Technology

Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That's when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.

Reporting on "X" is what's keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there's some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it's actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.

It's something you see endless repeated. When there is no rules, you get the loudest, baddest, pieces of work, rise to the top and then set rules that favour them. Look over the world and history, where law and order has broke down, war/drug lords take over.

I lived in Holland for a bit, my Dutch colleagues told a story of the bus system. Holland tried a honor payment system, trusting people to pay what they needed to for their trip. It failed hard and was replaced with fair collectors my colleagues called "the bus Nazis".

The same thing happens with free speech absolutism. You hit "Paradox of tolerance".

Anarchy just doesn't work. You need rules for everyone to play nice by.

Ah in this town square metaphor, don't forget the private company's CEO has a megaphone and talks over people, and outright kicks them out of the square if you hurt his feelings.

How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?

You have just invented malls. Hugely damaging to society, but they come with convenient parking and air con.

I quite like the tag line X, the abandoned shopping mall of the internet.

I think it describes it well.

People acting as if twitter is something important. And killing it is meaningful. In Europe we don't use it. Literally. I'm Polish, I never had a twitter account and don't know anybody who has. The whole twitter/musk debacle is a war over nothing.

Same. It loads the page where the tweet would be, then it seems like 2 popups cover it up, both about logging in. I immediately no longer care about viewing what I wanted to see, and close the window.

Honestly I feel like that killed Twitter more than many other changes.

People tell me "there's no way he (musk) would intentionally crash his own company - it makes no sense - "he's just terribly bad at business!"

But is he really THAT bad? In what world could these changes be made in which he's actively trying to improve the company? If nothing else, seeing the negative backlash, bad publicity and dropping number of users wouldn't any sound minded business owner at least temporarily undo some of these changes?

With any business, if you make a change that causes you to lose customers and get bad publicity.. don't you try to mitigate the damage done? Who goes balls to the wall on obviously bad decisions?

Downvoting and disliking can have their own issues too.

On Lemmy, downvoting isn't really that bad, especially compared to Reddit, and that's likely because of the federated model where instance admins can't trust the authenticity of votes. On Lemmy, voting effects the score on the post and that's it, as opposed to Reddit where taking on too many downvotes will shadow ban or lock your account, even if you still have thousands of karma in the subreddit where it happened. Those restrictions also apply site wide. Lemmy users also don't have a global karma count, which removes most temptation to delete posts that go negative and self censor. Of course there are probably many people out there who would delete a post with a 10:1 negative score ratio. Then again if it's that bad then it might not be a bad thing to delete it.

Both models have their place and pros and cons. I understand the nefarious intent behind this change on Youtube, but I feel like hiding negative feedback so that only the poster can see it has potential. It could deter bandwagon downvote brigading. Dislikes are really only relevant to the algorithm and the user who posted the content.

It's almost like "fewer people" is a distinctly different concept from "nobody".

Because the algorithm will always try to fill the timeline with something. It’s not going to show you empty spaces where tweets WOULD have been if people who left had been there.