I'm genuinely curious: how so? I'm all for the idea of aligning moderation with the law of the land, but to be honest I'm not in-the-loop enough to know what people are upset about in the first place, except banning Trump I guess?
I can see how the Twitter UI kinda sucks in some ways, but it gets the job done. I'm fairly new to Twitter, and I'm pretty impressed at the level of participation from well-known individuals, and I'm also impressed with the ability to sniff out breaking news.
If the "broken" part of Twitter is people arguing all the time, how is that different from other corners of the internet?
Twitter being toxic is one flaw that would be very complicated to address, but I'm talking about flaws at the feature level.
The character limit in combination with a completely unusable threading system basically makes any non-trivial discussion impossible.
Reply counts are buggy, and make no sense. Notification counters are broken. There's obvious bot armies. Reporting doesn't really work. Verification is broken.
Discoverability for "common" users, the non-influencers, is a major problem. They're all basically tweeting to a wall.
I could go on, but can sum it up as Twitter being far less usable and robust than it can be.
Thanks for answering directly. I agree that Twitter's UI is not great for contextual reading (and therefore discussion), but I wonder if it might result in a greater diversity of content when browsing? A "better" UI might lead people down more rabbit holes and echo chambers.
I'm really just playing devil's advocate of course, but I do have a comparison to draw: Reddit and Slashdot. Reddit, which is heavily popularity-based, arguably has a friendlier UI, but Slashdot's, once you come to understand it, seems much better at avoiding landslides of groupthink.
My take on all these “fixes” for a “broken” Twitter is that pretty much everyone has a point of view of what is broken to them and frequently the fixes for solving them are contradictory. A lot of Twitter’s bugs for some set people are features for another.
Twitter will always have “problems” and most of them are impossible to solve in a global way that won’t leave a significant portion of their user base upset.
I’m intrigued in what changes Musk drives and their eventual effects but really don’t think he (or anyone) will have the ability to significantly move the needle in increasing Twitter’s perceived value.
The problem with Twitter (and Elon, this one is free) is that Tik Tok exists.
I'm serious.
Both are platforms that exist to connect a poster with an undefined (but hopefully as large as possible) audience.
Tik Tok does a very good job of giving audiences exactly what they want and nothing else. Twitter constantly forces audiences to see the content that the other side likes (even the replies to a tweet you do like may be content you don't like).
This causes the audience to be generally unsettled and somewhat cranky while using Twitter, which causes them to generally focus on the platform's problems and resent their usage of it much more than their usage of other social media.
It will be very hard to 'fix' that with 'free speech' but I welcome Elon's attempt.
>My take on all these “fixes” for a “broken” Twitter is that pretty much everyone has a point of view of what is broken to them and frequently the fixes for solving them are contradictory.
This is exactly right. This leads to a surface level consensus from all parties that Twitter is in some sense broken, without a consensus on what exactly that means.
I'm genuinely curious: how so? I'm all for the idea of aligning moderation with the law of the land, but to be honest I'm not in-the-loop enough to know what people are upset about in the first place, except banning Trump I guess?
I can see how the Twitter UI kinda sucks in some ways, but it gets the job done. I'm fairly new to Twitter, and I'm pretty impressed at the level of participation from well-known individuals, and I'm also impressed with the ability to sniff out breaking news.
If the "broken" part of Twitter is people arguing all the time, how is that different from other corners of the internet?