IMHO, Twitter had not “collapsed.” Less popular? Sure. Infested with bots? You bet. No longer the central nexus of elite journalistic thought? Absolutely. But it’s still chugging along, somehow. Resolves N/A

So, is that "internally siloed" criterion intended to specifically disqualify Mastodon?

@AndrewHartman It disqualifies mastodon for sure, but I was also thinking of discord, Reddit, private group chats on messenger apps, and whatever the new substack social network is. None of them are sufficiently similar in shape to Twitter IMHO

@LarsDoucet So, I'm not someone who actually uses social media of any stripe - maybe you can explain to me why the flatness and enforced brevity of twitter is useful (or at least successful).

@AndrewHartman Oh I'm not claiming that it's useful or successful or even good. I'm just saying that's essential to what makes twitter, twitter. It's the unique thing that sets it apart.

Twitter's core value proposition is three things: 1) it's where elite discourse happens (note all the headlines in major newspapers about someone merely tweeting something), 2) a bunch of famous and/or allegedly important people are on there, and crucially, 3) it flattens the distance between any two people on the service. You can follow, retweet, and send messages to anyone at any time, and everything anyone does is by default in public for everyone to see.

My point is that I think you can't pull this off under modern circumstances, because e.g. Taylor Swift will only join a new social network on her terms, not yours, and people like her don't actually want the fundamental vulnerability that comes with Twitter. Twitter was able to pull it off because it grew so quickly and got those network effects locked in that anybody who felt important felt compelled to be on there. But in the current landscape my prediction is that most of the major people responsible for the majority posts on twitter, when considering a new platform, will want two things: 1) maximize their ability to reach the people they want, and 2) minimize the amount of vulnerability they are signing up for. The way this plays out in my mind, is if one platform takes over, it will have internal siloing that keeps sub-communities mostly apart from one another (akin to Discord and Reddit or any messenger app with lots of private group chats), or if anything shaped like Twitter takes over, there will be multiple versions and different communities will go do different places, and it will all be fragmented rather than mushed all together like Twitter was.

@LarsDoucet Also RE this: "So, I'm not someone who actually uses social media of any stripe", I'd argue that Manifold Markets is a social media platform in disguise 🙂

@LarsDoucet I guess it has some of those features, but given that the commentary around the primary purpose of the platform is fairly topical, I don't really consider it to be "social." I certainly don't really keep track of who any of you people are or your relations to one another, unless there's a market angle involved.

@LarsDoucet This makes a lot of sense to me, although I suspect the flatness and public-facing-ness of it is why it will maintain its grip on political discourse as it is practiced in modern day.

I will admit I don't really understand what's vulnerable about it. Are we talking about interacting with people one doesn't like? Because nothing about twitter compels you to care about any given tweet made, or requires you to respond to it.

If you're a pretty influential person or a public figure, twitter mobs can definitely invade your real life and make you miserable. Twitter is also where a lot of coordination is done to organize campaigns to revoke someone's access to this or that third party service. Even if you never check your mentions, that can affect someone in that station in material ways.

@LarsDoucet But that stuff can and does happen to people who aren't on twitter, so I'm not sure I see any specific vulnerability there. The danger is in being a public figure in the social media age, not having an account on a specific service.

@AndrewHartman Sure, my point is that twitter is uniquely powerful at that sort of thing compared to other social networks. Scale and magnitude matters, which are a consequence of twitter's design.

@LarsDoucet Also the fact that it happens to people who aren't on twitter is kind of my point -- it's often twitter that enables the bad behavior, because that's where the coordination and the outrage magnifies itself and makes itself heard in elite discourse. Whether you're interested in twitter or not, twitter is interested in you.

@LarsDoucet Well, that point was in response to your observation that public people would prefer a platform that made them less vulnerable. I had understood this to be "vulnerable on the platform" but I guess I'm realizing you meant vulnerable in general, e.g. public figures have incentives to want twitter-like networks to die because of the greater organizing power?

I'm actually skeptical of the claim that twitter, or at least, its network features, are uniquely good at arranging public shaming/shunning/whatever. Even given that though, I still think the clout-seekers of the world benefit more than they risk, enough that their incentives align with its continued use in a largely-unchanged form.

Hmmm, I think I put the wrong resolution date on this. Lemme fix this.

The reference class includes at least one case (myspace) where this happened, and is probably<5-6 cases total, so the prior should be about 80%.

This definition of "collapse" includes the case where Twitter loses half its users, in which case I think Twitter would almost certainly still be the dominant Twitter-like platform - most likely the users would be lost to other non-Twitter-like platforms that already are highly successful.

@jack Sure, but twitter doesn't count as its own successor

@LarsDoucet Right, that's why I'm predicting NO.

Sorry, I meant: that's why I'm predicting that there will be no dominant successor, i.e. YES. Unfortunate double negative.

@jack Made that mistake myself a couple times. Maybe I should frame all questions in the positive valence from now on

@LarsDoucet Fun trivia: when I was at Google they once had a company-wide internal server crash because someone set a "system resources not available" bool and the double negative confused someone else. After that they instituted a company wide policy that all boolean variables had to be posed with positive valence.

@ShakedKoplewitz That's not unbelievable!

@ShakedKoplewitz Something similar happened at Wayfair, according to my wife, but they apparently didn't learn anything from it. She makes her team use this standard, though.

Contingent on Twitter "collapsing", no SINGLE widely recognized successor will emerge within a year., 8k, beautiful, illustration, trending on art station, picture of the day, epic composition