Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Today's @bopinion post is about how Clubhouse, Substack, TikTok, and other new social media are helping move public discussion away from Twitter, and in doing so are helping to build a better Internet.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

2/Twitter is great for many things -- meeting people, getting news quickly, giving voice to the excluded, etc.

But it's also a place filled with rage, where negative emotions create virality, and everyone is incentivized to be angry all the time.

smithsonianmag.com/science-nature…

3/Misinformation also travels quite rapidly on Twitter.

And as Trump showed, bad actors can leverage Twitter to destabilize society.

news.mit.edu/2018/study-twi…

4/Seeing these problems, entrepreneurs decided to experiment with ways of making things better.

For example, Substack and its competitors like Ghost have incentivized people to go back to long-form blogging.

5/TikTok is for funny videos, but it's also a place to share political ideas and views without abuse and dunks.

fanbytes.co.uk/tiktok-politic…

6/But the real game-changer here might be Clubhouse.

7/Human voice is just inherently a better way to build understanding, empathy, and concord than text.

Also Clubhouse uses real names, has community moderation, and has no dunking mechanism.

8/But there's one huge thing that Twitter still controls:

The news.

As long as Twitter is the place to get breaking news and links to just-published articles, it will continue to have a strong network effect.

9/So while new social media is chipping away at Twitter's dominance of our public conversation, it has not yet landed a death blow.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Oh, and if you want to hear me talk about this stuff live, join our @bopinion Clubhouse event this afternoon/evening!

joinclubhouse.com/event/mWEzBWZD