The Billionaire and the Anarchists: Tracing Twitter from Its Roots as a Protest Tool to Elon Musk’s Acquisition
The Billionaire and the Anarchists
"Roots as a protest tool"... uh...
If San Francisco tech bros tweeting pictures of sandwiches and their favorite brands of loose leaf tea counts as a form of protest then... sure...
This article touts Twitter as a tool of resistance, yet Jack Dorsey is still friends with Musk, he's still heavily invested in Musk's various companies, Dorsey definitely doesn't seem like he gives a shit about anything but making more money with Apartheid Space Karen, just like Spez wishes he could.
Strangely enough the article goes into that:
But Twitter did not simply spring, fully formed like Athena, from the head of company co-founder Jack Dorsey. In fact, it was a modest refinement of a model already demonstrated by TXTmob, the SMS text messaging program developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protests at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
Blaine Cook and Evan Henshaw-Plath, anarchist developers who worked alongside Dorsey at his previous company Odeo, helped refine TXTmob and later took the model with them into the conversations with Dorsey that gave rise to Twitter.
If the unrelenting urgency of social media in general and Twitter in particular can be exhausting, that’s to be expected—the infrastructure of Twitter was originally designed for street communications during high-stakes mass mobilizations in which information must go out immediately, boiled down to its bare essentials. It’s not a coincidence that, despite its shortcomings, the platform has continued to be useful to street activists and conflict journalists.
Fuck Jack and fuck musk
“roots as a protest tool” lol
“roots as a simple text repeater to harvest personal data for monetization”, yeah.
Tool of resistance...you mean micro blogging..?
Twitter came out when blogspot was still a thing man lol.
I wish people would actually read the articles before commenting.
This references the various tools that led to the development of Twitter, but I'd rather you read the article than go by my attempt to tl;dr it here ;)
People react to the title; very few actually read the article. On reddit, I collaborated with media outlets to measure click-through rates a few times for high-profile content. It's something like 2.5% on a good day.
There's an academic paper about it from back in 2017. Not much has changed since then.
As far as what you could do: the biggie would be to allow longer titles and auto-fill with a machine-generated summary, rather than use the original title.
Howdy neighbor. Well let's not be disengious right: That's not what the headline suggests.which is why I'm commenting.
And what you're suggesting isn't even accurate. Jack D, founder of twitter talked on a 60 minute segment saying the original inspiration came from cop radios talking about where they were and what they were doing. He then much later worked at a blog sort of company called Odeo and that's where he passed around the idea.
Most importantly this article tries to push a narrative that Jacks coworkers at Odeo were anarchists and that had great influence on twitter. At best they were users of the platform.
Origin of twitter https://penningtoncreative.com/the-origins-of-twitter/
If the title isn’t what the article’s about, that’s not our fault . . .
Sure seems like the majority of our protest tools are being ruined by rich people lately, coincidence?
Definitely not a coincidence, there's a lot of Global Right wing money involved, including the Gulf state monarchies.