There are a handful of cultural issues that I don’t think are overblown by media attention. This is one of them. It is simply impossible not to be exposed to misinformation in 2023. We all need better critical thinking skills.
While I would love to end this with a condemnation of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, I think it’s important to point out that many of us are complicit. Fund managers seeking the best short-term profits for their investments run funds whose shareholders include most of us. When we log in and look at our IRA or 401(k) accounts, we look for how much the value has increased, not what makes the most sense for society. Our account balance looks a little nicer when a company lays off 10,000 employees and the stock price increases.
It’s all entwined. To paraphrase Michael Corleone – “We’re all part of the same hypocrisy.”
Why did we think anything on the public internet was a place to let kids roam with no training?
Of course, when we create new laws or tools, we focus on the problem in front of us. Whether that be, in this case, trying to enforce an age restriction or requiring identity verification in some odd attempt at making it more difficult for people to engage in anonymous speech, we too often forget the details of how that would work exactly.
Think about it, services that tell you how many times your post has been shared on Twitter, auto-posting from a blog, automation involving automatic sharing of links, and scheduling of tweets, many of these things involve the API. Many of the tools we all use to share content on Twitter with minimal effort could either be gone or become more expensive next week. That will push a lot of excellent content out of the platform.
I have heard this before, but is the Twitter situation going to be the thing that moves the needle for RSS? I started using Revue to send newsletters last year as an option for people who were trying to follow my websites on social media but ran into the algorithm deciding not to shat them anything that was being posted, especially with Facebook Pages. It had some subscribers but not that many. After Twitter killed Revue, I also moved to Substack and have seen some growth, but I’m also realizing that we can’t replicate Twitter with email newsletters.
See a sample before subscribing here