Thats downloads. Of course an app that no-one was using before but is now the "promised land" for all the right thinkers is gonna be downloaded more than the apps that half the world already has. lol. You do know that a lot of phones come with twitter and facebook and other pre installed junk already installed on them don't you? No need to download the app. Trouble with the Bluesky love in is that unless their "opponents" follow them over to troll them.......they will get bored and come back to twitter anyway......some like John Sopel announced they were leaving twitter and 4 hours later were back posting on it! I rarely use twitter anyway for anything other than Crypto stuff. Haven't been on facebook for anything other than seeing if anyone has messaged me for a couple of years. I have no interest in a timeline/newsfeed that is solely based on what it thinks I will like..........nor what any of my mates are eating posts several times a day. I would rather switch the TV and laptop off, plug in my latest vintage tube and listen to some music with a smile on my face. Literally la, la, la ing but with headphones on instead of fingers in my ears.
Nah, they won't be back. It's not quite the love in you're thinking of there, it's just people being civil, having discussions and generally it's currently all quite nice. What it is, is people (and in particular well known people) being tired of having everything they post hijacked by "blue tick" payers with agendas, angry shouty people, crypto ads and bot farm noise. As I said previously, it's not about deriding or being against free speech, it's not wanting to deal with arseholes. I think that's something anyone right minded would get behind, regardless of political persuasion. When Twitter first started, it wasn't a particularly political platform, but became a firestorm in that arena. Many people don't want to engage with that on social media, and that's absolutely understandable, and fair enough. The only place I talk politics online (in reality) is here (and I don't even really do that all that much). (By the way, Sopel didn't announce he was leaving Twitter. He said he was going to go to Bluesky, but would pop into Twitter occasionally. Which is what he's done).
I get what the idea is, and I actually think if it's done properly it's a very good one. The 'if' is doing a fair bit of heavy lifting there though.
Twitter has always been 80% bots, raiders and free advertising. Its hard for it to compete really with facebook's 3bn where the same happens. Everybody is at it. social media has replaced most legacy advertising and getting your tribe involved in raiding posts with your small product for free is a big thing on there and even moreso for the Crypto NFT community. Its a great platform for getting free outreach to people for your stuffs.......hence why big users like Guardian can happily say they are "officially" leaving twitter because they know their "tribe" will still be raiding like billy-o and their articles will still get linked up on there as much as they were before. Officially they leave but unofficially there will be as many links to guardian articles as there were when they were officially on it......but it makes them look good to make a stand. Bluesky may well gain traction and not be another "threads" but at the end of the day 100% echo chambers don't survive in social media land. They liked twitter when it was 90% them and 10% their opponents as they could keep kicking out the wrong thinkers and then back patting each other. Unless any wrong think follows them to bluesky they will soon get bored. The whole narrative of focusing on the nasty stuff like child porn / abuse etc spreads pretty quickly to "what our people have decided is false information" which is actually propoganda in the modern era as we have seen with the Hunter laptop and Covid silencing. I'm still a little bemused to be honest how Alex Jones can be sued for so much money for telling a lie? Maybe there is more to it than just what we hear on the general news but there are plenty of people that could be done for saying the earth isn't round or that the moon is actually 2000 miles away (or is that the sun) so maybe there was more than just saying a shooting hadn't happened which is what the MSM news present it as. I'm not overly a Musk fan myself. Not even a twitter fan really but I puzzles me how people think that everything should be silenced. It screams of censorship. Silencing your political opponents in Russia = bad. Silencing your political opponents in the "current" western world = Good. railing against Child porn? It is actually a crime. yes of course it should be taken down. railing against someone being liberal with the truth or even downright lying about something? Who is deciding what the truth is? Who is going to police this? Sorry to say that people should be free to say whatever they want to say and some people say nasty **** while other may unintentionally do so. That's humanity for you. You can ignore people and walk away rather than demand that wrong thinkers be silenced. OR should we round up those hippies that talk of "peace man" but believe in magic crystals that will give you positive vibes yet get incredibly angry to the point of explosion if you disturb their 1 hour meditation? Get the fires ready. If they die they weren't witches and we made a mistake, if they survive we were right. Even with Brexit (and yes we are done with that.) We are still following graphs made by economists (or were they customer service complaints people) that take an estimate and set it against an actual. The "evidence" before was based on projections. The evidence now is based on estimates. There is no comparing 2 realities here and yet we are supposed to believe that this is evidence and not the usual numbers game to support the groupthink? Its very easy to point fingers at "righties" (or lefties) for using X data to support their statements / policies but at the end of the day both are manipulations. Only a small amount of it is actually the full truth or facts to support the argument yet there's lots of finger pointing from both sides with the "told ya." Lots of anticipations of "gotcha" moments where the "you're wrong because my "evidence" say you are" but is it actually evidence? or could it be something designed to present aituation where "it would have been better, look, this expert says so." Brexit has been a ****show but how much of that is because of Brexit itself and how much has it been from the machinations of TPTB and every part of the blob to resist it having a chance to work? Is there a projection or graph based on "If the government, civil service any other bodies involved had decided on day 1 "OK lets try and make this work" vs the reality of what happened? Should there be 3 lines on that graph? Still in vs actual vs estimate of if they actually tried? Maybe a happy medium in there? Of course not because the political will is to "prove" it was a ****show from the start. Its like deciding a car is incapable of doing 100mph, then doing a test drive with no intent to see if it can and then saying.........see, I was right. I forecast it wouldn't do 100mph and the results are in. It only did 50mph. Surely we can all agree that even if you think Brexit has held us back that we have hindered ourselves "as a collective" by not even trying to make it work and that instead of 50mph we could have at least hit 75mph if we had tried?
"You can ignore people and walk away rather than demand that wrong thinkers be silenced." That's precisely what the people going to BlueSky are doing.
Every now and again people bemoan the high street closing and start shopping there again. They always end up back at Tesco a few months later though!
The thing with Twitter was that if you were vaguely well known, every post you did (regardless what it was about, politics or not) was answered with streams of abuse and invective from the blue tick crowd. Understandably people got tired of that. That's literally it.
Look at it this way. If you joined here, and it was full of half decent football discussion for a while, that's great. If after a time, with every post on here, I replied with "you're a ****", you'd block me. If everyone after every post just replied with "you're a ****", to the extent you couldn't block them all, because there were hundreds of them, you'd end up leaving the site and finding another one. And you'd be right to do so.
This snippet is hilarious. There are quite a few US companies that have moved from California to Texas. Spinning this as because of financial problems is funny. They may have moved for financial reasons but not because "they had to" to survive. The US has different tax regimes in different states, but there is also the political stance and what that has entailed which has driven many of the former darlings of silicon valley to exit especially since Newsome and his policies have advanced. From what I read on Far right news anyway
The problem with that statement is that the othering is the setup created by the one you think we should be directing our ire at. It is the rich that support the policy ot put money into the foreign in order to achieve what? It is the greedy landlords that want the "illegal" and legal immigrants in order to push up their profits. 2004 saw the beginning of a massive sea change in private landlords buying up all those first time buyer's houses as well as some big houses where they could house lots of people. Rental is big business as long as you have a big "customer base" and more people means its very easy to make money out of renting somewhere to live and even better if it is the government paying it because you can normally guarantee the government is gonna pay up on time every time. There is a balance of course but the majority of people are not doing what you describe there as othering. They do blame the real culprits of the problem because it is those real culprits that are supporting the policies in order to profit from them while hiding behind nice narratives about "freedom, people" blah blah which you seem to accuse "populists" of. Big business, megacorp, technocrats care nothing about people. they care about $ and if they can present their stance as being about people and hide behind that then great, especially when there is an army of gullibles that seem to be anti capitalist, anti nasty things but then defend the exact policies of the people they "used to" rail against? If you can buy up loads of property and then charge 6 (or more) people to share that 3 bedroom house half the monthly cost each then of course you are going to be fully behind "more people please" and if you can present it about giving people freedom, peace, love and unity, convince a large part of the active voices in the political sphere of that argument then no-one is looking at your profit making anymore because they are defending freedom peace love and unity instead.
When twitter started its advance was because of the political arena, quick little ditties of this and that, I'm hearing that sort of thing. It turned into the main app that journos and activists as well as those inside the actual political arena were using to get their "message" out there. Of course when things get bigger then things do get worse and when the past decade's politics has turned into 2 sides lying about being different to each other, making every little misdemeanor into some massive scandal. Every politician every day must resign because X........Politics in general has turned into a quagmire of sensationalism about everything and twitter has just echoed that. The fact that then in the years just before Musk the centrists tried succesfully to get these platforms onside to censor stuff that hurt their arguments was the point it all collapsed. The Biden laptop and Covid lab leak censorship just showed to what lengths those inside the actual running of countries were now able to control social media and legacy media. Even US daily's removed or "corrected" what they said on these things. That Musk has opened up twitter to allow both sides to lie about stuff again instead of toeing the line with the political narratives and censoring dissenters from that narrative is a good thing in my eyes. You can stop child porn or anything else that is actually illegal without censoring people or statements that do not agree with the agreed upon narrative. But we have seen in the past decade that debate has turned into talking over and showboating for that 10 second snippet to get onto the twittersphere. Debate has long been dead in terms of people with a platform whether on TV or internet. Its not even arguing these days. Its just shouting over and trying to get that viral snippet. Probably why they are gradually being replaced with individual time allocations rather than 1v1s in many cases although the 1v1 won't die out because people like to watch confrontation and name calling. Its the new Springer / Kyle format in the political forum.
This is an analysis of twitter from 2018 but you can date the political beginnings of domination in the twitter arena back to Barack Obama, The Arab Spring things like that which were not long after twitter made the mainstream. IT only started to really grow in the 2007-2009 time but it was well before Musk took over that it had descended into a cesspit of opposing views. The main complaints now seem to be that people who got their wish and had things silenced that didn't help their cause have had that reversed. It hasn't got worse, it is just back to how it was before they chose to censor "wrong think." i.e. distort things. I can remember MSM using it pretty early and some politicians early on but it was activism, mostly (so called) left wing activism that were more prolific. TLDR: Twitter was trash, then they censored one side of trash to make it seem like it wasn't trash, and now its back to the old trash again. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/41668/how-twitter-poisoned-politics
I pop in here "occasionally". Sopel's "occasionally" seems to mean a few times a day Is Sopel coming over to bluesky something to crow about? The guy literally vehemently defended Huw Edwards spewing out his anger at fake news and misinformation!
Good and they are free to do so. Hope they enjoy themselves and don't waste too much time "talking about twitter."
I think the confusion about "things getting worse" about all social media once it is established (bluesky will have to work hard to avoid the inevitable there) is that 10-15 years ago it wasn't about twitter or facebook per se. It was about influencing what would appear in MSM screen or print media. And that worked. News started reporting views or tweets from social media. But then politicians (or the strategists) saw this change and started to exploit that direction. Similar to soundbites they used to make at speeches to get that soundbite on the news. Was nothing new in the Thatcher Reagan years and they both did those soundbite slogans meaning for them to be the snippet on the evening news. Sturgeon did it all the time through any debates. It wasn't her policies that got those snippets. It was grandstanding on any opportunity to be anti [insert wrong think] so she was pouncing on any opportunity to cut someone like Farage off with a quip. No policy, just grandstanding and yay, retweets, replays and a chorus of folks saying "Pity we can't vote for Sturgeon" Hold that thought!. Vote for her not for any policy she has not even mentioned but because she got a 5 second quip in against the nasty chap! But viewing / social habits have changed bit by bit. People are increasingly moving away from TV and print and they are increasingly not getting their news from TV or print to the point now where most people don't get their news from TV or print. They get their news from chinese whispers which the majority of is from their own echo chamber be that left or right with a minimal amount getting any balanced news because that's who social media (and other internet) algorithms work. It gives you what you like and prefer But the whole political entry into twitter as with a lot of social media took off in the Barack Obama era. People don't realise how good his team were. It wasn't just that he was (and is) an insane orator. I picked up on this while he was running against Hilary watching the rallies on BBC news though the night in 2008. His team used all sorts of "new" methods on big data, targetting, influencing, social media! All those nasty things that were focused on when they cheated and brought about Brexit and Trump were used by Obama (more in 2012 but started in 2008) and they were not moaned about then because they brought about the "right" result. I only use twitter to spam Crypto stuff, raiding, getting messages out for people to spread further. I notice the odd trending. Most of my tweet reading is from the 5-10 years ago model of other platforms newspaper sites, here. lol, TV, bog sites, including tweets in their articles / reporting / posts. Not directly from twitter. Its is and always was a cesspit.
I'm spamming but here's a thought: Politics is not far removed from football. Every tackle the players react to these days as if it was the worst foul ever in order to influence the ref.....and by extension the fans. If we as fans looked at it neutrally we would see things for what they are but you we're not. Its our side and they are the opponents. So every tackle is greeted with such noise from the fans of the recipient as if it was a foul whether it was or not. Players squeal, roll around, put their hands up when they kicked the ball out their selves, claim everything is handball, get very angry for no reason other than to influence a decision and the fans do the same.....either fooled into or willingly wanting to get the decision. Nothing about truth or fairness or reality. Purely interested in their side getting the decision. Politicians will show faux anger at things, distort something someone said in order to make points, their army of supporters and influencers are either duped or willingly join in. Its not at all about "real" and all about here and now and it gets nasty. Do football players or fans think about how their reactions will affect the sport they love in the long term or even what might happen after the match? Nope. They react now either for effect or because they went with the flow or because they thought they saw something worse than what happened. "Its sport and this is real life, they are not the same" Maybe then they should think about this in real life before making mountains out of molehills and seeing only their opponents of being guilty of it! They might not be the same thing but the actions surrounding them are the same! There is not a lot of reality being looked at, just select "truths" from sources that support your viewpoint provided by people who agree with you (you being whoever, left or right, pro or anti etc.) and there is minimal actual neutral information out there at the moment. Almost everything out there, even on science and very important things, is dwarfed and crowded out by skewed "truth" designed to support a particular viewpoint. Hence we get "Tory Kuennsberg" from the left, "Lefty Kuennsberg" from the right when the reality is in this day and age she is very representative of what has become. She is Kuennsberg Kuennsberg. She is not at all Tory or Lefty in the publicsphere, she is all about Kuennsberg and not a lot more. Political correspondent used to be an "unsexy" role on the news. It has become star material in the modern era to the point that the focus becomes that person rather than the news they are reporting on. We could say Robin Day or others were like this but in reality they weren't the news. They had their show like Andrew Neill but were never supposed to be the unglamorous reporting the news per se but they were much more tuned into actually trying to get the information rather than constant interuptions or tutting or cameras doing close ups of their reaction while the interviewee was talking! Kuennsberg > Maitlis > Derbyshire (latter is the worst) are not interested in getting truth. They are interested in how they themselves come across and making sure they come out sounding like they are the star. Kuennsberg got called Tory because she was perceived as soft on Tories but then she gets her scoops by being part of the loop. She has no other contacts. Maitlis doesn;t get scoops but she isn't interested in news, just herself and how she appears. Derbyshire is vacuous and just interrupts, twists the words someone just said, draws straightlines and tits. but the left love her for some reason. Probably because she chooses social issues and appears to be hard on right wing politicians yet she asks questions and the interrupts an answer a few words in to tell the interviewee to answer the question she just stopped them from answering....yet again. Then says Wow yet again before sighing, looking away in faux disgust and tutting. GB News is not better. All the young presenters are awful grandstanding on issues, faux anger and all about their own stardom. Even Daubney looks like he is sucking a sweet half the time with his "stern" face and makes mountains out of molehills. However GB News has a lot more lighthearted stuff that pokes fun at itself. Mark Dolan, Darren Grimes, Headliners, Leo Kearse on Saturday are all light hearted shows that I enjoy and I like Michell Dewberry's show because its no nonsense and an actual accent on TV. Northern girl with Northern attitude which is very very rare on TV. They normally start that way and then turn into a heritage softy luvvie (Sara Cox.) I will stop spamming now Have some music to listen to: Gonna use the one 5th from the left. 1958 "k61 marked" ECC88 form the Mitcham Mullard factory
