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The slow, sad death of Twitter
(www.theneweuropean.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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I remember in the early days of the Musk takeover he was mocked for talking about introducing microtransactions using Dogecoin as a way to combat bots and scraping. And it was good he was mocked, because crypto was a stupid as fuck idea for about a thousand different reasons. It’s interesting to read how a lot of people here support the idea of automatically sending a fraction of a cent to a website for each post to discourage bots and support smaller servers though.
With how prevalent the AI and data scraping conversation has become, I wonder what the view of Musk’s Twitter would be if he had stuck with that original plan instead of selling meaningless blue check marks. Probably still extremely negative, since a system like that would kill engagement overnight without SEO pumping tweets anyway… but an interesting thought experiment.
Not like the monetization scheme of blue check marks even ranks in the top 10 of terrible Musk decisions at this point. Seems like the dude is just constantly making and reversing poor choices.
You realize that "conversation" is fake, right? There is no increased load on Twitter, Reddit, or other web services due to "AI data scraping". That was made up to distract from the material causes of Twitter's failure, namely:
Big tech companies that already run search engines already have a copy of all public Web pages, which they use for search engine indexing. They don't need to make a second copy for AI training; they can just use the same one.
Google can train Bard with the same copy of the public Web that they use to create Google Search; same with Microsoft, Baidu, or any other big company that runs a search engine.
And for everyone else, there's Common Crawl.
“Fake” from the side of data load, sure, I can see that, but there’s plenty of interest in trying to stave off the “dead internet” by incorporating new systems where bots and AI generated content aren’t profitable. That’s more what I was referring to.
People are here because they are tired of paying for social media by looking at ads and promoted shit and other shenanigans like rate limiting and being funneled through hostile UX. The "you are the product ..." business model of social media is collapsing in 2023 (LLM scraping, interest rates, inflation, enshittification, pick your poison, it doesn't matter).
Donation- and micro-transaction-supported social media sounds like a fantastic alternative who's time has come.
I also find it a bit rich to hear extreme pessimism about cryptocurrencies from a fediverse user. Crypto has exactly the same problems and exactly the same advantages over centralized approaches as the fediverse has, because it's more or less the same core idea. It takes hard times to learn or remember the importance of censorship-resistance. But I guess the hard times are here for social media/fediverse users, where as many people (especially in the western world) still have it really good with their currency.