more birdsite postmortem
I think I'm still grieving twitter, but if I'm honest with myself, it's really the twitter of 2010-14, back when the site was still usable and friendly. In my experience it's closely associated with the indie games scene at that time, which was an anomalously hopeful, vaguely utopian moment. Gamergate really was the beginning of the end of both, when people realized they could use the twitter platform for coordinated harassment, and ever since then it's been an inherently antagonistic political battleground. There were still hints of the good things about it but it became harder and harder to access those things. I think I was pretending that twitter was something other than it was for a long time.
The second hopeful moment for me was when Trump was banned from the platform. It seemed like, okay, maybe we can get a piece of that back, or at least stave off the worst parts of late-stage twitter. But what I find interesting is that, when people were reminiscing about their favorite days on the platform, no one else I know mentioned this moment. Instead they mentioned the day Trump got COVID and when everyone was clowning on that. That was what people remembered and enjoyed, the dunks and the memes and the clown shit. Which I do enjoy occasionally if I'm being honest, but I hate how it tends to amplify the worst people. I think this was an eye-opening moment for me in terms of realizing that what I valued about the platform was not what most other people valued.
It's weird, somehow 2014 feels like ancient history and 2016 feels like yesterday.
