What did Andy Yen really do? I mean it is clear what the "cancel force" accuses him of, but I am curious what he really did or said to trigger this. Feels way too organized to be organic.
Not true from what I can see - the only cohort who left Twitter were the uncompromising leftwing folks. OTOH, people with moderate views now can get points across that had been previously suppressed.
English speakers left. Or so I assume. It's still roughly what it always was so long if you were somehow illiterate in English yet educated and plenty smart :p
LLM auto-translations haven't changed that much. The current corporate seems to be trying to figure out why and whether those remaining huge mass of foreign users lean left or right by the criteria of US politics, but still haven't have any clue about that nor had accepted that non-English-speakers actually don't speak English lol(or, to say, find translated contents natural as speeches with reasonable flows of logic, to be even more blunt)
Kind of, but I don't think this is strictly limited to the US. All languages are probably affected to degrees proportionate to language and culture compatibilities with the US English. If your ideas about left and right politics are the ones built up from first principle that isn't well correlated and connected with the orthodox interpretations, both sides will be nonsensical to one another, and that shields such bubbles from ... the massive negativity being poured into the platform, for example.
edit: since this is under a dead comment that might not bother too many: I'm suspecting that there must be two competing hypothesis inside the org that owns Twitter, one being more preferable than the other depending on where one is coming from, that users still remaining on the platform and active on it must be either A) appreciative of ultra right turn of the platform with increasingly dominant right wing ragemaxxing contents, or, B) they just exist as a colossal autonomous parasitic self-contained isolate hivemind that had always been at least equally influential as the host but now is also physically bigger and therefore more influential than what its owners consider the host.
Frankly, I find the Malfoy trend that was going on couple weeks ago to be highly sus, that it smelled like an artificial boosting campaign to map out political leanings of user clusters which has to be right leaning from the hypothesis A. It makes sense as to me as one, given my unique knowledge of political controversies surrounding Harry Potter and ... opinions expressed by its author JK Rowling, which absolutely everybody here knows about. And I'm imagining that, if it had been such an experiment, it must have been horrifying to watch the Potter villain simply accepted as completely non-controversial wholesome pro-LGBT pro-gay left-to-center content among the most influential and knowledgeable and skilled of Twitter users like nothing had happened since 2016 or so, supporting the undesirable hypothesis B, although that seems to have always been the reality to me.
You are right but I would use a different tone for what you're describing. E.g. I've seen a lot more antisemitism and full-blown racism on Twitter than I did in the past.
I put that into the "people who want to kill me" silo.
I vacillate on the value of seeing this stuff. Sometimes I think its important my radar be aware that these attitudes are way more prevalent in society than they used to be. Lot's of my not-on-twitter peers I suspect are in a bubble and don't realize how much societal decay there has been around norms and batsh*t conspiracy thinking. As a citizen I think it's important not to be in a total bubble until the frog boiling temperature is reached.
At the same time, I'm pretty sure that low grade daily exposure to "look at all these neighbors of yours who wish you were dead" overstates the prevalence and the fact that the people who feel this way do so in no small part because they are getting a daily algo feed claiming I wish they were dead (spoiler - I don't want them dead). Since I find it really hard to break my Twitter addiction there is something about all of these emotions which keeps some susceptible humans like myself clicking, but like the article says, it's quite rare that I emerge from an hour of Twitter scrolling feeling anything but gross.
All of this is frustrating because I was very late to Twitter. I joined a year or two before the acquisition. I loved how I could connect with all sorts of interesting brilliant people in all sorts of interesting fields. I wish I could get that back but I guess that iteration of Twitter didn't sell enough ads.
> All of this is frustrating because I was very late to Twitter. I joined a year or two before the acquisition. I loved how I could connect with all sorts of interesting brilliant people in all sorts of interesting fields. I wish I could get that back but I guess that iteration of Twitter didn't sell enough ads.
nuts. i joined in 2008. that was when it was cool.
It's also important to keep in mind that a lot of that shit on Twitter is literally just bots. I can mention some trigger word or name and the majority of the replies will be "name-bunchanumbers" with some generic profile picture posting the most caustic and idiotic bullshit. Like, go post something with the name "Brandon Johnson", the current mayor of Chicago, in it, and accounts you have never ever seen will come out of the woodwork to post irrelevant "huh huh progressive politics" slop, half the time they're just non-sequiturs. Same with Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, happens on posts plenty of right wing politicians too. Name-bunchanumbers, some AI generated "memes" to make it look organic. It's all bullshit. Automated bullshit.
I have no doubt there ARE people out there with those horrific views and ARE actually making AI generated meme slop and posting it feeling satisfied, but I choose to believe that the vast majority are bots, and a fraction of the real humans doing it learned it from the bots. Just reading that sort of shit over and over again can change how you think about things if you aren't vigilant and the outcomes are more division. Plenty of bad folks in the world just want the division. They want people mad, and feeling afraid.
No those are just "moderate" opinions of every day regular people, who were previously being "canceled" by "the far left". (/s)
The times I've had the misfortune of reading replies on xitter, even on what should be technical topics, they have consisted of extremist maximalist takes with others chiming in to call them "based" [0]. Whatever its "algorithm" is, it definitely leans into the outrage farming / Balkanization project, regardless of the bots.
[0] which from context would seem to be shorthand for "freebased", as in smoking crack, despite apparent intent to the contrary
I know the word gets thrown around in mainstream politics and has devolved into meaninglessness, but on Twitter it's actually really antisemitism, as in they want to expel and/or kill the Jews because they believe they secretly control the world.
As someone that feels both parties are irredeemably corrupt, I left because I am anti authoritarian and Twitter both before and after Musk has repeatedly unfairly applied rules for clear political reasons which made it no longer a fair or honest platform to participate in.
I think you're kind of proving their point about 'normies' when your first instinct is to start talking about 'leftwing folks' and 'moderate views'. Most normal people aren't talking politics on the internet.
My experience as a young adult in the UK was that most people I knew had moved from Facebook to Instagram & Twitter in their early 20's.
Normal people whose interests would be things like football, going out drinking, and reality TV. The extent of their politics would be sharing a meme of Boris Johnson or complaining about COVID restrictions. I don't like the word 'normie', but that's exactly how you would describe them.
Looking through my following list now, these type of people have now either deleted their account, or haven't posted in years.
I don't think it's entirely political. But the rebrand to X and Musk's involvement made using it very uncool. It's seen of in the same vein as Facebook now, it's kind of embarrassing to admit you still use it.
Yes, and the downvotes and replies you're getting on here perfectly prove your point.
The moderate views are always seen as too "boring" or "naive". There's always a vocal crowd who wants to tell you about it. Anyone willing to leave a comment is already too engaged enough to take a step back and find nuance in what is not being said.
Respectfully, the moderate isn't getting their point across because nobody is reading it. The only people the algo shows moderate views to are the extremes to feed their need for fresh meat. Normie moderate people in a point in the Overton window where they may respond to moderate points have as much organic attraction to spend time on Twitter as my teenage children do to chat with their peers via email (i.e., null).
The moderate on twitter is the proverbial old man yelling at clouds but imagining the clouds are actually some relevant audience of non-bots. I do admit we may define moderate differently here in which case there is a chance we are talking past each other.
I think the OPs argument (which I am not endorsing) is that they in fact enjoy a higher quality of life even if their "standard of living" (measured in purchasing power) is higher.
It's all subjective though. Asking most in a 'developed' country whether they'd trade their high rent for a dirt floor/house would result in an affirmative no. Same for health/insurance - "Would you trade your high premium for 'the nearest so called doctor is a days walk away'" is going to be a resounding no.
But then it's the same the other way around "Would you trade your dirt floors for linoleum if it meant you hard to do hard labor 40 hrs a week?" and "Would you trade your witch for the luxury of owing the doctor thousands of hours of labor?" would both also be resounding nos.
I know there is a growing contingent of those moving off of the grid and spurning modernity for log cabins built by hand, and the converse OLPC in dirt huts thing but for the most part everyone everywhere wants to have their cake and eat it too.
Part of our standard of living is widespread access to contraceptives and sex education, and of course access to any soft of education for girls and women.
Even we accept your premise that moderation is _some_ form of censorship, it still holds that we may not want _other_ or _all_ forms of censorship.
The last sentence of your comment, therefore, is manipulative. It's like saying "ice is a form of water, so you can't have drinks without water, and the only difference is who waters down your bourbon".
There is a difference between being taught and being preached to. Intelligent people are particularly sensitive to this distinction, and that category of people happens to be the audience of the magazine.
You did not experience a trait of humans generally, but a trait of the specific, historically rare instance of high-trust society that had been consciously invented, built and protected, and that you were very lucky to be born into or live in.
Most self-forming human societies are high-trust and more loyal to each other than to truth (as the models have so eloquently regurgitated). Look anywhere from the hunter-gatherer tribes to villages to small towns. I have traveled my small, poor country extensively and the only place the fundamental idea of altruism had to be "consciously invented, built and protected" was in the big cities. In the rest of the places, it came to them as naturally as hunger. We've found skeletons from thousands of years ago that indicate that the whole society came together to care for the disabled individual for nothing in return, leading them to live as long as a modern disabled person with healthcare might.
Societies become low trust driven by specific factors: resource scarcity, something forcing a lot of different groups of people into the same area without integration. This is not a defense of humanity. I'd say the case of the returned wallet is more an example of class-loyalty than general human altruism. Humans have an instinct for exclusion of the non-conforming.
But the idea that civilization has to be invented and maintained is a debunked, regressive, even dangerous idea in that this line of thinking was used to justify a lot of atrocities historically.
Do you have any evidence to back up that assertion? I have several contrary examples. My mother travelled through much of South/central America as a 60 old, taking buses other means of transport, often she was invited to stay at people's homes. Similarly have a very good friend who as two early 30s women travelled through Iran and had similar experiences.
I want experienced small acts of kindness in many countries and in both rural and metropolitan areas. I do agree that different societies are more or less likely. In my mother's travels, she was met with a lot of distrust in Guatemala (but this was reasonably recent after the end of the dictatorship), similarly my best experiences have been in NZ (just walking around with a map in central Auckland often ended up with someone offering to drive you to where you needed to go).
I live in a high trust neighborhood. Bicycles will sit around for a week or two before someone finally returns. Outside my neighborhood bicycles last about an hour at most.
I don't know why people are even bothering to reply to a one sentence rage baiting comment. Let that useless comment fade into oblivion. It makes no sense other than him trying to create discussion.
It’s difficult to say, because there are plenty of fairly horrible examples where an entire nation gets trapped in a culture that actively masters over generations how to punish honesty and reward corruption. Russia being an example.
I doubt very much you have any backing for this statement...
In the micro level, Russians look to be lovely trusting people to each other. My source is an Instagram story of a guy pretending not to speak Russian, talking to drunk Russians on the street in English, and they're not agressive but they try to solve his problem. Yeah, great source, but I doubt it's much worse than yours.
For almost all of human history we lived in very small groups with incredibly high trust, which was necessary for survival. Modern low trust societies are the exception and the rarity.
Thats not entirely true. High trust tight knit communities are the default we evolved for. Where is usually breaks down if people don't have a strong internal sense of guilt is in sufficiently large groups (i.e. cities) where the social dynamic breaks down and people get effective anonymity.
"Hail capitalism because we're only civilized under the influence of game theory!"
I think we're living in a highly individualistic society and what little high trust remains is outside of the logic of markets.
You should have seen the dark age... if everyone fended for themselves there we wouldn't be here now. You know how much you depend on your peers without any of the affordabilities of today's age?!
Every time I see the words “high trust” the needle on my chud detector fucking blows through its stop peg and I need to take precious time out of my day just to replace it.
Edit: it’s never “we’re becoming a low trust society because of rising inequality and K-shaped economic recovery leading to a breakdown of the social contract”, it’s always “we’re becoming a low trust society because of brown people”.
Most of the IPs are used are blocked before they even start. If you do get in there, an editor without a clue will challenge your edits even if he (nearly always a "he") knows nothing about the given subject.
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