This begs the question to me, is there a way to "fix" Twitter, without greatly reducing its impact? It seems to me some people talk about making Twitter "the" public forum, but most of the fixes to Twitter seem to be about how to make it work for your niche. Which is great! Things shouldn't have to be big or making billions of dollars to be good. But "No politicians, no journalists, no institutions" doesn't sound like a public forum to me, and I can't imagine some people would buy Twitter in order to dramatically shrink it.
The only talk of "public forum" comes from people who are desperate to force others to listen to them. I don't need TERFs and neo-Nazis in my feed, but they want to be there.
There's plenty of non "public forums" out there. Hop onto a Matrix room, Discord guild, Subreddit, IRC room, Fediverse instance, whatever. The whole point of "social media" is that it's socializing "in the large". You might not like this, I don't either, but some people do derive value from socializing "in the large". The fact that so many people in this post go into the necessary contortions necessary to make Twitter work for them _shows_ how much latent demand there is for socializing in the large.
> The only talk of "public forum" comes from people who are desperate to force others to listen to them.
Occasionally, it's used by other people properly to refer to a space used by government for official purposes; I suspect much of the other use is dual purpose, that is, it intends to discredit the proper use as much as to advance a more overt purpose.
Not to mention that you can no longer view more than a couple tweets of a given user without having the experience blocked with a "sign in!" modal covering the screen, preventing further use of the platform. This change alone has made the platform less accessible than ever.
[self-promotion] My browser extension for iOS and macOS can stop this and allow you to browse Twitter while logged out: https://underpassapp.com/tweaks/
> Twitter is of course completely unsuitable as means of official communication
Whether or not you believe it is unsuitable for such purposes has no bearing on the fact that government has indeed used it for such purposes, and that this imposes legal requirements on the use of those government accounts as public fora that do not apply to Twitter generally.
> So you are for peaceful/voluntary online segregation of people who don't share your values. Does this translate to the real world?
Of course it does. It's called having friends.
If you're having a conversation in a restaurant, and a stranger at another table overhears you and decides to interrupt with their contrary opinion, do you "owe" them an argument, or do you tell them to mind their own business and go away?
And then will the interrupter whine, "A restaurant is a public place! If you wanted to have a private conversation, you should have had dinner at home."
There's almost no situation IRL where you're arguing with strangers. That only happens online.
> Nobody is trying to force you to engage with anyone on Twitter.
Have you ever... been on Twitter?
Seriously, Twitter randos often consider it a badge of honor to get blocked by someone after they tweet unsolicited hostile replies. "Ha, they blocked me, what a snowflake! Can't handle any criticism."
Weird take, we have all sorts of mores around “you don’t talk politics at work”. People go to different churches, some people choose private schools. Online seems to be the only place that we have this idea that people have to listen to each other.
It's wrong to exclude people from your twitter feed -- you have to be inclusive. Just like you don't get to pick your neighbor (you have to accept anyone that moves in next door). Well same online! Don't exclude others, but rather be inclusive.
