Hot takes about the bird site are real cheap these days. To sell this one, I spent a year in grad school thinking pretty seriously about how internet platforms work or fall apart. A platform is different from a community, which is a group of people and norms. Platforms have their own logic, and a lot of common platforms are about exploiting the people coerced to use it. Cohost is different, but that's for the end.
Where to even begin with Twitter? There's so much that's a tire fire, and it's getting bigger by the minute, but it's useful to stake down that the basic metaphor of Twitter as the "internet's town square" couldn't be more wrong. I think Twitter is actually Total Request Live.
TRL was about the celebrity and about the mob. We watched it to see what was popular and to see interviews favorite musicians. Artists used it to reach the crowd. And the crowd was participating in the belief that if you waved your sign hard enough, you could be on TV! You could borrow some of the artist's glamour.
While I mostly think cyberspace metaphors are awful and misleading, as primates we have an easy time thinking in terms of spatiality. One of my very favorite articles from that project on platforms is Nagy and Neff (2015) Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory. If you can wade through the jargon, they introduce the useful idea of an imagined affordance, the mutable gestalt entity that sits at the intersection of the hard features of a technology, the behavior of its users, and the expectations of what is possible on that platform.
There is a concretization of users' perceptions, emotions, and experiences into the qualities or features of media technologies, which is not captured by the way scholars currently use the term "affordance." For example, Facebook privacy settings may or may not be adaptable by users, but there is value in examining the pragmatics of such adjustments and settings - as users practice them - as the "affordances" of Facebook. Users may have certain expectations about their communication technologies, data, and media that, in effect and practice, shape how they approach them and what actions they think are suggested. These expectations may not be encoded hard and fast into such tools by design, but they nevertheless become part of the users' perceptions of what actions are available to them. This is what we define as imagined affordance, as opposed to a more rigid and fixed notion of affordance that communication technology scholars have struggled with.
Back to TRL. Sure, the Twitter core power users of journalists, politicians, and various expert influencers seem more serious than a 00s pop act, but the medium is the message. And the medium on Twitter is you can go right up to the rich, famous, and powerful, and tell them you love them - or tell them to huff your farts. You can wander in the crowd and find people shouting the same things as you and wind up leading the chants. And in a terrible reversal, if you become the Main Character of Twitter, you can find yourself thrown to the tender mercies of the mob. It feels a lot like Times Square.
TRL was cancelled due to low ratings in 2008, and while the reasons for that cancellation are diffuse; the rise of Youtube, changing audience tastes, and so on, I think the critical affordance that made TRL work was that MTV played other music videos. The idea of a show of daily audience driven curation of content only makes sense when there's dross to rise above. You need that potential energy for the show to feel real and participatory, and not like a publicists' payola.
Likewise, I think the affordance that makes Twitter work might be verification. Verification lets us imagine that Twitter is real life, that the statements of important people on there are true and potent, and that we're participating by yelling back. We can imagine that we're citizens and experts on Twitter. Sure, the single timeline, hashtags, and easy discoverability/amplification tools are also important, but they're present on sites which don't have nearly the same impact as Twitter.
Verification provides the social potential energy that makes the bird site work. Breaking it for the equivalent of loose change is like cross connecting all the leads in a Tesla battery because it's dark in this hyperloop tunnel and you want to see by the sparks, to craft a metaphor with absolutely nothing that should be read into it. You'll solve an immediate problem, but step two gets very uncomfortable very fast.
@garius's Trust Thermocline tweet has been making rounds, with the basic idea that there's a sharp boundary between trusted and despised platforms, and that you can exploit your users without consequence only so many times. Breach that boundary, and things get very bad for your company quickly. I'm not sure what's going to happen to Twitter as it dives for the thermocline, but personally, I'm hoping to grow fangs and light emitting organs to lure in unwary posters.
Meanwhile...
One of the reasons why I'm optimistic about cohost is that the admins are very clear that they're not going to monetize user data to attract advertisers, because everything optimized towards selling user data and ads is an ulcer of an evil affordance oozing black goo at the heart of your site. We'll have to see how the tech/finances work, but I think modern Something Awful proves that user supported sites can work. (oh, and dare for the community. I don't have Cohost plus, but if this post makes numbers, I'll sign up right away). Did you read the Anti Software Software Club Manifesto It's cool, it convinced me. And also, this being 2022, they're very clear that this place is a community, it has norms, and if you don't like them, you can fuck off. Trans people are great. Nazis are vile. Disagree? Door is right there. I think they get the geek social fallacies, and while moderation is hard in practice, they don't seem to believe that there are load-bearing assholes who deserve to keep using the site despite bad behavior, or that this is something that can be foisted on contractors in some nightmarish call center.
And as for the affordances of this place, well, they're evolving. The text box will let me write as much as I want, maybe too much, hence the #longreads. But I can also post a picture of my dinner, or a funny meme I saw. There are no rules yet, and that sense of being in on the ground floor is incredibly liberating.