Top of the list I’m presented with is the Colombian songstress Shakira. To sign up, you need to specify interests from a list that seems oddly weighted towards astrology and horoscopes, and you’re also given a choice of popular figures to follow. The transformative happening is always somewhere else, just out of sight, and I’m left looking at an utterly underwhelming spectacle.Įlon Musk: threatening to sue Meta over ‘unlawful misappropriation’ of Twitter’s trade secrets. “You must see it!” friends say of some cutting-edge production in a disused warehouse, and then you go there, walk from one darkened space to another staring at a mime artist or some dreary installation and wonder what it is that you’re missing. So what did I encounter in my hours spent lurking on Twitter and Threads? The experience reminds me of my unsatisfactory visits to immersive theatre. I don’t have the spare frittering capacity to indulge two further platforms of screaming opinion. I already spend more time than I knew I had scrolling through images of friends’ holidays and reels of comic pratfalls on Instagram. That was another reason to resist the lure of the tweet: time management. Although I’m not an active user, it’s been largely inoffensive in my experience, and a near perfect waste of time. On Facebook I’d had maybe two barbed disagreements in 15 years, which was more than enough. I know this because I’m a member of Facebook and not infrequently friends post messages saying that they are in an almighty scrap over on Twitter with someone I’ve never heard of, and put up screenshots of their toxic exchanges. After all, that’s what other people – particularly, but not exclusively, men – seemed to do. One of the reasons I never got round to signing up to Twitter was that I feared I might end up arguing with strangers late into the night about things that didn’t really matter that much to me. The transformative happening is always elsewhere, just out of sight The experience reminded me of immersive theatre. And going against all my tardy adopter instincts, I also joined Threads to see what all the fuss was about. The perfect time to join, then, for someone like me who is congenitally late to the party. Zuckerberg has form on imitating other apps, Instagram’s reels being a barely disguised take-off of TikTok.Īll of which means that Twitter appears in danger of becoming inessential. Twitter also now finds itself battling with a new competitor, Threads, the strikingly Twitter-like platform launched last week by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta empire (which includes Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp). One critic, the blogger and author Cory Doctorow, poetically declared the regression a process of “enshittification”. In the novelty-fetishising world of tech, where looking a day out of date can prove terminal, there have been growing complaints that Twitter is going backwards.
That at least had been the prevailing wisdom until Elon Musk began tinkering with his new $44bn toy after acquiring it last October.
0 kommentar(er)
