I'm going to rant a bit about why mute is destroying the conversation in Twitter. You can mute me ofc, but you'll be making my point for me.
World Cup tweeting understandably turns people off & the new mute function was rolled out just in time to help cope with the deluge, right?
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Unsurprisingly, mute wasn't well thought out & designed, becoming another "shadow" functionality like lists. Only, this one kills convos.
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2 days ago, after the games, I noticed that a twin tornado tearing down
#Pilger was going completely unnoticed, despite repeated tweets. -
It happened again, yday, on a larger scale, when the IDF mounted the largest op in the West Bank after the 2nd Intifada and *noone noticed*.
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I'm being dramatic, but Palestine is fairly visible on Twitter, ppl interested in it can easily follow it, would see RTs. If not for mute.
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My hypothesis: In addition to numbness due to oversharing, muting is eroding Twitter's function as a substrate of the 'global conscience'.
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By which I mean that Twitter seems to be devolving into islands of news monologues, interspersed by -directional- pleasantries & chatter.
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I'd need data to back up my hypothesis, ofc, but Twitter is notoriously stingy, and no new media think tank is researching these trends.
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First tornados, next Palestine, then it'll likely be Iraq. And don't blame football, all the ace curators I know are watching it & news both
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I see the counter-arguments, about enhancing consent, but mute was never really needed on Twitter. Or it should've been better implemented.
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Asymmetric follow is Twitter. Unfollow is a social game. Blocking is needed, and we fought to keep it. It carries finality & thus gravitas.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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