Musk you caused another scandal on Twitter by posting a picture of Stalin.

Result? Thousands of angry shares calling him an “idiot”.

But Musk is just using the same media tactics as Trump:

making an incendiary or incredibly stupid statement
which are then shared by 1000 of supporters
but also shared by, most importantly, 10’000 of his opponents

In the times when media is all about “clicks”, “enagements”, “shares”, “brand recognition”, it’s not Musk who is an idiot here.

We somehow forgot about the most efficient social protest strategy - ostracism. Just block toxic people and never see them again.

@kravietz
I've been thinking about this phenomena a lot and this is what I came up with: a lot of people are still on social media for attention, when they post photos of their arts and crafts, long thoughtful texts — it gets little attention, but when they start bashing someone famous, they start getting hundreds of likes, follows from people whom they didn't know before.
Social networks encourage such behaviour — but it's not about algorithms, it's how people work — they like gossip.

@kravietz
Even here, where there are no algorithms, my posts that get the most attention is me besmearing Google — not those 5000 character longreads. I'm not the attention-seeking type so I'm fine, but a lot of people — they go for what's easier 🤷

@m0xee

That’s apparently deeply embedded in human nature, but if we learned not to defecate in the middle of the street I guess we can also learn to control our compulsive negative reactions 😉

@kravietz @m0xee

I've more or less stopped using mastodon for in depth long form discussion.

Instead I discovered the joys of usenet!

Mastodon is still ok for short comments and discussions, if you have a nice home instance, but otherwise, it is not so deep I find.

@h4890

Usenet, I’ve used it a lot back in 1990’s. But since then it seems to have gone into decline, cannibalised by Google Groups? There’s also quite a lot of very active discussion groups on Matrix.

@m0xee