What will Twitter be about? Introducing House of the Dragon to Gadget Lab with Tori Elliot and Lauren Lafourcade

Twitter has always had trouble figuring out how to moderate fast shifts in online conversation. It might get worse now that Musk has made cuts to the company and its safety systems.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED platforms and power reporter Vittoria Elliot about the changes coming to Twitter and how they may affect the future of the social network.

Tori wants you to encourage your male-presenting friends interested in fathering children to watch House of the Dragon on HBO. The new album is from Natalia Lafourcade. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.

Tiny Talk Town at GadgetLab – a talk with Elon Musk from the moment he heard about a big bang

Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. There is a person called Michael Calore. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by a man named Boone Ashworth. Solar Keys is our theme music.

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“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. The person has achieved something. We all live in Tiny Talk Town now, where all conversation is about Elon Musk.

Quiet Quitting: The Problem with Social Media in the Age of Noisy Incrementals and Surprising Excesses

In the workplace, quiet quitting is rejecting the burden of going above and beyond, no longer working overtime in a way that enriches your employer but depletes your own metaphorical coffers. On Twitter, it’s about not giving more to a platform than most people can expect to get back. If you’re not going to use it on yourself, you need to find a new way to use it.

A small group of people control a social media site. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”

So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. (Same goes for journalists.) Almost half of users send less than five times a month and most of their posts are replies. They go about their lives after checking in on current events, sports or celebrity news. They’re “lurkers.”

Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. When it comes to dealing with the complexity and chaos of New Followers, it’s better to simply sit back and observe. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. You should send a message, but then disengage. Keep one eye on it during basketball games. Direct the message threads to another location if you have to. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

Why scientists should jump on to science? A study of Mastodon’s rise and fall during the first half a million users in 2017

The open-source platform has added nearly half a million users in little more than a week — but should scientists make the leap? We examine the pros and cons.

Mastodon grew slowly after the first code was released in 2017, appealing mostly to free software enthusiasts. Then Elon Musk took control of Twitter for $44 billion. The promises of deep staff cuts and chaotic changes to the platform turned many dedicated users off the platform. It has taken a number of weeks to create a Mastodon account and to overload popular server with new accounts. Last year, donations to the nonprofit that runs Mastodon and where Rochko is CEO totaled 55,000 euros; it spent only 23,000 euros.

This means that individuals and organizations can host users on a server. geographical locations are represented on the server. Once they have joined a server, users can chat with others on that server, or post into the federated universe (or fediverse). Messages posted to most servers can be read by the wider Mastodon community, unless a user opts out.

You can post up to 11,000 characters in a Mastodon message, and unlike those on the micro-messaging site, they are not limited to 280 characters. Another difference is how users encounter content: Mastodon doesn’t have a place forTwitter’s recommendations. What you see is dictated by who you follow and what they share.

Mastodon is a place where you can go for drinks after a conference. “You get to chat to everybody; people who understand academia and the ground rules for academic conversations.” She compares it favourably with Twitter, where it feels like everyone is listening in and the world is watching. Ian Brown thinks that a lot of Mastodon users are academics.

That conversation comes with caveats, however. The new arrivals have caused tension on Mastodon, due to the fact that many of them have formed their own social media habits. The new arrivals are going to shift the decorum to be more robust, as they are used to sharing their work without engaging too often in conversation.

Bergstrom thinks the positives and negatives of the social networking site are related. He says that the public was given more transparency when it came to the uncertain process of science. And if some audiences wanted to leap on to messages of scientific certainty where there was none, that wasn’t Twitter’s fault, he adds.

There are other issues that might give users pause. Mastodon categorizes conversations around hashtags much more frequently than Twitter, partly because of its lack of algorithmic recommendations. Even though the platform has technical architecture, it is not an obvious way to corral conversations about a particular academic paper. A user asked for the function to be introduced after they reported the issue.

A Videochat with Rochko on Facebook and the Upgrade of Mastodon (ITP), an Open Letter to Oprah Wins

Since Musk took over Twitter, Rochko has been working long hours to keep his own server, Mastodon. Social, running, while also preparing a major upgrade to Mastodon, but he took time to videochat with WIRED from his home in Germany. The conversation was edited for clarity and length.

People want to hear that it’s been great, but I don’t want to be there. There is more work, there are more fires to put out. It’s incredibly stressful. I’m pulling 14-hour workdays, sleeping very little, and eating very little.

A new version of Mastodon software was released in conjunction with the whole story. You have to dedicate a great deal of time to that. Suddenly, you have to deal with responding to press inquiries, and running social media accounts to take advantage of the opportunity.

Yeah, it was good and gratifying at an objective level. Mastodon is used by so many people, like Stephen Fry, that I would like to just lean back and enjoy it. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to lean back and enjoy that. There has been an increase in funds due to all the new Patreon donations in the past 10 days, it’s been unprecedented.

Tweeting About Edson Activism: How Dan Sheehan Earned His First Job: Copywriting for an Income-Motivated Workforce

Many users followed suit, tweeting short eulogies for the platform. For some, like writer Dan Sheehan, gaining a platform on Twitter later allowed them to excel in their personal and professional lives.

“I built this following for myself, and that got me some of my first job offers just in the copywriting space. That’s how I paid the bills for a very long time,” he says.

Through copywriting, Sheehan was able to dedicate time to writing his novel, a project that was made a reality in part by crowdfunding through his large Twitter following.

“The fact that I was able to keep the lights on, the bills paid, while writing the book, and then have the book reach that audience of over 100,000 people directly, none of that could have been done through traditional means,” he says.

Creative fields have been surrounded by the children of the wealthy for the longest time. Twitter allowed you to build this audience that made you undeniable to the people holding the keys to that.”

Azucena was able to open a door into the journalism industry because of the help she got from social media.

“It’s just unfortunate that the diversity problem continues, and I don’t know how now, those communities are going to find each other… She says that she could follow people and read other people’s work if she had been following them on her phone.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/23/1138605036/twitter-shutdown-elon-activism-trump-career

Twitter can’t survive the Pandemic, but it’s an opportunity for me to learn more about the disease, the injustice that lies, and the vulnerability of people

An active member for years, wendi Muse is a PhD candidate with multiplesclerosis. She sent some of the personal stock she had amassed, as well as posting resources to help people get masks. She noticed that there was an increased demand for N95 masks in the community.

“In total, it’s going to be more than 12,000 masks that I sent out just on my own, literally from my living room since January of this year,” Muse says. She doesn’t believe that she would have been able to reach so many people if it hadn’t been for her influence on the social networking site.

It has been crucial because it’s made it so that I can learn more about the Pandemic while reaching out to other people who don’t have access to these resources.

Muse, and many other people, would be badly missed by the potential end of the social networking site.

I think it’s more difficult for people who are disabled and elderly, who may not have social networks in person, because of the uneasiness of not knowing.

Though Twitter has yet to fully collapse, people have already jumped to other social media platforms, leaving the Twitter town square a little less full than it once was.

On 11 December, Musk tweeted that his “pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” in an apparent attempt both to mock the transgender and gender-nonconforming rights movements and to malign the departing director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, who has faced abuse and death threats for his role in advising the US government response to COVID-19.

It would not be possible for me to know many scientists without it. “It increases democracy in science and gives you more opportunities, no matter where you are.”

At the same time prominent COVID-19 researchers experienced abuse and even death threats, as shown by a 2021 Nature survey. Bergstrom adds that researchers on the site oversimplified information, posted alarmist analyses or shared false information. And despite Twitter’s self-styled reputation as a public town square — where everyone gathers to see the same messages — in practice, the pandemic showed how users segregate to follow mostly those with similar views, argues information scientist Oliver Johnson at the University of Bristol, UK. For instance, those who believed that COVID-19 was a fiction would tend to follow others who agreed, he says, whereas others who argued that the way to deal with the pandemic was to lock down for a ‘zero COVID’ approach were in their own bubble.

Sigourney Bonner is a PhD student at Cancer and co-founder of the #BlackinCancer community. “I didn’t meet a Black woman with a PhD until I started my own,” she says. The use of #IAmAScientist because is an example of a movement united by the same hashtag being used to discuss racism, sexism, harassment and the like.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge studied the impact of misinformation on the social networking site, and found that false news stories spread much faster than real news stories. The false news also tended to arouse emotions such as fear, disgust and surprise.

In his study of hate speech on the internet, a PhD student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology discovered that users who used hate speech on the internet were more likely to have their message read by other users.

Science in the Making: How scientists come to terms with scientific collaboration on the social-media platform Mastodon, according to a comment by Bergstrom

“I don’t think we’ve done a good job of talking in school science classes about the process of doing science, and explaining to people how the social process of science operates,” he says. “When you actually see science in the making, it looks very, very different.”

After Musk mocked Fauci, Bergstrom locked his own account. “You can’t have meaningful and productive scientific collaboration on a platform run by [a] right-wing troll who denies science when its results are inconvenient to him and just simply to hear his audience cheer,” he wrote on Mastodon.

Rechavi says that researchers will try to find a similar social-media replacement after leaving the platform. I imagine that if scientists stop using the service, it will be replaced by something else. “I just can’t imagine going back to being disconnected from the rest of the science world.”

The stuff that I posted was getting a lot of engagement on Mastodon, despite the fact that I have 10 times more followers on social media.

According to researchers who spoke to Nature, there is still a need for trained scientists to point people to the best sources of evidence based information, even though the platform’s worst qualities have become more common. In response to Bergstrom, a health scientist at the University of Oxford, UK, called out people like him and stated that she feels duty-bound to carry on. I’m staying.”