I feel like twitter should've gone on strike like reddit when they had the chance but also I fear that, democratically, twitter is too full of capitalists and elon fanboys to ever get such a thing off the ground. twitter feels like a lost cause nowadays


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in reply to @thewaether's post:

Even just the nominally leftist and socially progressive chunk of Twitter could never agree on one thing. The best you could hope for is like, a few really popular accounts agreeing to try and convince their followers to leave, but there’d be a counter-reaction even there. Twitter is herding cats. What event ever unified Twitter?

Reddit is a hivemind, it’s gotten substantially unified over some really stupid things, like trying to find the Boston Marathon bomber and ruining some poor innocent guy’s day. It also has staged substantial protests like back during the FOSTA-SESTA bill sessions. When the foundation of the site is showing posts that people marked as “convincing and informative” to more people so they can be convinced and informed and upvote it again, it’s a great consensus building tool. Twitter, by comparison, basically is sorted by “controversial” by default. It wants engagement, at least a little positive, but it’ll take negative too. So not much takes off on Twitter unless someone is arguing against it.

That’s fair but it’s kind of essential social glue. If malcontents are preferentially boosted, you end up with PvP social media. It’s not entirely a joke what’s said here about many of us being “veterans of the posting wars”.

I also think that maybe human social structures are more often consensus building. That does make sense for what kinds of structures last for the long term and which burn out quickly. Heck even the US government had a PvP era in the Articles of Federation before the more-consensus-building-focused Constitution.

And for what it’s worth, cohost is very much a consensus building site, even if to a weaker extent than Reddit.