Post Elon acquisition, many influential tech figures have discovered that being a provocateur on Twitter/X is more consistently successful at building an audience than genuine insight.
Eh? Trump was never there post Elon acquisition. I don’t think that timing makes sense. The tone of Twitter has been like this for years if not the beginning.
It's human nature. People are social creatures and they love to join some fight as long as they have their own comrades with them.
My wife spent years on Twitter embroiled in a very long running and bitter political / rights issue. She was always thoughtful, insightful etc. She'd spend 10 minutes rewording a single tweet to make sure it got the real point across in a way that wasn't inflammatory, and that had a good chance of being persuasive. With 5k followers, I think her most popular tweets might get a few hundred likes. The one time she got drunk and angry, she got thousands of supportive reactions, and her followers increased by a large % overnight. And that scared her. She saw the way "the crowd" was pushing her. Rewarding her for the smell of blood in the water.
Audience capture is real. Chronically online people with polarised followers will play to their crowd. Inch by inch, day by day, as social creatures, we automatically and subliminally seek approval from our social group. I've seen this type of dynamic push people into the extremes.
My wife got out. First she asked me to block twitter on all of her devices. A month of cold turkey later, she quit for good ,and she's far happier for it.
I know that was the case for me. I spent hundreds of hours of reading blog posts by intelligent, optimistic, philosophically transgressive at times but not actually rude or crass folks, all trying to grapple with how to live best in this world. I think this reshaped me to be a much better person in a whole bunch of ways. Very happy for it.
I thought the idea that timeline sorting order on social media sites is deterministic or scrutable to the viewer is long dead by now - it's not been the case for at least a good decade now!
Natural responses to this would be "I don't like drama" and I would say the same, unfortunately this isn't the case for most of humans.
The players and ordering has changed only.
Should Gary Tan quit over this? Of course not. I think the fact that people put others on a pedestal is a mistake in the first place.