The people I’ve seen the most dreading the likely collapse of twitter are artists and musicians, who point out how much business they get from centralized social media. Sites like these, designed more to foster small communities (while also explicitly trying NOT to be the worlds biggest website) are inherently antithetical to the design that helps artists, they say. As twitter is made for advertisers, promotion of things to sell is easier than in a small chronological only website.
I’m not sure what the solution to this is, but my inkling is that twitter replaced a lot of functions that the real world had in separate places (marketplace, mall, community center, local news station) and that an approach that tries to be all of those things limits the effectiveness of all of those functions.
For those of you who do art or music: what do you think the future of trying to sell art of any medium on social media is? How do you balance the design needs that foster healthy socialization and make things intentionally hard for advertisers without also making it more relatively difficult for artists?
