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- cross-posted to:
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Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
I mean it was never actually a good place for news, aside from the top five trending stories, if you wanted infinite bad takes on them.
I’d argue it was a good place for FAST news. For a lot of major events you can find posts and videos from users before the media releases anything, which is kind of a first for humanity at least in terms of accessibility.
Now, if you’re looking for ACCURATE news…
Yeah, I’d say that it was useful to gather sources that had to be vetted for accuracy. Honestly, I’d also say it made a good source for the media, where they’d have the job of vetting it and putting out material with more delay but also more accuracy.
Yep I heard that it was great for journalists looking for info on a developing story. You could usually follow a hashtag around to find videos from different angles and witnesses to follow up with / interview.
Hopefully that builds up on the new platforms too
Its specific speed/accuracy tradeoff made it a very good fit for news which you need to know quickly, but had low stakes if it was incorrect. A great example of this transit delays/cancellations, where you probably don’t care about the specific reason why a train is delayed and just want alternative options asap.
It was often much more effective to directly follow transit agencies and/or workers for info, rather than use their official website.
It was good for fast news in the same way that I can multiply long numbers fast by always saying 62 immediately.
It’s no longer a good place for news, discussion, or even real opinions. It’s just an echo chamber of hate and closed-mindedness, and increasingly just bots talking to each other.
Right, and though it is certainly worse, my argument is that this was true before the rich brat bought it.
It depends. In the early days of the Android ROM scene, Twitter was the best place for news. Cyanogen and all the crews basically announced their new releases exclusively on Twitter. There has been a similar vibe for other scenes over the years as well. Discord is largely taking over that space these days, but I miss the simplicity of following one or two people whose updates I cared about a bunch over the new reality where I’m in 30 Discords and they’re all chock full of notifications for endless nonsense I care nothing about.
I mainly used XDA then, but you right. I had truly forgotten how nice it was around '10 - '11.
It was big among the netsec/sysadmin crowd too, it was the first place you’d hear of 0-days in the wild, or whether a popular site/service was down.
You could follow journalists you like or outlets though