Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.
Either way, I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the Office series!
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Why can’t you? There’s a logical leap in this statement I don’t follow.
When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc.
Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography.
I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users.
When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization.
In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat.
I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.
> when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it
And because it's private now, we have no idea what its financial situation is. My expectation is that they're much worse off financially since Musk's acquisition, even after shedding most of the staff.
A lot of people I know predicted Twitter would be completely shut down within a year of Musk's acquisition. I wasn't quite so quick to agree, but I think we're still going to get there eventually unless Musk drastically changes course.
As one of those people, I'm definitely eating crow. Three things happened that bode well for Twitter's future:
1. Musk has attracted a loyal core of true believers that think he has saved free speech with the Twitter purchase.
2. The Overton window of online discussion has started moving right. In particular, companies are becoming less interested in toeing a left ideological line with their ad spending.
3. A bunch of people who hate X and hate Musk and his politics stayed on Twitter! To me this is most surprising of all, but perhaps shouldn't be because many of these same people posted to Twitter in the past while simultaneously calling it things like "the hellsite"[1].
I'm no longer sure we'll ever "get there" other than if a new paradigm marginalizes all of social media the way social media marginalized blogging.