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kompootor t1_j9ghufp wrote

If we can extend to the entire written word, I would unironically, mostly, at least for 99.9% of public access, would want the entirety of Twitter destroyed.

This is not because I think it corrupts the written word, or that I don't think attempts at literature on the medium have not been impressively artistic, or that I don't think it has seen effective use in mass organizing for good cause. But I think it also represents the worst of the past decade's internet in a couple key factors: 1) self-publication without self-scrutiny (and being serious about it instead of doing so on a s***posting forum); 2) poorly (or deliberately, but most likely just lazy) designed algorithms that encourage mob mentality by promoting outside traffic to the most heated polarized arguments and pile-ons; 3) no hysteresis combined with the two points above meaning the stupid stream-of-consciousness crap that a tween-to-twenties posts will follow them for life; and honestly it just goes on, but those are the big ones. Reformed algorithms can improve these issues to some degree, and they recently addressed/acknowledged the hysteresis problem a bit (or maybe just didn't want to keep buying hard drives), but it's still a crapville archive of the worst of internet mass socialization.

A lot of it is endemic to the problem that norms of social behavior on the internet are far behind those that have been established in irl society. I think burning down what someone once called the new Great Library (I feel like someone years ago called Twitter this, but I can't find it -- it's one of those things that was chuckled about at the time, but would be so beyond absurd to even mention now) would be a good symbol, like at the end of Fight Club (yeah, I was an edgy 90s kid and totally unique about it; how could you tell?) when they stuck it to creditors (but it wouldn't in reality do anything since there's several layers of backup records built in).

There are other sites (cough quora cough) that I think should be forcibly shut down but have the text archived for public use, but that's quite a bit different. In other cases I'd want additional legal options to norobots that expand, within reason, the rights of public crawling archiving for sites whose content and value is generated entirely by public users. Again, different, but it's effectively a total disruption of publishers, which if it were done to print publishing would be a chilling affront just like shutting down newspapers.

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