when did twitter stop being cool?

2015

the 2013-2015 period is when it really started to go downhill imo

2014 tipping point, 2015 is a cavalcade of downgrades

280 char was an improvement tho

when did favstar go down

gamergate

I mean it was never cool but I vaguely remember it being fun sometimes before then

2006

2011.

man I remember the fun days when all I did was use Twitter all day to try and get my fav rappers to tweet me back.

pretty successful there!

when did the blue checks start?

I started on twitter in 2009 and there were verified accounts then

it’s still cool imo, ur feed probably just ossified and u don’t follow cool ppl

TweetDeck has been around since 2008. (I've been using it since 2012.) Looks like 2015 is when they rolled out "TweetDeck Teams," which I have never heard of, but I guess is a way for brands to give multiple people access to the same account without sharing a password.

also none of the ui features in the poll affected its quality or coolness at all, just something for people who get traumatized by website redesign to hyperventilate about. even switching to 260 characters, i had already forgotten about 140 after 2 days

Personally, I feel like there's a clear divide in my own Twitter experience between pre-2016 and post-2016, but it's less a matter of Twitter no longer being "cool" and more just a general shift in tenor (for obvious reasons).

When did they fuck up the TL so you no longer were presented with things chronologically?

it felt cooler prior to 2015-16 but i was also pretty bewildered by it for my first couple years on it (joined in 2013) and part of it feeling chaotic and wild was probably my confusion. i definitely remember feeling really annoyed at a lot of the big absurd/weird accounts of the time becoming angry political accounts. but then i just unfollowed a lot of rage-follows and now my feed is a delight. it’s hard to separate trends in coolness from a general aging effect of my twitter “cohort“. i follow some younger ppl but like my feed is definitely aging with me

When did they fuck up the TL so you no longer were presented with things chronologically?

― Fenners' Pen (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, January 13, 2021 11:54 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

u can still make it chronological by clicking a button at the top. doesn’t make a huge difference in my xp, mostly it means i don’t see tweets by british ppl

flopson at 10:41 13 Jan 21

also none of the ui features in the poll affected its quality or coolness at all, just something for people who get traumatized by website redesign to hyperventilate about. even switching to 260 characters, i had already forgotten about 140 after 2 days


I am a dork and was huffy about the switch to 260 and also got used to it in about a day, and now could not imagine having only 140 characters

yeah fsr i cared about that one too at the time. i thought brevity was the soul of wit or wtv but 260 is still pretty brief and tweets are still quite witty

When did they fuck up the TL so you no longer were presented with things chronologically?

2014 - algorithmic feed

what was the first threaded tweet that was like 1/ STRAP IN that might be it

the algorithmic feed is when it started to go downhill. before then, there was much less of the “main character” effect and the people who interacted with each other seemed to actually want to interact with each other. there was less drive-by dunking

also none of the ui features in the poll affected its quality or coolness at all, just something for people who get traumatized by website redesign to hyperventilate about

stars vs hearts rly did affect both quality and coolness, made losers thirsty

2015 is when Quote Tweets were introduced, which some have pointed to as a sign of downfall.

2006 and it has just continually gotten worse.

Still amazing how easy Twitter makes it to block anyone who advertises on the platform, my first instinct is to block any sponsored post and I now get almost entirely ads for Eastern European farm equipment and HIV medicine aimed at doctors.

when they fully b0rked 3rd party apps I had to switch to looking at it on laptop instead of phone in queue / bus / bathroom, and thus got fewer ads than ever

Whenever that lameass “Why I Quit Spin Magazine” tweetstorm happened.

I disagree with all posters above, increase to 280 was and is bad, the witty tweets are invariably the short ones, the double-sized tweets are for people who would very visibly Rather Be Blogging (see also: 1/ STRAP IN)

2015 is when Quote Tweets were introduced

hoo boy, yeah, i voted for the right year

twitter has never been cool?

I don’t even own a tweet

when did the blue checks start?

Yeah this. I also remember the day they introduced "liking" tweets and within hours it felt like a competition for who screams the loudest.

I think 2010 or 2011 was when "liking" tweets started. Probably 2010 so that's my vote.

i guess i keep substituting "good" for "cool" in the thread title. i remember twitter being "cool" in 2009. but also 2012 was like the peak of ppl using twitter as a platform for increasingly surreal "jokes," which felt "cool" to me at the time. the point of no return for the latter was like 2014 i think, and then the feed was consumed by the five-year-long american election

yeah the election was a huge turning point, I do sort of feel without any real evidence that going public was the biggest blow to coolness and goodness

quote tweets might be the best answer, because everyone wants to dunk on dumbshits it had the effect of boosting the worst tweets

early 2009 - when a load of celebrities like Jonathan Ross suddenly started joining and going on about it

yeah i was also thinking "good" instead of "cool." idk if twitter was every really "cool," tbh

TWITTER: I don't get it

'I use myspace and del.icio.us and shit I'm not a luddite'

I knew a few people who tweeted their way into careers and big opportunities in 2011/12, so it seemed good/cool to me then. I feel like it was around 2015 that I first started hearing the performatively-bleak "this is a hell site" type rhetoric from the heavy twitter users i know, then a couple years later is when it seemed to shift into being an actually-bleak manifestation of irl depression/device addiction. So I guess I would vote for 2016.

"So, micro-bloging, then."

twitter as a whole cant really be cool (except maybe at its infancy. and even the doubtful, many old tweets are bad—a lot of the 2012 era weird twitter humour is cringey so random larfs now—and it’s likely just people who got in early claiming it was cooler before as they get old and confuse the two phenomenons) just due to its size. but it contains within it a lot of what i think of as the coolest part of the internet. the more visual platforms are hotter and more fashionable but nothing’s as funny or smart. a big platform on which to post jokes and pithy observations is an obvious thing and will survive in some form forever as a permanent part of culture imho

I knew a few people who tweeted their way into careers and big opportunities in 2011/12, so it seemed good/cool to me then

from what i can gather rubbernecking media twitter this is now the only way to break into the industry. which i could totally see ruining it for everyone in media

a lot of the 2012 era weird twitter humour is cringey so random larfs now

was true at the time too, very few of them were good

the few that were good tho were v v good

unfortunately i find your posts itt depressing flops

I basically like it btw

I knew a few people who tweeted their way into careers and big opportunities in 2011/12, so it seemed good/cool to me then

Sounds like a dystopia to me.

any time a friend of mine has more success than me its a dystopia

otm

unfortunately i find your posts itt depressing flops

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Thursday, January 14, 2021 3:16 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

my twitter feed is good! i see good stuff ever y day. can’t complain

Twitter kills Vine is the one that most annoyed me, aside from that I don't think the site is noticably any worse than it has been at any time in the half-decade I've been using it consistently, and I wasn't around much in the fun early days.

no social media platform was, is, or ever will be cool

the internet is not cool. computers can be cool. sorry i don't make the rules.

the internet is a some hellraiser cenobite puzzle box shit

Beandad

maybe it was a time/place thing and I was just the right age, but i kinda liked MySpace. it was tacky and stupid and customizable (obv problems for advertisers and dead-eyed freaks like Zucc & Jack bent on... whatever the fuck they’re bent on)

an old work friend of mine who occasionally writes about poker for B3tF4ir was an early twitter enthusiast who saw the corporate comedy crossover potential and he hired a professional comedy writer to do the Arena Flowers twitter account. He got a bit big-headed when the FT did a write up on him and I think it's been mainly downhill for him since then. I think the Arena Flowers account is still going but I'm not sure if he makes any money out of it. Before the rona he was struggling to get by and airbnb-ing the spare room in his Berlin flat

Genuinely think twitter has gotten better the last couple years. Nadir was 2015-2018 or something. Trump getting banned is def a positive also

Not only was it always terrible, but Twitter and Instagram have substantially devalued the very concept of cool.

^^^ man alive knows what's up.

man alive is the definition of cool, this is well documented

only apart from when he posts about politics where he sucks badly!

calzino, another cool poster I’ve definitely never tired of

HI DERE

lol

if that was actually funny, then I'm going back to twitter for a non-neanderlol style laughfest

well we know twitter’s not cool anymore are you sure it’s a place you’d want to be

sorry all I’m just weary from every variety of media this month and the question posed by this thread clearly isn’t for me. I’m off

well yeah I don't know what cool is tbh. I'm knocking on 50 and poor as fuck, that deffo isn't cool. But anyway haven't you got some US flag nearby to get some release from?

Tied up leading the detail keeping Iran from assassinating any ex-Presidents IIRC

scene missing

when tombot starting posting iran from the thread

2005

man alive is the definition of cool, this is well documented

― sound of scampo talk to me (El Tomboto), Thursday, January 14, 2021 6:15 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Plaid chucks are the definition of cool iirc 😉

2005

Tbc when I said 2006 I meant before March.

there should be an option for those who think it's still cool. it's had its ups and downs but I still think it's the only major social media platform to spawn its own art form/form of writing. I don't think Trump getting banned is any more significant than increasing the character limit to 280. I know a lot of people spend way more time on their phones and on Twitter than me, but as a casual user, I've always liked it and still do, to basically the same degree.

fwiw, my bigger objection to it is just that I find it to be a miserable and harrowing place to spend time, like being in a cave full of shrieking bats. I just get into a terrible state when I'm on it, and that's why I dropped my account, and, unlike other addictive social media, never felt the urge to go back.

media twitter killed it

"Not only was it always terrible, but Twitter and Instagram have substantially devalued the very concept of cool."

I hate the word influencer. Sickening.

It’s true. Coolness thrives on mystique, scarcity. Clout is the opposite and the two forms of social currency cannot coexist.

v hard to be cool while imploring your audience to subscribe to your channel and smash that like button before playing a song you're still working on

as long as the 'gram exists, twitter will be cool, at least in a relative sense

It has the time, it has the power
It's yet to have its finest hour
Twitter

Had to go w/ 2015 because of indexing, "enhancing" the algorithm, and ditching the fleeting, dissolving character all together.

media twitter killed it

It's nice to go into a cave full of shrieking bats, but only for a few minutes.

cave full of shrieking bats is otm. it isn't always my twitter experience, but when it is, i know it's time for a break.

I love following people from Australia and England who are outside of our political context. Brexit talk is so soothing to me.

Outside your political contesxt, I think you mean.

This is not cool?

2018: Deepfakes could seriously destabilise global politics in the coming years and we should be alert to the dangers of disinformation spreading at a faster rate than ever before.

2021: …

pic.twitter.com/JLl8NgoQrA

— Pete Fraser (@petefrasermusic) January 15, 2021

there is still a lot of funny and clever stuff on Twitter

i love that Wellerman vid

i enjoy Twitter

i like things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_OXAOILYq0

who are the ppl being faked there?

Just 4 lads I think:
https://thetab.com/uk/2020/06/10/we-spoke-to-the-boys-in-this-picture-and-theyve-had-enough-of-your-jokes-161026

i don’t get the shrieking bat cave thing anymore. at one pt i felt an obligation to stay on top of the discourse and follow a certain core set of highly central accounts in politics media twitter, but there’s actually no reason to do that. the side effect is im rarely more than tangentially aware of what the main character of the day is. like i only saw passing reference to the fact that other people were tweeting about something to do with a bean dad, i never saw anything g directly about it and still haven’t looked it up

i always thought that “hell site” was something that big accounts said because once u got to a certain level of followers u start to get the attention of nazis and your tweets gets RTd and dunked on by random communities, and then smaller accounts just started parroting it unthinkingly even though essentially no one interacts with them and they can perfectly customize their experience

the thing is that people are just as hateful to one another in real life, and the attribution of it to twitter is 100% due to people not wanting to face that fact

ironically the "I'm not reading all that but I'm happy for you or sorry that happened" probably reflects the average person's amount of actual care for everyone else in his or her life, but because it's twitter it's twitter's fault

xp not, imo, a fact

im probably meaner to ppl on ilx than twitter, and irl i recoil in horror and lose sleep if i ever say anything even borderline misconstruable as impolite

if you're mean to people online that still counts as being mean to people, sorry to inform you

not what was said tho

im meaner to ilxors irl fwiw

it's exactly what I said; people compartmentalize being mean online as not being mean, and then blame it on whatever online service it is

i usually regret being mean on ilx. usually i just don’t look at the thread for 2-3 days

the thing is that people are just as hateful to one another in real life,

Not, imo, a fact, and exactly a quote of what was said

what I meant is that people do not become less hateful to one another just because the medium changes

i think that's fair enough but i do think the medium matters or changes things in ways which makes it very difficult to be sure about any big statements sometimes?

I think that's something that's probably open to serious challenge

xp

xp may have read that wrong tbh

If its "people dont behave any differently" then ime thats not right

If its "the same behaviour is no different just because of the medium" then it's up for debate

i love that Wellerman vid

i enjoy Twitter

i like things

like for instance today the Designated Wrong person was someone who said that Disney IPs were for children and people shouldn't like them. every other day the Designated Wrong person is people who watch Disney IPs. the only constant is hatred of people.

"Designated Wrong person" is not a thing that exists

And Disney ips are for children

Even searching Twitter for Disney I have no idea what that refers to

I do see tweets like this and they're correct that the Aristocats are cool

Disney + has these super cute little mini docs. On one, a Pixar script supervisor is talking about how she noticed that their movies were heavily weighted towards more male characters, and male characters having more lines...

— Ashley Nicole Black (@ashleyn1cole) January 16, 2021

oops like this

Who needs "That Cats Movie" when The Aristocats exists#Disney #TheAristocats pic.twitter.com/YxcoIQTHhU

— Movie Madness (@CinematicAppeal) January 16, 2021

“Designated Wrong person" is not a thing that exists

― John Wesley Glasscock (Hadrian VIII), Saturday, January 16, 2021

...except on ilx and all other social media

wow wrong again

lol

Denigrated wrong person

"Designated Wrong person" is not a thing that exists

― John Wesley Glasscock (Hadrian VIII), Saturday, January 16, 2021 8:27 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

"the main character," whatever, but it is a thing that exists

the tweet I was referring to -- I don't agree with the rest of the thread, but "you are choosing to give a corporate entity your creative energy" is a sentiment expressed over and over during the "if you disliked that martin scorsese movie but like the marvel cinematic universe you are bad and wrong" cycle and accepted as the self-evidently correct take that if you disagreed with you deserve to be mocked forever. but now it's self-evidently incorrect

"Fanfic is collaborative" "it's about community" nah sorry it's all corporate IP. Ultimately, someone else legally owns it, and you are choosing to give a corporate entity your creative energy.

— RS_Benedict (@benedict_rs) January 16, 2021

like if you're going to tell people they're horrible people for doing/thinking something at least just make up your mind on what you need to not do to be horrible

At least it changes every day tho

Lot to be said for that

maybe different people think and are saying different things, can we get a spreadsheet

Jayslack.cls

Dmactypos.ffs

I mean no, there is not a lot to be said for that, because I never know what is and is not the right thing to do and think among morally neutral things, like being a marvel fan

It must be a matter of opinion so. I think the variety is good, it keeps my interest. Its probably down to how one uses it i guess.

I never know what is and is not the right thing to do and think

This is called existence. You get used to it.

That tweet looks more like an issue of fandoms/fan communities than 'the twitter discourse' or whatever. Those fandoms have a habit (from the outside) of blowing up irrelevance into huge moral causes, which is why they're almost universally bad.

How many people think about or care about fanfic at all on a daily basis?

writing fanfic about Disney IPs is vastly morally superior to paying money for Disney IPs

there would probably be fewer "main characters" if twitter as a platform didn't encourage people to declare their takes in the pithiest, smuggest, least nuanced language possible, thereby inviting equally pithy smug unnuanced responses. there are plenty of twitter users who display intellectual curiosity and thoughtfulness but those things obviously don't drive engagement

i won't go so far to say that people like that don't exist in real life, but it shouldn't be difficult for most adults to foster a social life free of them. ime people like that attract people who can tolerate them and repel everyone else. social behavior that is much more difficult to replicate on twitter and other public-facing social media platforms.

in real life i am never going to be encouraged to supply a reaction to a brief statement a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend said

“there are plenty of twitter users who display intellectual curiosity and thoughtfulness but those things obviously don't drive engagement“

but it’s fairly easy to curate your own experience to foreground those people

not saying it isn't. you can surely find a pocket for yourself away from the big mean discourse, but then we wouldn't really be talking about what we're talking about

Umm ... what is an IP in the context of Disney?

m/l: a character/concept/setting and the associated registered copyrights and trademarks

Ah, OK. That’s all I know IP to mean but the context of “Disney ips are for children” threw me

See the corporate boardroom drama ip man for a full background

^ arf

The thesis is that is is not ideal for grown-ups to have a major emotional investment in, or to build their personality around their regard for, stories about cartoon mice or space elves or superheroes.

(Especially as they do not have discrete authors, and are controlled by a company that actively cares about exploiting the reader for money 100% more than thye are interested in telling a meaningful story (via the means of financially exploited authors): the glimpse I caught of what I'm inferring Katherine's discourse to be was a sneeringly-phrased imprecation against training-wheels authors teaching themselves by making art about those characters, for fun.)

realistically, in that trite punk rock, well-intentioned way, probably 2007-2008

then it turned into this ugly monster where the good people just chill on its bunions but you can still smell its stinky feet

Twitter fucking sucks, it has always sucked. All social media is garbage.

The lifeblood of twitter is all about WHO is saying what and to be SOMEONE on twitter all you have to do is: whatever it takes using an insufficient amount of characters to do it. I don't trust anybody on twitter.

Twitter is great, just don’t follow shitty people.

Twitter is great when your pal wins a Gwyneth fanjo candle in a quiz, it explodes when lit, she sells the story to a tabloid, and the story goes viral with many, many LOLs.

If I had a nickel...

I upset Ripper Owens on Twitter once

I noticed a few years back, in myself and others, that any assertion I made in a public online forum had a subconscious primary motivation. I'd conceive of an assertion, think it was coming from a particular place, but in retrospect, I'd be able to see the subconscious motivation for making that assertion. In certain cases, the primary motivation would be full-tilt psychological projection-- identifying a pattern of behaviour in others, publicly speaking on it, without realizing (at the time) that I was, in fact, describing my own behaviour.

Having noticed this, I became more trepidatious about making online assertions. Twitter is, I think, just the most obvious arena for this tendency to thrive. I see rich people asserting that they're poor, and accusing others of being ostentatious about their wealth. I see the smuggest individuals I've ever met accusing others of smugness.

I mean, even this post itself has to come with a disclaimer... I'm not posting this to claim that I'm "above the tendency toward psychological projection in making online assertions", just that it's kinda prevalent, a constant byproduct of being online, in my own posting and others

Extending generosity that they might not deserve, you could imagine that smug people are extra-sensitive to it in other people because they are trying to fight it in themselves... maybe.

im just extra sensitive to it bc im a perfect judge of other people, nothing more to it rly

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

never was i had myspace!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

write in vote for whenever half of all posts in the world became reaction gifs

ILX majority otm.

twitter stopped being cool right here

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsS6UfSXYAMMvKX?format=jpg&name=medium

Trump's getting back in in 2024.

Demolition Man

People are sharing the many films Sylvester Stallone has featured in after a user asked if people could name a movie that the actor has starred in that was not from the Rocky or Rambo series

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/06/jack-dorsey-is-offering-to-sell-the-first-tweet-as-an-nft.html

poll ultimately OTM

ffs you could probably buy a set of ancient Sumerian stone tablets for that price

it seems like a great way to meet new people, talk about interesting ideas, but also be silly and have some fun once in a while. seriously considering signing up for an account and getting in on the conversation.

The thing that tells me to Login/Signup no longer seems to have an X so I can't get rid of it :(

Oh, okay. I can see if I c&p to incognito mode tab.

was 280 chars really only in 2018 it feels like it's been around much longer

imagine what tweet threads would look like if they lowered the character limit to 14

The thing that tells me to Login/Signup no longer seems to have an X so I can't get rid of it :(

― Tapioca Tumbril (James Redd and the Blecchs), Monday, January 31, 2022 11:36 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

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