> Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.

> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.

Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!

I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.

I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...

I would recommend Pleroma over Mastodon. Character limits are configurable and I've often seen ones 10k or higher. While Mastodon can see and reply to the fedi posts that long, it may not be able to make them. I reply to people on fedi quite a bit, personally. I think people are conversing.

Bluesky inherited Twitter's toxic culture and most of its users switched over for political reasons. That creates an echo chamber full of the worst "2020 cancel culture liberal" types who think they're radical but are really just annoying.

There are parts of the community where it's a lot better (atmosphere and open source devs, some digital artists who are not vocally pro/anti AI) but most people will see the front page that's almost exclusively US politics and get turned off.

I don't know how to fix this. Maybe create a new site that starts out focused on a specific large, politically mixed group like gaming or football fans and then expands to a general audience. Or use a personalized algorithm by default and initialize it randomly so new users see more diverse content.

Even if the platform weren't originally a microblogging one, longform text is basically over at a societal level because the majority of internet users now are on phones, and that medium discourages longform text. You can see this from Reddit, where comments a decade ago where often much longer, a couple of solid paragraphs, and now they tend to be microblogging-length inane quips.