Wil Wheaton has quit the tire-fire we call Twitter and now, because of an abusive reception, he has quite Mastodon as well and has sworn of social media altogether. Leo Laporte of TWiT has also signed off Twitter. I think Wheaton sums up the problem nicely. "I watched, in real time, as the site I loved turned into a right wing talk radio shouting match that made YouTube comments and CSPAN call-ins seem scholarly. We tried for a couple of years to fight back, to encourage Twitter to take a stand against bad actors. Twitter doesn't care about how its users are affected by themselves, though."
I used to write about the concepts of 'push' and 'pull' a lot more than I do today. The idea is that the web (or anything else) could work one of two ways: either you you pull the stuff you want, or you let others push you content (and you filter the stuff you fdon't want, if you can). RSS is an example of pull; so is podcasting, so is the web itself. Email, radio, TV, social network feeds and telephones are examples of push. I have always been a proponent of pull. Push can be (and inevitably will be) abused by people. They will say we need suggestions, that there's too much choice, that we don't know what we want, that some messages are too important to be left to change, that there must be a common social fabric - whatever. But in the end it Always. Gets. Abused.
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