticize me from the other side.
My general solution if Twitter, Facebook and stuff have too much power[1] and use it badly would be to divide them in 42 smaller entities that would still individually have flaws, but you would have checks and balances because the problems caused by one mini-twitter will be limited by the strength of another mini twitter.
[1] And to be clear, I absolutely believe that Twitter does indeed have too much power.
Look up #DHSLeaks to see what the previous owners of twitter and facebook where up to. Elon hasn’t even had time to do a code review let lone change anything for better or worse.
https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1587142804429410304?s=46&t=8XI_Jq3YjvqOKNATmIh3yQ
https://twitter.com/drelidavid/status/1454475769200185349?s=46&t=MyRC_0dfxz31iXjgssdiGg
I met a lot of good friends through twitter in the 10 years since I started my account, but the last few years have had a lot of decisions that negatively impacted UX and made it more trouble than its worth.
I'll see you on Twitter.
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