Review: X

I use Twitter as a key complement to sites like Google News in ways I previously used RSS. On Twitter, I can get direct feeds from NGOs like Amnesty International, Oxfam, or the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as notable individual experts in fields ranging from biology to arms control. As with Facebook, the main advantage is that everybody is there, and you get a direct, unmediated channel to them. If celebrity culture is your thing, Twitter is great for that, too.

But man, is it a limited platform! People post essays as a series of 140 character tweets, or as image attachments. The character limit also means that discussions are basically impossible, and if the subject is controversial, turn into contests of who can get a large number of likes on a pithy soundbite. That further reinforces political polarization and degrades discussion culture.

Because there’s no real community but just individual users, problems like harassment aren’t solved collectively, but in an arbitrary way based on who can get the attention of staff. Engagement of the company with its users is generally very limited and ineffective.

There are a few open alternatives out there, most notably the GNU Social community. They’re still lacking in usability and community size, and the decentralized approach with many different websites means they’re unlikely to ever have that same experience of being able to find anyone, or even having confidence that your choice of server will stay online. So for now, Twitter remains the service to beat, and is useful within its niche.