Poll of the Day > Elon's handling of Twitter tells me that Twitter itself was a mistake.

(+) Yeah! (+)

adjl posted...

Are you actually suggesting that a functional verification system would somehow automatically make all verified people famous, and that failing to do so means it doesn't work? Because that's not at all what it's for, nor is that expectation even remotely in line with reality.

No I'm saying it should only include well known people. That could also include limited purpose public figures.

Revelation34 posted...

No I'm saying it should only include well known people. That could also include limited purpose public figures.

Do you not see any value in being able to know that the Twitter account for, say, an obscure game studio is in fact affiliated with that studio and not somebody impersonating them?

Revelation34 posted...

No I'm saying it should only include well known people. That could also include limited purpose public figures.

Well known to whom?

adjl posted...

Do you not see any value in being able to know that the Twitter account for, say, an obscure game studio is in fact affiliated with that studio and not somebody impersonating them?

Companies would be different since they're not just one person.

dainkinkaide posted...

Well known to whom?

The majority of people.

BlackJackCat posted...

I think society should re-interpret how it views social media

Social media is still a very new thing for society. It's only really been mainstream for a couple decades now. We still definitely have a long way to go to figure out how to implement it responsibly

Revelation34 posted...

Companies would be different since they're not just one person.

One-man game projects exist (Undertale and Stardew being some of the most notable recent examples, though obviously they aren't exactly obscure). Even then, companies and individuals function identically for the purposes of this discussion, so that's not a meaningful distinction. If it makes you feel better about the example, though, think about authors instead. Do you not see any value in being able to know that the Twitter account for the author of an obscure series of novels does in fact belong to that person and not an imposter?

You seem to be confusing "I don't care if certain accounts are verified" with "the verification process doesn't work." I'm not really sure why, given how obviously different those are, but that's very much a mistake.

Revelation34 posted...

The majority of people

There are very, very few people in the history of the world that are actually known to a majority of people. I'd be willing to bet that every single example you can provide of somebody that you feel should be verified actually is not, given how rare that is.

adjl posted...

But they could hear from a real person on Twitter, and Twitter is a perfectly fine platform for that. There's always going to be demand to gather all updates from individuals and companies that you're interested in in one place, especially without pressure for those updates to be "newsworthy" or otherwise passing through any sort of third-party curation that presumes what you want/need to see. Obviously, Twitter's algorithms and moderation do still end up curating your content to some extent, but you can still customize by following people and prioritizing their updates over others, and having a single site for that instead of having to visit a dozen different personal websites to check for updates isn't a bad thing.

But that is a bad thing, for more reasons than just my distaste for a social media website that wants to represent my proven identity. It's also bad because it contributes to the consolidation and monopolization of the Internet. We used to have so many websites, now they've all opted to just have Twitter pages. This modern Internet killed the Mortal Kombat forums, for instance.

"My personal gripe is a problem for all of society" the topic.

EvilMegas posted...

"My personal gripe is a problem for all of society" the topic.

I don't like the way society is headed, I'm not the first person with that take.

Blaming it on Elon buying Twitter or whatever this topic is ain't it though, fam.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

This modern Internet killed the Mortal Kombat forums, for instance.

It didn't kill them. It just provided an alternative that people liked better. As much as that's unfortunate for those that preferred the old communities that haven't been able to sustain themselves, that's just the nature of any service industry: People will leave one service if another one serves their needs better.

Are there issues inherent in consolidating the Internet into mega-sites that hold near-monopolies on whatever service they provide? Absolutely. We're seeing that with Twitter now, actually: Musk running it into the ground is causing problems for those that have come to rely on it and he's killing it faster than a competitor can take its place. But the demand is there and I expect several similar services will be competing to fill that vacuum in short order.

adjl posted...

One-man game projects exist (Undertale and Stardew being some of the most notable recent examples, though obviously they aren't exactly obscure). Even then, companies and individuals function identically for the purposes of this discussion, so that's not a meaningful distinction. If it makes you feel better about the example, though, think about authors instead. Do you not see any value in being able to know that the Twitter account for the author of an obscure series of novels does in fact belong to that person and not an imposter?

You seem to be confusing "I don't care if certain accounts are verified" with "the verification process doesn't work." I'm not really sure why, given how obviously different those are, but that's very much a mistake.

There are very, very few people in the history of the world that are actually known to a majority of people. I'd be willing to bet that every single example you can provide of somebody that you feel should be verified actually is not, given how rare that is.

The internet didn't exist before. The internet made famous people even more famous by exposure.

The world would be better off without social media. GameFAQs is the only tech company that deserves to live - everything else, from Google to Amazon to Facebook to Wikipedia deserve to die.

adjl posted...

It didn't kill them. It just provided an alternative that people liked better. As much as that's unfortunate for those that preferred the old communities that haven't been able to sustain themselves, that's just the nature of any service industry: People will leave one service if another one serves their needs better.

Are there issues inherent in consolidating the Internet into mega-sites that hold near-monopolies on whatever service they provide? Absolutely. We're seeing that with Twitter now, actually: Musk running it into the ground is causing problems for those that have come to rely on it and he's killing it faster than a competitor can take its place. But the demand is there and I expect several similar services will be competing to fill that vacuum in short order.

We didn't migrate to this because people liked it better, we migrated to this because it was cheaper than running and maintaining your own platform. If companies didn't rely on it, people wouldn't flock to it.