Twitter was great and I think anyone who thinks otherwise either curated it to be awful or didn’t really use it at all. Your Twitter experience was defined by who you followed. There was sports Twitter, political Twitter, science Twitter, weird Twitter…there were thousands of different spheres to put yourself in.
If you followed political accounts…yeah you set yourself up for a toxic experience. But I followed funny people so my experience was great. A seemingly endless series of one liners, comics, and weird observations.
I think anyone who thinks otherwise either curated it to be awful or didn’t really use it at all.
. . . or was targeted by harassment campaigns that the company did a poor job of protecting against. Plenty of celebrities and political actors realized they could weaponize their fanbases to go after critics, and Twitter never did much to stop it. For public officials or organizations, twitter too often was a cesspool of abuse that they couldn’t afford to leave, and that was messed up. (I think the balance has shifted now, that they can afford to leave and have a moral obligation to do so, but many haven’t.)
I always enjoyed my twitter experiences, because like you, I curated a nice feed to follow (and used a browser to keep on chronological timeline). But I was just a follower, mostly, and was never targeted by the really nasty stuff. But I’m not so myopic as to declare that what worked for me wasn’t awful for many other folks.
It got worse but it didn’t become a truly toxic cesspool until Elmo bought it.
It’s not like the majority of the site was toxic, either. It was THE site for science, comedy, music, and a bunch of other interests until recently. It’s like picking a couple shitty instances/communities we have here and declaring the entirety of the fediverse a toxic cesspool.
That’s what I’m getting at. The site itself was pure poison, but the logo, the term “tweet” was literally genius.
Twitter was great and I think anyone who thinks otherwise either curated it to be awful or didn’t really use it at all. Your Twitter experience was defined by who you followed. There was sports Twitter, political Twitter, science Twitter, weird Twitter…there were thousands of different spheres to put yourself in.
If you followed political accounts…yeah you set yourself up for a toxic experience. But I followed funny people so my experience was great. A seemingly endless series of one liners, comics, and weird observations.
. . . or was targeted by harassment campaigns that the company did a poor job of protecting against. Plenty of celebrities and political actors realized they could weaponize their fanbases to go after critics, and Twitter never did much to stop it. For public officials or organizations, twitter too often was a cesspool of abuse that they couldn’t afford to leave, and that was messed up. (I think the balance has shifted now, that they can afford to leave and have a moral obligation to do so, but many haven’t.)
I always enjoyed my twitter experiences, because like you, I curated a nice feed to follow (and used a browser to keep on chronological timeline). But I was just a follower, mostly, and was never targeted by the really nasty stuff. But I’m not so myopic as to declare that what worked for me wasn’t awful for many other folks.
Twitter was no worse in that regard than any social media site until the 2016 election.
2016 was 8 years ago, that means by your definition twitter spent nearly half it’s existence as a toxic cesspool
It got worse but it didn’t become a truly toxic cesspool until Elmo bought it.
It’s not like the majority of the site was toxic, either. It was THE site for science, comedy, music, and a bunch of other interests until recently. It’s like picking a couple shitty instances/communities we have here and declaring the entirety of the fediverse a toxic cesspool.