I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with this article. On one hand, I subscribe to many different news sources and believe that people should support quality journalism. On the other hand, the...
Exemplary
I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with this article.
On one hand, I subscribe to many different news sources and believe that people should support quality journalism.
On the other hand, the source I most often see cited on the internet (and by extension, though usually uncited, in real life) is some random Twitter post rather than an actual credible source.
I am a fan of the way that The Corespondent/De Correspondent does it. Any link posted or shared is permanently free. I can browse their website and copy the URL from my address bar if I want to share it and know that my recipient will be able to read it. However, if you wish to browse their website for yourself, they require a subscription. They also have no advertisements.
I’m not a fan of the microtransaction solution that the article cites, and that I’ve seen floated around here. You aren’t going to pay for an article that someone else cites if you disagree with them, and you aren’t going to know if it’s worth paying for either. I’ve opened up some articles that I expected to be in-depth and it was three paragraphs (typically a developing story).
I also don’t really see why this is particularly relevant now. The social media platforms that have existed learn your behavior and will create the echo chamber of disinformation for you if you want and even when it wasn’t a matter of following disinformation, like I said, people took Twitter as their source.
I’m definitely game for news sources to drop the paywall, maybe promote an ad-free experience w/ their subscription (though many sites rely on subscription+ads, I’m willing to pay extra).
I think The New York Times is in a pretty good position to experiment. They have NYT Games, The Athletic, Times Cooking, Audm, and Wirecutter. I’m curious how many subscriptions they would retain if they freed the news and kept the rest paywalled (they could even keep certain sections paywalled, such as their subscriber-only newsletters).
The main thing that concerns me is the fact that many news organizations have been going bankrupt or are close (WaPo, Vice, The Corespondent (not De Corespondent), Buzzfeed News (not the rag)). Maybe experimenting is just what some of them need, but I don’t think most are in a position to do that.
Yes. But the disappearance of original sources has been a problem for decades. It started when Craigslist appeared, which took the main source of income (personal ads) away from local newspapers....
On the other hand, the source I most often see cited on the internet (and by extension, though usually uncited, in real life) is some random Twitter post rather than an actual credible source.
Yes.
But the disappearance of original sources has been a problem for decades. It started when Craigslist appeared, which took the main source of income (personal ads) away from local newspapers. The situation got worse as the internet replaced printed newspaper. Most news orgs were unable to figure out a way to make money from websites and they basically collapsed.
Twitter has always been a net negative for society. There were a handful of people who did actual investigative journalism, and would report their work through twitter because it was basically a free platform for doing this. But this tiny ray of light was always overwhelmed by the huge volume of nonsense and intentional disinformation. For some reason there’s always money to create an infrastructure to spread disinformation rather than truth.
It's just so much easier to create misinformation than it is to disprove informational or put out quality good information. It's kind of like headphones(I'm now realizing I will have to start...
For some reason there’s always money to create an infrastructure to spread disinformation rather than truth.
It's just so much easier to create misinformation than it is to disprove informational or put out quality good information.
It's kind of like headphones(I'm now realizing I will have to start specifying old headphones... eith cables). There's only one way for them to be neatly folded. There's almost unlimited ways for it to be a tangled mess. It'll inevitably end up that way in your pocket if you don't do anything to stop it.
It's not a perfect analogy but I think it kinda gets there
Usually a publication is paywalled before I can even assess if their quality is worth the subscription they're begging for. I'd rather pay $1 for a day of access, or 30c to view a single article...
Usually a publication is paywalled before I can even assess if their quality is worth the subscription they're begging for.
I'd rather pay $1 for a day of access, or 30c to view a single article I'm genuinely interested in.
I imagine for so many businesses, what's daunting is erasing/removing Twitter. It's been built into so much infrastructure and used as a primary communication channel for so long. Hell, US policy...
I imagine for so many businesses, what's daunting is erasing/removing Twitter. It's been built into so much infrastructure and used as a primary communication channel for so long. Hell, US policy has been announced via Twitter and such. And not to mention there isn't a good replacement yet.
There was a panic when a Dutch fire brigade sent out an alert directing people to Twitter when you suddenly needed a Twitter account, since then it forced a lot of change to an existing website...
There was a panic when a Dutch fire brigade sent out an alert directing people to Twitter when you suddenly needed a Twitter account, since then it forced a lot of change to an existing website and the gov spun up a mastodon instance to reduce their reliability on Twitter.
There are alternatives but they require some force. By forcing people to go to the government owned Mastodon it creates the replqcement by virtue of existing.
News sites I think need to make better use of the 80/20 rule, that 80 percent of your income comes from 20 percent of your customers. Offer access to events, talks, exclusive newsletters that are...
News sites I think need to make better use of the 80/20 rule, that 80 percent of your income comes from 20 percent of your customers. Offer access to events, talks, exclusive newsletters that are all in all only a marginal value add at a significant premium to the regular subscription. Use this revenue to subsidize the main subscription and support the business.
I just want the people who are all anti-twitter to actually stop using twitter. I am not even on twitter but I've seen about 45 different tweets within the past couple of days about how twitter is...
I just want the people who are all anti-twitter to actually stop using twitter. I am not even on twitter but I've seen about 45 different tweets within the past couple of days about how twitter is paying right-wing influencers for their content on twitter.
Yet, all these people complaining about it are just refusing to leave twitter.
People love to complain, but Twitter's too ingrained in their lives to just give up. Prisoners probably complain about prison food all the time too, but it's not like they can just stop eating...
People love to complain, but Twitter's too ingrained in their lives to just give up.
Prisoners probably complain about prison food all the time too, but it's not like they can just stop eating without starving to death. I think for a lot of people, dropping off Twitter (and/or Facebook) would be equivalent to dropping off the face of the Earth since it's the only way a lot of friends and families bother to stay in touch with one another.
Hell, losing reddit was one of those moments for me. I've lost a lot of awareness of things going on in the world. That said, it hasn't really measurably impacted my life. I'm missing a lot of...
Hell, losing reddit was one of those moments for me. I've lost a lot of awareness of things going on in the world.
That said, it hasn't really measurably impacted my life. I'm missing a lot of discourse around hobbies and news, which while making me worldly and stuff, doesn't really improve my life in any way.
It's strange, I thought I would lose a lot of awareness by cutting out reddit, but it turns out that's not really the case. I just spend more time actively looking for information that's more...
It's strange, I thought I would lose a lot of awareness by cutting out reddit, but it turns out that's not really the case. I just spend more time actively looking for information that's more relevant to me, instead of scrolling through tons of noise that's stimulating but not immediately useful. It turned out to be a really good thing for me.
I was already tapering off of Reddit before the third party apocalypse so I haven't noticed much different. People post music and movie news here which is all I care about news-wise so I'm...
I was already tapering off of Reddit before the third party apocalypse so I haven't noticed much different. People post music and movie news here which is all I care about news-wise so I'm content. Plus this is a much better vibe and community here so I see it as a massive upgrade myself.
Too much info and negativity is never good for us. Conversation and politeness here is a most welcome change overall.
I mean, I can go to Crinacle for headphones, there's a few RC web forums, and plenty of larger interests have other fall backs but where do you go for defense themed shit posts? There was a lot of...
I mean, I can go to Crinacle for headphones, there's a few RC web forums, and plenty of larger interests have other fall backs but where do you go for defense themed shit posts? There was a lot of informational takes underneath all the naked tanks and stuff.
Yes, the positivity of tildes is certainly a boon but I do have a dark side that craves a little 4chan lite every now and then. Can't bring myself to go back to 4chan though...
Eh, I wasn't sure I'd be able to cut reddit cause it was really ingrained in my life. I at least managed to severely cut it to only one subreddit and only if I'm on the computer. It took a while...
Eh, I wasn't sure I'd be able to cut reddit cause it was really ingrained in my life. I at least managed to severely cut it to only one subreddit and only if I'm on the computer. It took a while but now it feels normal to me. Yeah, there would be some adjustment but one can give up a social media (even one that is really ingrained) if they try hard enough. One thing I suggest is finding alternatives. THey won't be the same thing (for me I found tildes and squabbles) but they'll help you during the adjustment. Hell, Zuckerberg now has an alternative now (if you're not like me and disliek facebook/zuckerberg. But I admit in a fight between Zuck and Musk I'd cheer Zuck but mostly cause he seems more competent, not cause I like him any better).
(to be fair though, the real test of how long I stay away from Reddit is when either Starfield (the subreddit I made an exception for) has enough new info to not be all the same posts or some other game I really get into and I want to go chat away with other fans).
For a lot of people Twitter is part of their job, especially the journalists who write all these pieces complaining about Twitter! Less comparable than just casual reddit use, I think
For a lot of people Twitter is part of their job, especially the journalists who write all these pieces complaining about Twitter! Less comparable than just casual reddit use, I think
Yeah.. I mean I don't care about twitter and I dislike Musk so I'm loving the schaudenfraude, but if you dislike what they are doing and are on it, you are just enabling them. I mean I managed to...
Yeah.. I mean I don't care about twitter and I dislike Musk so I'm loving the schaudenfraude, but if you dislike what they are doing and are on it, you are just enabling them.
I mean I managed to cut my reddit use at least to only one subreddit and only when I'm on the computer. No, it's not cutting it entirely but trust me, it's mostly cutting it out of my life. And while I missed it for a it I'm starting to get used to it. Yeah, it is painful but after a while it becomes normal and people would stop missing twitter.
Schadenfraude is when you commit fraud at the expense of others. It fell out of use immediately after being coined because people realized that's just normal fraud.
Schadenfraude is when you commit fraud at the expense of others. It fell out of use immediately after being coined because people realized that's just normal fraud.
I have never understood the appeal of Twitter, Mastodon, and now Threads and to a much smaller extent Squabbles. I’m not a fan of the on the nose yelling into the void type of media that these...
I have never understood the appeal of Twitter, Mastodon, and now Threads and to a much smaller extent Squabbles. I’m not a fan of the on the nose yelling into the void type of media that these social media sites offer, and I don’t see the entertainment value in it either.
A lot of the appeal was/is access. Some examples that come to mind in a world without (or before) twitter: Public figures and politicians had to rely on press releases (or the like), which had to...
A lot of the appeal was/is access. Some examples that come to mind in a world without (or before) twitter:
Public figures and politicians had to rely on press releases (or the like), which had to trickle through brick-and-mortar gatekeepers, to disseminate news to the public. It was slow, expensive, and subject to the editorial whims of those who ultimately reached the audience.
Individual journalists had to either maintain a blog or wait for publication to get news out. Published news demands more in-depth coverage than minute-to-minute updates. Same with hyperlocal news - most of it just fell by the wayside because it wasn't fit to waste expensive publication real-estate on. Not to mention the notion of independent journalism was severely limited.
There is no easy way to gauge the pulse of a community - no collective hub where you can look broadly at public sentiment over virtually any topic. Some examples: sports events, awards shows, political debates, concerts, natural disasters (try searching "earthquake + city" to see hundreds of people voluntarily report on this).
A world without Twitter, or at least the dumb-pipe twitter that you could achieve with 3rd party clients before Elon, is a world where communication goes back to being small, selective, slow, and myopic. That doesn't mean that it didn't have its downsides - it absolutely did and those have been reported on ad nauseum. But the biggest value was that it was a low-effort low-friction hub for fast and reliable thought.
For me the value was convenience. I used to be a big RSS user for my news. With RSS slowly dying, Twitter made it easy to follow the sources I wanted to follow in one place. I could have the news,...
For me the value was convenience. I used to be a big RSS user for my news. With RSS slowly dying, Twitter made it easy to follow the sources I wanted to follow in one place. I could have the news, fantasy football, tech news, and whatever other subjects I was interested in curated in one place.
very true, I'd consider using Mastodon (not Twitter though, not ever) if I had literally any use for it. Theae sites just seem like zoomer facebook and I never cared for it.
very true, I'd consider using Mastodon (not Twitter though, not ever) if I had literally any use for it.
Theae sites just seem like zoomer facebook and I never cared for it.
I don’t think zoomers are using it. I have a brother in law that is a zoomer and he and all of his friends use pretty much only instagram and snapchat. I think it’s more of millennials and younger...
I don’t think zoomers are using it. I have a brother in law that is a zoomer and he and all of his friends use pretty much only instagram and snapchat. I think it’s more of millennials and younger gen X that uses it.
I tried mastodon when the Reddit exodus began not even knowing what it was. I played around with it for a couple of days and I wasn’t really impressed. It felt like a Twitter-Tumblr hybrid in some ways. I don’t like tumblr either so that wasn’t a bonus for me, but I can see why it is for some people.
Nobody actually used Twitter except news and culture junkies. It never had the broad appeal that the other platforms had, it just had mindshare because it’s where all the media people were. Your...
Nobody actually used Twitter except news and culture junkies. It never had the broad appeal that the other platforms had, it just had mindshare because it’s where all the media people were. Your average person is mostly consuming tweets through being linked to them from aggregator articles and group chats.
Yeah I don't think zoomer are as keen on Twitter (and certainly not Mastodon). A lot of zoomers do have them, ofc, they're a big group, but the dominant "voice" on Twitter is definitely for...
Yeah I don't think zoomer are as keen on Twitter (and certainly not Mastodon). A lot of zoomers do have them, ofc, they're a big group, but the dominant "voice" on Twitter is definitely for millennials. I didn't know anyone was still using Snapchat though -- Tiktok is definitely the zoomer-ist major social media atm imo.
Yeah, I really hate Snapchat but I have a couple group chats that are going on 10 years old on there that have kept me there. I’m very very close to just saying fuck it and deleting it and...
Yeah, I really hate Snapchat but I have a couple group chats that are going on 10 years old on there that have kept me there. I’m very very close to just saying fuck it and deleting it and starting a signal group or something anyway though because I use it for literally nothing else.
I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with this article.
On one hand, I subscribe to many different news sources and believe that people should support quality journalism.
On the other hand, the source I most often see cited on the internet (and by extension, though usually uncited, in real life) is some random Twitter post rather than an actual credible source.
I am a fan of the way that The Corespondent/De Correspondent does it. Any link posted or shared is permanently free. I can browse their website and copy the URL from my address bar if I want to share it and know that my recipient will be able to read it. However, if you wish to browse their website for yourself, they require a subscription. They also have no advertisements.
I’m not a fan of the microtransaction solution that the article cites, and that I’ve seen floated around here. You aren’t going to pay for an article that someone else cites if you disagree with them, and you aren’t going to know if it’s worth paying for either. I’ve opened up some articles that I expected to be in-depth and it was three paragraphs (typically a developing story).
I also don’t really see why this is particularly relevant now. The social media platforms that have existed learn your behavior and will create the echo chamber of disinformation for you if you want and even when it wasn’t a matter of following disinformation, like I said, people took Twitter as their source.
I’m definitely game for news sources to drop the paywall, maybe promote an ad-free experience w/ their subscription (though many sites rely on subscription+ads, I’m willing to pay extra).
I think The New York Times is in a pretty good position to experiment. They have NYT Games, The Athletic, Times Cooking, Audm, and Wirecutter. I’m curious how many subscriptions they would retain if they freed the news and kept the rest paywalled (they could even keep certain sections paywalled, such as their subscriber-only newsletters).
The main thing that concerns me is the fact that many news organizations have been going bankrupt or are close (WaPo, Vice, The Corespondent (not De Corespondent), Buzzfeed News (not the rag)). Maybe experimenting is just what some of them need, but I don’t think most are in a position to do that.
Yes.
But the disappearance of original sources has been a problem for decades. It started when Craigslist appeared, which took the main source of income (personal ads) away from local newspapers. The situation got worse as the internet replaced printed newspaper. Most news orgs were unable to figure out a way to make money from websites and they basically collapsed.
Twitter has always been a net negative for society. There were a handful of people who did actual investigative journalism, and would report their work through twitter because it was basically a free platform for doing this. But this tiny ray of light was always overwhelmed by the huge volume of nonsense and intentional disinformation. For some reason there’s always money to create an infrastructure to spread disinformation rather than truth.
It's just so much easier to create misinformation than it is to disprove informational or put out quality good information.
It's kind of like headphones(I'm now realizing I will have to start specifying old headphones... eith cables). There's only one way for them to be neatly folded. There's almost unlimited ways for it to be a tangled mess. It'll inevitably end up that way in your pocket if you don't do anything to stop it.
It's not a perfect analogy but I think it kinda gets there
The Guardian is free. They rely on their printed paper, donations and advertising.
How ironic that this article too is behind a paywall…
It shouldn’t be. They said they disabled it for this article.
It's kind of. It pops up asking you to sign up with no way to remove it. You can still read the article, but half your screen is blocked.
That's just how the web is these days.
That's why everyone uses adblockers and just avoids news sites these days.
For those who actually want to read the article, here is the archive link.
Usually a publication is paywalled before I can even assess if their quality is worth the subscription they're begging for.
I'd rather pay $1 for a day of access, or 30c to view a single article I'm genuinely interested in.
Paywalled sites will never win against free sites telling you whatever lies you want to hear.
I imagine for so many businesses, what's daunting is erasing/removing Twitter. It's been built into so much infrastructure and used as a primary communication channel for so long. Hell, US policy has been announced via Twitter and such. And not to mention there isn't a good replacement yet.
There was a panic when a Dutch fire brigade sent out an alert directing people to Twitter when you suddenly needed a Twitter account, since then it forced a lot of change to an existing website and the gov spun up a mastodon instance to reduce their reliability on Twitter.
There are alternatives but they require some force. By forcing people to go to the government owned Mastodon it creates the replqcement by virtue of existing.
News sites I think need to make better use of the 80/20 rule, that 80 percent of your income comes from 20 percent of your customers. Offer access to events, talks, exclusive newsletters that are all in all only a marginal value add at a significant premium to the regular subscription. Use this revenue to subsidize the main subscription and support the business.
I just want the people who are all anti-twitter to actually stop using twitter. I am not even on twitter but I've seen about 45 different tweets within the past couple of days about how twitter is paying right-wing influencers for their content on twitter.
Yet, all these people complaining about it are just refusing to leave twitter.
People love to complain, but Twitter's too ingrained in their lives to just give up.
Prisoners probably complain about prison food all the time too, but it's not like they can just stop eating without starving to death. I think for a lot of people, dropping off Twitter (and/or Facebook) would be equivalent to dropping off the face of the Earth since it's the only way a lot of friends and families bother to stay in touch with one another.
Hell, losing reddit was one of those moments for me. I've lost a lot of awareness of things going on in the world.
That said, it hasn't really measurably impacted my life. I'm missing a lot of discourse around hobbies and news, which while making me worldly and stuff, doesn't really improve my life in any way.
It's strange, I thought I would lose a lot of awareness by cutting out reddit, but it turns out that's not really the case. I just spend more time actively looking for information that's more relevant to me, instead of scrolling through tons of noise that's stimulating but not immediately useful. It turned out to be a really good thing for me.
I was already tapering off of Reddit before the third party apocalypse so I haven't noticed much different. People post music and movie news here which is all I care about news-wise so I'm content. Plus this is a much better vibe and community here so I see it as a massive upgrade myself.
Too much info and negativity is never good for us. Conversation and politeness here is a most welcome change overall.
I mean, I can go to Crinacle for headphones, there's a few RC web forums, and plenty of larger interests have other fall backs but where do you go for defense themed shit posts? There was a lot of informational takes underneath all the naked tanks and stuff.
Yes, the positivity of tildes is certainly a boon but I do have a dark side that craves a little 4chan lite every now and then. Can't bring myself to go back to 4chan though...
Eh, I wasn't sure I'd be able to cut reddit cause it was really ingrained in my life. I at least managed to severely cut it to only one subreddit and only if I'm on the computer. It took a while but now it feels normal to me. Yeah, there would be some adjustment but one can give up a social media (even one that is really ingrained) if they try hard enough. One thing I suggest is finding alternatives. THey won't be the same thing (for me I found tildes and squabbles) but they'll help you during the adjustment. Hell, Zuckerberg now has an alternative now (if you're not like me and disliek facebook/zuckerberg. But I admit in a fight between Zuck and Musk I'd cheer Zuck but mostly cause he seems more competent, not cause I like him any better).
(to be fair though, the real test of how long I stay away from Reddit is when either Starfield (the subreddit I made an exception for) has enough new info to not be all the same posts or some other game I really get into and I want to go chat away with other fans).
For a lot of people Twitter is part of their job, especially the journalists who write all these pieces complaining about Twitter! Less comparable than just casual reddit use, I think
I mean, I did. I'm a nobody, but I dropped Twitter months ago, and Reddit this month. Not all of us are hypocrites XD
Same here. Deleted my Twitter account and I would delete my Reddit account but I only went to that site using RIF.
Yeah.. I mean I don't care about twitter and I dislike Musk so I'm loving the schaudenfraude, but if you dislike what they are doing and are on it, you are just enabling them.
I mean I managed to cut my reddit use at least to only one subreddit and only when I'm on the computer. No, it's not cutting it entirely but trust me, it's mostly cutting it out of my life. And while I missed it for a it I'm starting to get used to it. Yeah, it is painful but after a while it becomes normal and people would stop missing twitter.
Schadenfraude is when you commit fraud at the expense of others. It fell out of use immediately after being coined because people realized that's just normal fraud.
I have never understood the appeal of Twitter, Mastodon, and now Threads and to a much smaller extent Squabbles. I’m not a fan of the on the nose yelling into the void type of media that these social media sites offer, and I don’t see the entertainment value in it either.
A lot of the appeal was/is access. Some examples that come to mind in a world without (or before) twitter:
Public figures and politicians had to rely on press releases (or the like), which had to trickle through brick-and-mortar gatekeepers, to disseminate news to the public. It was slow, expensive, and subject to the editorial whims of those who ultimately reached the audience.
Individual journalists had to either maintain a blog or wait for publication to get news out. Published news demands more in-depth coverage than minute-to-minute updates. Same with hyperlocal news - most of it just fell by the wayside because it wasn't fit to waste expensive publication real-estate on. Not to mention the notion of independent journalism was severely limited.
There is no easy way to gauge the pulse of a community - no collective hub where you can look broadly at public sentiment over virtually any topic. Some examples: sports events, awards shows, political debates, concerts, natural disasters (try searching "earthquake + city" to see hundreds of people voluntarily report on this).
A world without Twitter, or at least the dumb-pipe twitter that you could achieve with 3rd party clients before Elon, is a world where communication goes back to being small, selective, slow, and myopic. That doesn't mean that it didn't have its downsides - it absolutely did and those have been reported on ad nauseum. But the biggest value was that it was a low-effort low-friction hub for fast and reliable thought.
I agree and I think it lends itself to rapidly becoming a pathway for abuse / bullying.
Yeah, it definitely seems like people are a lot more likely to get harassed and even doxxed on Twitter over anywhere else.
For me the value was convenience. I used to be a big RSS user for my news. With RSS slowly dying, Twitter made it easy to follow the sources I wanted to follow in one place. I could have the news, fantasy football, tech news, and whatever other subjects I was interested in curated in one place.
That’s fair, I’ve recently gone back to using an RSS feed again, and while there’s not as much content as the used to be, I’m still enjoying it.
I also used to use third party twitter apps for news, but IMO the official app sucks for it. I just went back to RSS.
very true, I'd consider using Mastodon (not Twitter though, not ever) if I had literally any use for it.
Theae sites just seem like zoomer facebook and I never cared for it.
I don’t think zoomers are using it. I have a brother in law that is a zoomer and he and all of his friends use pretty much only instagram and snapchat. I think it’s more of millennials and younger gen X that uses it.
I tried mastodon when the Reddit exodus began not even knowing what it was. I played around with it for a couple of days and I wasn’t really impressed. It felt like a Twitter-Tumblr hybrid in some ways. I don’t like tumblr either so that wasn’t a bonus for me, but I can see why it is for some people.
Nobody actually used Twitter except news and culture junkies. It never had the broad appeal that the other platforms had, it just had mindshare because it’s where all the media people were. Your average person is mostly consuming tweets through being linked to them from aggregator articles and group chats.
Yeah I don't think zoomer are as keen on Twitter (and certainly not Mastodon). A lot of zoomers do have them, ofc, they're a big group, but the dominant "voice" on Twitter is definitely for millennials. I didn't know anyone was still using Snapchat though -- Tiktok is definitely the zoomer-ist major social media atm imo.
Yeah, I really hate Snapchat but I have a couple group chats that are going on 10 years old on there that have kept me there. I’m very very close to just saying fuck it and deleting it and starting a signal group or something anyway though because I use it for literally nothing else.