What makes a “good” app, anyway?
There are plenty of excellent political reasons to abandon Twitter/X and Meta. But once you do quit, you'll also feel healthier.
In this excerpt, Kate Lindsay compares Twitter/X and Meta to less toxic choices.
This past week, I went through, cleaned out, and updated my Goodreads for the first time in almost 10 years. I did the same with Ravelry, which is essentially a Goodreads for knitting. I also finally downloaded Letterboxd (pretend I never wrote this), and updated it with some of my most recent watches (Wallace And Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl? Five stars). These apps fall in line with what should be the point of apps in the first place: to help with real life. You can’t engage with them in a vacuum. To use Goodreads, you have to be reading. To use Ravelry, you have to be knitting. To use Letterboxd, you have to be watching (ideally going to see) movies. Even a visit to Pinterest, one of the pioneers of the infinite scroll, more often than not ends with me pinning something I’d like to do IRL—a sewing pattern I’d like to try, or a new way to organize my office. These apps are companions, not black holes.
Twitter/X and Meta are black holes whose gravitational pull never let go of your attention.
Platforms are dominated by a minority of vocal users. Those people make you think that their dominance represents majority views. It's basically how extremists (regardless of ideology) hijack the conversation at Twitter/X and Meta with the help of algorithms which promote them.
Now, a majority of the content on most platforms comes from a minority of “power users.” You can chicken-or-egg this debate, but I think it went like this: These platforms got more popular, more centralized, and had to start using more bespoke algorithms to manage all the content. Users, though, started gaming these algorithms, and the people who could crack them got all the views. Everyone else’s content was deprioritized, so they became disincentivized to keep trying. Now, most of us just lurk.
Monopolization is generally bad. People who once had their own sites were lured by convenience into joining Facebook. But once in Facebook, they became manipulated byproducts of a multibillion dollar corporation designed to make Mark Zuckerberg even more fabulously wealthy. They had the feel of engagement but with few of its benefits.
Specialized and well-run platforms which don't turn you into a cyber zombie are fine. But those do not include Twitter/X and the Meta platforms which exploit you and ultimately control you.
