https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/we-dont-need-a-new-twitterIf we look past this narrow discussion of Threads’ challenges, however, a broader question arises: Why is it so important to create a better version of Twitter in the first place? Ignored amid the hand-wringing about the toxic turn taken by large-scale conversation platforms are the many smaller, less flashy sites and services that have long been supporting a more civilized form of digital interaction. As a Washington Nationals baseball fan, for example, I enjoy lurking on the game-day discussion threads hosted by a modest but lively Web site called TalkNats.com.
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Forcing millions of people into the same shared conversation is unnatural, requiring aggressive curation that in turn leads to the type of supercharged engagement that seems to leave everyone upset and exhausted. Aggregation as a goal in this context survives, instead, for the simple reason that it’s lucrative.
It's interesting to watch how online habits change over time. A change that I've noticed lately is a return to the past norm of using pseudonyms, avoiding personal details, and having a more fragmented online identity.
There was a time when people were extremely cautious about all of this, but for much of the past twenty years or so, that attitude evaporated. The extreme point was the early Facebook days of people posting entire party albums without bothering to lock their accounts.
