this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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If you removed the noise from the signal , the signal was very good. When twitter first started there was a great talk about finding survivors and infornation in an earthquake. it was a great tool for crowdsourcing event ands info. It later gave people closer access to companies and people. But, i do agree, there was a lot of noise. i hope the signal finds home on the fediverse with mastadon or whatever.
The problem was, and is, that Twitter was always a private for-profit company whose business model was tracking users and mining their private data. Yes, it could do good things, and in the hands of some of those opressive regimes it could do some bad things and in between it was built to do some skeezy things because that was how they attracted the venture capital.
Not to mention it was never innovative in what it was offering, there were and are many different avenues to connect people (that is the fundamental feature of the internet) it just created a platform that became popular for various reasons. Earthquake victims and rescuers, anti-government protestors and so on could always use Signal or another app for talking to each other - and should.
One of the real impacts of the cancer of Twitter came when journalists reached a critical mass and decided if something was tweeted about it counted as a primary source and they could write an article about it without having to get out of their chair. It was always lazy journalism and often totally irresponsible journalism and it's no coincidence that the apex of Twitter journalism was the rise of an orange demented sociopathic rapist. All of which was part of the promise of a service that sold views and news by secret algorithm and cash.