Some random observations on the state of social media given ~gestures~ everything.
This is in the context of me being in Canada, more specifically British Columbia, where the last week has been dominated by massive wildfires and evacuations and, this morning, the city I was in was rocked by a huge explosion. I mention Canada, also, because news can no longer be shared to Facebook or Instagram.
1. Nothing is as good as Twitter used to be for both finding information and sharing it. For finding information it is much worse now than it used to be but despite how bad it is, it is still far and away the best of any of the platforms I am on - including Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky. This is because it is still, somehow, the only place with both a chronological feed AND a robust search function
After Twitter, Mastodon seems to be second best but I still hate how bad the search is here. Unless you know the exact search term you are looking for it doesn’t really pop up that well. Plus, virtually zero official sources are on here. That’s another advantage to Twitter. Facebook has a lot of official sources but their search function is godawful. If Meta manages to get search and chronological they are easily going to become the place for breaking news. But I’m not sure they want it
Bluesky is pretty much a non-starter here. It’s like looking to tumblr for breaking local news
2. Although it is is better than anyone else, Twitter is clearly worse than it has been in the past. This is because there are notably fewer normal people on Twitter and notably more blue checks who are highjacking search trends for clout or something, and way, way, way more conspiracy theorists posting bad information. Also just a lot more jerks. But the official channels are still there
I was going to ask in what ways Twitter was worse (I've never used the site much), so this answers my question.
So it's not so much that Twitter itself is worse, but that the user based changed, causing kind of a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling prophesy of users leaving.
