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Twitter Added Zero New Users Last Quarter Despite Trump Tweets (nypost.com)
Twitter did not add any new users in Q2, a disappointing follow-up to what had been a promising start to 2017. Twitter reported earnings Thursday morning, claiming 328 million total users -- the same number it reported after Q1. Analysts had been hoping the company would add around four million new users last quarter. From a report: Despite its appeal among celebrities and public figures, Twitter has struggled to sustain its closely watched user growth even as it invests in features and live content to help draw viewers and boost user engagement. It is in stiff competition for advertising dollars with other platforms like larger rival Facebook and Snap's messaging app Snapchat. The company also reported a wider quarterly net loss and lower revenue, and said it did not expect its total revenue growth to pick up in the second half of the year. [...] President Donald Trump, one of the most active politicians on Twitter, has tweeted multiple times a day on average since his inauguration in January, according to social media analytics company Zoomph.
Tainted by the awful people who most frequently and publicly post to it, e.g. Kanye, the Kardashians, Trump, and Wesley Crusher.
None of my family or friends tweet anything that I care about, and celebrities, "journalists" and partisan zealots hold no interest for me...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
There's also Gab.ai, which has sprung up in response to complaints about one-sided censorship by the company.
Gab has a much more elegant solution to censorship: if you don't like something, put it on your personal list of "things I don't want to see", and you'll never see those. You can specify users or specific words you don't like.
Compare with Twitter, where you can complain about something being in violation of their rules of conduct for partisan reasons... and most likely it'll get banned.
Lots and lots of people are moving over to gab once they've been banned at twitter.
Usually with a screenshot of their *completely reasonable* post that got them banned.
(Even Scott Adams gets banned and shadow-banned - for nothing more than questioning the science behind global warming. It's almost as if the science behind global warming can't stand up to scrutiny!)
(Several of the recent bannings are for supporting the military trans' ban decision. Almost as if no one is allowed to debate that issue!)
i am still considering leaving the nation.
No you fucking aren't. Either shit or get off the pot.
What, are you holding out for "change" (your preferred party winning) in the midterm elections? I mean, that's just a little over a year away!
And if that doesn't pan out, well, it'll've been been 2 years. Surely the investigators are about to open the flood gates on info that will get the President impeached, and if not, you're about half way through their reign. Might as well stick it out and "make a difference" in the following Presidential election, right?
Quit kidding yourself. You're not leaving. And the President, however much of a buffoon and ass they may be, has very little impact on your day to day life. It's congress that you need to flush down the drain, yet none of you give a shit about midterm elections. You just want to whine and bitch and moan and blame someone for something, as long as you're not blaming yourself or your preferred party.
The above applies to all politards of all parties.
Politically, I'm a moderate or a centrist. I prefer to take the best ideas of the political right and the best ideas of the political left, rather than sticking myself at one extreme or the other. I'm open to immigration. I want all people to succeed, regardless of their skin color or origin or other attributes. I think healthcare should be affordable and accessible to all. I don't want to see prejudice and hatred.
As a moderate, I used to follow a huge variety of Twitterers. Some were political, some were quite apolitical. I was seeing a huge range of viewpoints, which I really liked. All was good for several years, but then I found things were getting more and more polarized.
It started off relatively mildly, with occasional tweets about Black Lives Matter or sexism or something like that. What started as a trickle soon became a deluge. It got to the point where tweet after tweet was about some kind of -ism or -phobia.
Like I said earlier, I'm open minded, so I started looking into some of the cases that were mentioned in these tweets. Time and time again the incidents mentioned in the tweets relating to BLM ended up involving somebody who actually did violently attack the police, and the police responded with deadly force in self defense. The same would happen when I looked into the cases allegedly involving some sort of -ism or -phobia. The situation would either turn out to be totally overblown, or in some cases it was later revealed that the "incident" being described was nothing but a total fabrication!
Interestingly, I didn't see this happening so much from the Twitterers I'd subscribed to who I'd place on the political right. Their tweets were much more relevant, and when I investigated them further it turned out that what they were saying actually matched reality. They weren't blowing minor incidents out of proportion, for example.
Then the 2016 US election really started heating up. Things got really bad after President Trump won the election. Soon I was deluged with endless tweets droning on about "Drumpf", or cartoons making fun of him for allegedly having orange skin, or snide comments mocking his hairdo. I found it all kind of strange, since leftists are the ones who typically say that bullying and ridiculing people is wrong, especially if it involves their skin color or some other physical attribute they can't control.
The tweets from people who I'd consider to be "right wing" ended up being far more reasonable most of the time. They'd be focusing on real issues, like the economy, border security, and international relations. They wouldn't just be slinging insults. They'd be trying to engage in real discussion, yet most of the replies to their tweets would be petty insults from leftists.
It was getting to the point where for every useful tweet I saw, I'd have to put up with 30 or more pointless tweets filled with petty insults or complaints about non-issues from leftists. Recently it got to the point where I just couldn't put up with it any more. The signal to noise ratio became terrible.
All I wanted was to read were reasonable and intelligent comments questioning the policies and actions of the new US administration. But all I was getting were tweets from leftists about "Drumpf" and "orange skin" and "bad hair" and "intolerance" and "racism" and "transphobia".
So I've quit using Twitter. It stopped providing me with useful content, so I stopped using it. I regret having to do this, as the tweets I was getting from so-called "right wing" Twitterers were typically quite reasonable. It was all of the increasingly nonsensical, negative, and detached-from-reality tweets from leftists that ruined the Twitter experience for me.
Well, apparently he makes major policy announcements now via twitter, and doesn't even bother to inform departments via normal channels. I'm not even sure why he has a communications staff, or heck, even a cabinet. This is government by one man and his phone.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And brilliant it is, too. He completely bypasses the media which only acts as a hostile filter. Before, they got to lie about what the President said, now he talks to the people directly. Kind of makes you wonder why we even have a media if their job is to be an arm of the Democratic Party. It's highly damaging to our democracy and has discredited the media entirely in the eyes of many in our society.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!