These things are good or bad because of the community of people who use them, not the technology per se. And that community is shaped by both culture and moderators.
The medium is the message. Any microcblogging platform that tracks and displays engagement inherently optimizes for short form swipes and "rebuttals" and outright lies. The "real time feed" nature optimizes for taking zero time or effort to confirm anything that anyone says. Nearly everything that "breaks" on twitter and doesn't make it to actual reports was an outright lie.
You can't put a necessary amount of nuance in 140 characters.
I disagree. The shape of the instrument makes some sounds easier to make than others. Pianos are inherently polyphonic while trumpets play one note at a time. Anything made in the shape of twitter will result in twitter like behavior.
The original Web was the work of genious, but everything since is either adtech enshittification or cumbersome hacks.
The "simplest" requirement - decentralized discovery of what is out there, is essentially still unsolved. That is one of the main reasons we have centralized platforms of all types instead of some RSS on steroids design.
The second (and more difficult in sociopolitical terms) requirement that is still unsolved is the "active" web, decentralized POST-in on somebody else's server. Here you have social challenges (identity, spam, moderation, fake news etc).
We really need a good society adapted Web 3 evolution, because Web 2 has been a disaster that keeps on giving. But it will require genious at least commensurate with the original.
How do you know what’s happening elsewhere? Other than having relations, it falls under reporters to propagate news. How do you meet new people? You go to special events and gatherings. The web is already linked, but we have special nodes like search engines, directories, and forums that are information hubs.
Creating a website was always easy. The minimum html you need is very small, and all you have to do is copy the files with an ftp client. Then tools like wordpress came and it became even easier.
What social medias have done was to put everyone in the same space. First there were walls and you just have to build your own information hub. Now, the platform is providing you its own like a private television service (including ads) whether you like it or not.
No need to invent a new version of the web, we can always go back to what was working and is still working.
Twitter is precisely the reason we need these decentralized, niche platforms. It's a return to the norm prior to social media centralizing everything.
They won't avoid the same fate, because decay and entropy are inevitable. But they will last longer simply because fewer people know about them and use them.
You must like it for political reasons, because from a technical standpoint the new Twitter is a catastrophe. It doesn’t even work properly. The other day I typed in the URL of an account I wanted to check, from a browser where I wasn’t logged in, and I got an endless loop of redirects. Watching Musk tear down Twitter infrastructure over the last two years has been like watching the Notre Dame fire, except if it was set on purpose. It was a miracle of human accomplishment and now it’s a shell of its old self.
