My entire friend circle is outside of tech and hate politics, and are tired of Twitter imploding.
They all want something new, or at least Twitter before Elon.
Most recently, we were trying to find news about the Paris riots, and there’s nothing but misinformation (videos from other riots) spammed consistently, that have no community notes, and have nothing but racist twitter blue users pushed to the top of the replies.
It’s creating a huge fog of war when just trying to figure out what’s going on.
It’s like all the moderation systems have just gone offline.
Honest question, as someone who doesn't use Twitter: why don't you just read the papers?
For the specific case of the Paris riots, you could check on Le Figaro (right-leaning) and Le Monde (left-leaning) – yest, both of them.
I find that following two newspapers allows me to get a balanced-enough take on current events. No need to try to decipher some ultra-short quip from random people and infer the 90% of missing context on my own.
I can see the sweet spot for community-driven/social journalism:
- Get updates between the new cycles. If you can get the scores for the football match in tomorrow’s paper, why even need to see the game?
- Get more targeted information, i.e. my favorite pastry shop is where some stuff went down, was it impacted? Someone might have commented on that/taken photos nearby.
- Get an even more unbiased opinion. Both the right and left leaning papers might have the same sponsor they happen to not make disparaging remarks about, or the local government might be able to quash things.
Then again wherever you have eyeballs looking you’ll have people trying to push an agenda in the raw feed, whether it’s political, economic or clout chasing.
> Most recently, we were trying to find news about the Paris riots
I've been very frustrated by this for a few years now. At least since the start of the pandemic response, I've noticed myself having a very hard time finding news on topics the BLM protests/riots, trucker rallies, Paris protests/riots, etc that didn't feel extremely controlled or moderated. Finding what seems to be unbiased updates on the war has also been particularly difficult, though that's kind of expected given that it's effectively an active hot war between Russia and Nato at this point.
They all want something new, or at least Twitter before Elon.
Most recently, we were trying to find news about the Paris riots, and there’s nothing but misinformation (videos from other riots) spammed consistently, that have no community notes, and have nothing but racist twitter blue users pushed to the top of the replies.
It’s creating a huge fog of war when just trying to figure out what’s going on.
It’s like all the moderation systems have just gone offline.