“They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry.”
“For all the grandiose talk about The Light Of Consciousness and The Future Of Humanity that has come out of Silicon Valley during its ascent, what it has delivered has mostly been spectacularly useless, lifeless, and anti-human. In this sense, it reflects its owners perfectly.”
“Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it touches. The people re-publishing my Mastodon posts on Twitter didn’t think to ask whether I was ok with them doing that. The librarians wondering loudly about how this ‘new’ social media environment could be systematically archived didn’t ask anyone whether they want their fediverse posts to be captured and stored by government institutions.”
“Twitter wanted all of the credit for the innovation and none of the credit for the impact, when the reality was the other way around. Time after time, they came right up to the limit of acknowledging that, always to turn away at the last moment.”
“Okay, wild! We guessed someone else’s tweet ID! And as the IDs are time-dependent that means they were met with an instantaneous retweet—creepy. Also, it seems like Twitter doesn’t actually care about the username and just resolves URLs based on the tweet ID.”
“[W]hoever’s running these art theft bots found a much more profitable way of generating leads: by scanning Twitter for people specifically telling artists they’d buy a shirt with an illustration on it.”
“Copying and pasting made people look at what they shared, and think about it, at least for a moment. When the retweet button debuted, that friction diminished. Impulse superseded the at-least-minimal degree of thoughtfulness once baked into sharing.”