Canned Dragons
I Quickly Eat My Words
Welp, it looks like things are already going south on Twitter. For the first time (maybe ever), someone I follow liked a racist tweet. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, I thought as I unfollowed the individual who boosted the tweet. Then I saw that Elon Musk was promoting a conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi on Twitter.1
As people wait and see what is going to happen to Twitter, the early signs are not good. It reminds me of when Trump became president and people thought the office was going to make him “more presidential.” We all saw how that worked out. Not to mention that Twitter was one of the ways that the Commander-In-Chief revealed just how consistently unpresidential he was. Similarly, some are speculating that Musk will become less of a troll now that he owns the business, but it doesn’t look like the leopard will change his spots.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I hope all of this brings more people to Micro.blog, which, while it has its network biases, is much more civil than Twitter, on the whole. Leon Mika has some words of advice for those coming to Micro.blog from Twitter.
You’re not feeding an algorithm here. There’s nothing like trending topics or recommendations that takes what you write and throws it around the network. Instead, you’ll get something better: real humans reading and replying to your post. So write for humans. If a post needs to be longer than 280 characters, then it can be: no need for threads here. Also, adding hashes in front of words does nothing other than make what you write harder for others to read.
I love the line about hashtags. Really, they do just make things more difficult to read!
The tweet has since been removed, but I did see it with my own eyes before it was taken down.↩︎