Sobre Twitter e blogues

The World That Twitter Made, em The Scholar's Stage:

In many ways the twitter experience of the user with a low follower account is somewhat similar to the experience of the old blogosphere. Many of my readers came to the internet in the 2010s; before I proceed with this point it is probably sketching out just what the internet was like in the world before them. That internet was organized differently. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Medium, Reddit, and Instagram either did not exist then or were the preserve of teenagers and university age students. Those platforms were for flirting and goofing off and gossiping behind your parents back. People who wanted to discuss bigger things—culture, art, history, science, business, politics, or what have you—went to the blogs. Well, the blogs and the forums.

There were two aspects of this older internet ecology that set it apart from the current get up. The first was its clear division into hundreds of separate communities.(...)

 This leads to the second big difference between the internet of the aughts and the internet of the 2010s: the standards for participation were different—in some ways the barrier to entry was both higher and lower than on twitter. In the old days people used to say "if you don't like it, make your own blog!" That directive was easy to follow. It is near impossible for someone de-platformed from twitter to create some new twitter to replace it; in contrast, anybody really could create their own blog (and forums were not hard to stand up either).

But if writers were to have people read their blogs, then their blogs had to be good. This was the price of participation. On twitter, anybody who can think up a snarky 140 characters retort can contribute to the "conversation." In the blogosphere, you had to create your own blog and write up your thoughts in long-form.(...)

The twitter user with 500~ followers in some ways exists in a world similar to the blogosphere of old. She is part of a small, self-selected community. Her followers chose to follow her because they are sympathetic with her ideas or at least interested in them. It is not difficult to have open and honest exchanges when you swim in safe waters. Most people in her network know her, and she knows most of them, so there is little incentive for mischief.

This changes with scale.

Um dia deste, se calhar vou experimentar essa coisa do Twitter (mas por outro lado, pelo que tenho lido, desconfio que já está na fase do declínio).