,
11 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
A thread on social media platforms regarding the @5chdn drama. I mainly want to highlight that various social media platforms have vastly different characteristics, and that most people aren't aware of this. 1/10
Many crypto reddits used to be small, with high signal. The communities were awesome. r/ethereum, r/ethtrader were markedly different. I imagine r/bitcoin was the same once upon a time. As these communities grew, the quality of discourse objectively declined. 2/10
Many prominent members of the community slowly left reddit and joined other platforms such as discord and Telegram. By far the most dominant crypto platform became Twitter. There's a very simple explanation for this: social scalability 3/10
reddit is simply not socially scalable. It never has been, and it likely never will be. The main reason is that there is no opt-out feature for visibility. When you open a thread, you are forced to consume everyone's viewpoint. It becomes cumbersome. 4/10
reddit's visibility algorithm is run by voting (i.e., "governance"). And if there's one thing all crypto peeps know, it's that governance can be manipulated. Easily. reddit has never been Sybil proof. 5/10
By contrast, Twitter's visibility is opt-in. You have to manually approve every user whose tweets you want to be exposed to. There is a forced filtration system that is hard to get around. More people use their real identities/photos, making the vetting process even easier. 6/10
The point of all this is that, it's much, much harder to run someone out of the community on twitter than on reddit. We'd never know how many sockpuppets were created on reddit bashing Afri. Or how much voting was manipulated. Yet it's still highly visible. 7/10
On twitter they could fake the likes/retweets, but it would have a significantly weaker effect, as none of us follow the bots and fake accounts. Their tweets don't show up on our feeds the way they do on reddit. 8/10
reddit is awesome for certain things, and has weaknesses elsewhere. I'm a huge reddit fan. However, a problem they've always suffered from is mob rule. Time and time again we see this occur, while it almost never happens on twitter. 9/10
My advice would be to start giving less weight to those communities, despite their larger userbases. It's no longer the high signal community it used to be. 10/10
just tagging some people whose feedback i'd be interested in. @econoar @0xMidnight @MPtherealMVP @iamtexture @iamDCinvestor @scott_lew_is @MrYukonC @antiprosynth
