Social-media researchers overemphasized the platform now called X for years. But now, as it rapidly changes into something new and frightening, we risk paying too little attention.
In the old days, there was a hierarchy of reputability. At the top you had the bluechecks that generally represented reputable sources of information, who had premium billing in the platform. Then you had the normies. Then you had the slush-pit of soft-blocked people that were shoved into the "other replies" box because everybody hated them and they only followed their network of bots.
Now, the hierarchy is reversed. The slush-pit people are now have blue-checks, the algorithmic boost on blue-checks is even stronger, and half of the old reputable blue-checks have left.
This is like saying "Reddit/Lemmy has always been awful" if we made the upvotes/downvotes of all the worst people on the site worth 100X what a normal person's upvote/downvote was worth. Yes, there have always been problems, but they can get worse.
You must not pay attention, I'm new to Lemmy, but Reddit's been garbage for years. Seems like a lot of that garbage made it's way to Lemmy too. Face it anything that you can hide behind a screen and a keyboard with relative anonymity is fucking shit. It outs people for the kind of person they REALLY are when they don't have to face the repercussions of saying shit to someones face.
This isn't pointed out enough, IMO. People act like it went sharply downhill under Musk but this is the platform that enabled extremists for years and only even banned Trump when he literally tried to overthrow democracy. Maybe Twitter was good in like 2010 but I really don't think Musk changed THAT much about it.
It's just because people are being TOLD that it's bad now. It's literally no worse than it was 5 years ago. Twitter has always been a cesspool of human "thought".
Twitter's influence has always been overstated by the media type, and the personalized recommendation algorithm it used has always been a black box to be gamed, and what this article really showed is that it is an inheritly unfair game and the people who writes the rules of the platform (in this case, Musk), can push whatever hot take they want to push to influence public opinion, and people who don't have that level of access to Twitter will brute force follower with bots in the hopes that it'll lure more real users to influence.
So, dead internet theory and all, until we fully automate Twitter to bots influencing bots. There is no authenticity anymore, it's all disinformation from all sides.
Nowadays, I like to pretend that I never had a Twitter or Insta. Not a healthy way of coping, I know, but it's way less stressful that way.
Didn't the mods say they were going to do something about musk/Twitter spam?
This isn't even about something Twitter did
This isn't even about something Twitter might do
This is just a dude talking about what everybody knows about Twitter. And musk fans upvote anything Twitter, and musk haters upvote this out of a sense of validation that is shit.
Voting is not good for this, please ban the musk spam
I've never used Twitter, nor liked it, but in 2010 I had to observe that it was indeed useful when it became one of the primary ways for people to communicate during the Arab Spring.
Since then I kept not being into it, but at least I thought it had some important value I had not seen.
Now it's all locked up, so it really has become useless (and I haven't even talked about the rampant disinformation)
The subhead is important in getting the gist of this article "study it now." Meaning the ridiculous amount of research on Twitter was dumb for awhile, but now that it's changing it might be worth looking at.
They also point out why it's not going to happen
Refocusing on studying X won’t be easy. It will require new methods and approaches that do not depend on the large amounts of data that were easily accessible before.
The API access was what made it so heavily studied and the current costs are why this change isn't going to be low hanging fruit for researchers to pump papers out on.