No my problem with Twitter is that the quality of the discourse is poor and getting worse every day.
Which is a direct result of Musk deciding to prioritise blue check comments over others. If you're having to pay to have people listen to you then that means you typically don't have something worth saying.
And we see this manifest in many ways e.g. pages of laughing emojis in response to a tweet.
For me it depends on the advertising. A brand that sells say bags? It’s fine, I love a cool bag.
And then there is the “Play this one stupid game that has everyone hooked!!!” With an unrelated picture. Or “This guy became a millionaire in ONE day!1!” type of advertising.
Advertising works extremely well precisely because most people are aware that many brands with something of value are also willing to pay for ads. Look at Apple.
Facebook changed their algorithm several years ago (2014?) to prioritize paid content over organic comments. This resulted in many companies being force to change how they communicated, as people who followed them were not guaranteed to receive critical information if posted on Facebook.
I guess the biggest difference is that Facebook has had almost 10 years to adjust the algorithm towards paid content, and have users becoming accustomed to the system.
> Facebook changed their algorithm several years ago (2014?) to prioritize paid content over organic comments.
That's a lie.
Instead, "Facebook realized that users were growing wary of misleading teaser headlines, and the company recalibrated its algorithm in 2014 and 2015 to downgrade clickbait and focus on new metrics, such as the amount of time a user spent reading a story or watching a video, and incorporating surveys on what content users found most valuable"
For companies that were depending on the organic reach of their clickbaity or low quality posts for their advertising, this had the effect of forcing them to pay to get that same reach. But it wasn't in any way that facebook was prioritizing paid over organic content.
The average rate of organic content on Facebook is 5%, and has steadily increased the amount of paid content that users get on their feeds compared to organic content.
Feel free to provide a source that show a decrease in advertisements on Facebook.
It's not about any of those things, it's about just being a well-run internet service. Facebook is very good at running a big internet service that billions use, Twitter not so much under new management.
A well-run internet service tries not to keep causing self-inflicted PR disasters. A well-run service is stable, consistently available, doesn't have a large amount of feature churn, and generally has stable leadership making sane decisions about maximising value. None of those things describe Twitter under Musk, but Facebook is a generally well-run company with sound policies and competent leadership.
Just because people here disagree with many of Facebook's decisions doesn't make them any less good. I may think that the focus on VR is a strategic mistake, or that Facebook has a PR problem, but generally they're good stewards of the platform they've created and run it fairly well.
We have 4chan, parts of the fediverse and so on for unfiltered. Threads is for mainstream.
I don’t see that as bad. As someone who was a moderator, sometimes you want that sandwich and not Joe Schmoe stupid verbal trash he thought less than 3 seconds about.
I want to be able to read (former UN weapons nspector) Scott Ritter on twitter. A man with a huge amount of experience and someone who is able to give very informed commentary. On pre-Musk twitter I couldn't read him, now I can. And I could give quite a number of similar examples.
They probably couldn't read him on pre-musk twitter because he was briefly banned. From the Wikipedia page, this is why:
"Ritter rejected the Western media's coverage of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and has voiced his perspective on multiple podcasts, including Andrew Napolitano's.[42][43] In April 2022, he posted a tweet claiming that the National Police of Ukraine is responsible for the Bucha massacre and calling U.S. President Joe Biden a "war criminal" for "seeking to shift blame for the Bucha murders" to Russia.[44][45] Ritter was suspended from Twitter for violating its rule on "harassment and abuse" after this, but his account was reinstated the next day.[45][46][47]
The U.S. Department of State and Polygraph.info described Ritter as a frequent contributor to Sputnik and RT during the war.[48][49] Polygraph reported that he compared Ukraine to “a rabid dog” that needed to be shot.[49] He has also compared Ukraine's treatment of Russians to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews.[50]
In July 2022, the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation included Ritter on a list of what it called Russian propagandists.[51][44]"
I responded to the claim that Facebook is "run well" and Twitter is "not run well since Musk". You've extended this simplistic division by implying anything that isn't basic sandwich content must be verbal trash.
Political discussion and controversial topics need to be covered in order for society to progress, to solve problems, to canvas the range of solutions and perspectives. Heated exchanges, passionate disagreements, and ideas we don't like come with the territory. No need to be afraid.
If we fall into the trap of "nothing to see here" via enforcing certain people as truth-tellers and everyone else as "stupid sex-predator anti-vaxxer shills", then we have a problem.
It's much better to trust the average educated person can think for themselves rather than need Corporate sponsored Big Gov to push creepy "anti-misinformation" tactics, censoring, back-dooring and manipulation. That's my point done... what exactly was your point?
can you define "well run"? As in "being a cause of a literal genocide because you couldn't bother to hire a single person to manage the country you're publishing your product in and take any actions to prevent the whole thing" or do we mean "making money" here?
Well, they are questioning the motivation to question the motivation of others. Assuming that this invalidates their point would, however, be a logical fallacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
Except that they are not questioning that motivation at all - blanket assertion that the activity is done too much but nothing supposed about anyone's reasons or whyfores.
I think that statement is being incorrectly reduced/interpreted to 'mind your own business' which would be ironic.
In my defense, I said "we" and not "you" for a reason. Also the point I was attempting to make was less "stop doing that" and more "that way madness lies"
So does Threads solve the problem of viewing things logged out?
FB always had this tendency of rate limiting (showing an annoying sign up modal and then eventually silently failing due to HTTP 429 ajax requests- seemingly IP rate limiting). It also seems to not allow viewing of otherwise public info based on user agent (mobile vs desktop)
Zuck seems rather less likely to dig up one of my posts just to say "did your brain fall out" directing the attention of his 100m followers to then also dump on my post.
My problems don't really matter here, where most of my community moves does. And lots of them seem to think the fediverse is to complicated, some that sign up just put the local part of their username into places.
I expect that Meta will filter out a lot more antivax, nazi, MAGA, and racist drivel that I don't want to see which is readily available just about anytime I read the comment on just about any news story.
I don't use Twitter or Facebook or IG so I also won't be using Zuck's new thing. That said, I did a quick straw poll of some non-tech relatives who have not expressed to me any previous opinion either way about Elon Musk and the takeover and got told "Twitter is really weird now and full of ads" and "I can't find anything any more". Anecdotal, but it seems to me twitter would be vulnerable if enough users felt that way. All of the people I spoke with in this very non-scientific and non-representative sample already have instagram accounts so it would be pretty easy for them to move over.
A lot of the prominent accounts seem to be moving. It may be because they want a general public square rather than Elons personal website. It may be because they are worried that the rate limiting etc is going to affect what they do to monitor their reach, understand their audience etc.
Either way I don't think their problems fall into any of the categories you've given exactly, but if the people someone likes to follow on twitter move to threads, the likelihood is that person will move to threads, especially if they are somewhat dissatisfied because the app is becoming weird and stuffed with ads.
I just went unto Threads and I saw quite a bit the sentiment of “I can read stuff again without being limited.” and people asking if so and so had switched.
If your problem is with ethics, FB isn’t a beacon of good behavior.
If your problem is getting rate-limited or losing your blue checkmark, I guess go wild, but you probably already loved Twitter too much to leave.