zlacker

On the community side, it now better reflects its mission as the public market square, where before it was so unbalanced to the left (also making what was to the right way more polarized) that it just wasn't very much fun or developing to stay on for long. Before I was only a lurker but now I sometimes chime in to tech threads without fearing someone will try to cancel me over a way I name a fruit or something.

On the tech side, it has retained everything that made it good (didn't implode!), and the tweet length / "show more" logic fits my style of writing perfectly. Spaces are also a kind of thing that I didn't use before but became immediately accessible as it was added right to twitter itself (and things like the 24h wagner coup space with 6M visitors isn't something I have seen in the past). And other simple things, like long videos sometimes fit a need, even while most of the time a youtube link also works.

Some things like crypto spam also seem to be in a bit better state, though can't obviously ever be completely removed

>>maxlin+(OP)
It's interesting to me how deeply politics gets into everything. You like Twitter more because "it was unbalanced to the left" and now reflects your political views better. My experience is that the first 100 replies to every semi-political post are now right-leaning blue checkmark holders and conspiracy theorists, and now I find it "not very much fun".

Honestly, I don't think the "public market square" has ever worked all that well, not even in a physical market square. You get 2 groups with sufficiently different views and before long it's devolved into shouting, if not a brawl.

>>me_aga+eJ3
I actually don't like politics being so prevalent in the space but it's quite unavoidable to give free speech any chance in the current environment. I really hope it evens out.

It's just the sad state of the world that the most aggressive, but voice-defining leftists would like to live in a situation where politics is talked about less but take a speech-impeding dictatorial rule as the precondition to allow for something like that to happen. Meaning, as long as every person in the thread or platform has somehow been "vetted" to not be conservative or even moderate, they'll act "normal". (and that ignores purity spiraling in such echo chambers making even that a stretch)

Maybe in one of the futures of this planet people can go back to not being as polarized and twitchy about talking with people with even the opposite viewpoints. Increased amount of mutual respect in a conversation plus all sides having more mental robustness reduces escalation, reducing the speech and experience of having the kind of speech you probably are talking about to a very manageable level and is absolutely best for everyone.

I've learnt to personally take a lot of pains to maintain communication lines with even some quite extreme leftists and actually managed to retain a level of mutual respect with people some of my peers don't even dare to talk to. The end result makes otherwise impossible things greater than individuals could achieve, possible. But it's not very fair feeling like the human in the "pigeon vs human" chess match at times.

Regardless of everything, as long as we're not in some kind of shittyfuture war scenario, I will not stop believing in the concept of a "public market square" of free speech. I don't believe there is any other value that can keep an intellectually diverse human society together.