social networking

On the evening of Turkey’s most significant elections of the past two decades, Can Semercioğlu went to bed early. For the past seven years, Semercioğlu has worked for Teyit, the largest independent fact-checking group in Turkey, but that Sunday, May 14, was surprisingly one of the quietest nights he remembers at the organization.Before the vote, opinion polls had suggested that incumbent president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was losing support due to devastating earthquakes in southeastern Turkey that killed nearly 60,000 people…

Meta launched more expressive, customisable and diverse Avatars in 2021 and since then, the Facebook parent company has been bringing changes to the digital version of users. In the latest development, the social media company has announced that it is introducing new body shapes and improved hair as well as clothing textures that will enable users to customise their Meta Avatars to represent themselves in even greater detail.“Today, we’re announcing some improvements to Meta Avatars that will help freshen up your look…

ChatGPT warned me against asking legendary engineer Bob Metcalfe about his 1996 prediction that the internet would collapse. This came after I sought the chatbot’s guidance on what questions to ask the man who this week received the ACM Turing Award, the $1 million prize dubbed the Nobel of computing. The AI oracle suggested I stick to quizzing him on his famous accomplishments—inventing Ethernet, starting the 3Com Corporation, codifying the value of networks, and teaching students in Texas about innovation, which he did…

In mid-2021, Gabor Cselle bought a $15 Moleskine notebook to sketch out ideas for new startups. On the first page, he wrote “T2” and began taking notes for a better version of Twitter. Cselle had sold startups to Google and Twitter and worked at both companies. (He was at the time at Google for a second stint, as a director at Area 120, its startup incubator.) But he couldn’t figure out how to draw people away from “T1”—the original Twitter—and set the idea aside.Then came Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, which saw its new…

Not everyone is impressed with Mastodon. Some call it clunky and slow, some in the security world say it's far from perfect, and because different servers may be run differently, there's no consistency to moderation and rules.And you may be philosophically opposed to the fact that instead of “tweets,” messages on Mastodon are called “toots.”The Case for Post, Hive Social, or Other NetworksPost News is another interesting option; it seems built for newshounds and journalists. But it only just launched in late November, so…

Any platform that supports free speech should have a content warning system pretty much like the one Mastodon offers. I bet Musk won't implement it, though, because his snowflake fans would find this kind of free speech upsetting (and he's afraid of them). Mute People For a Little WhileSometimes a person you enjoy following gets in a mood. You don't want to unfollow them, but you also don't want to deal with whatever thing they're currently yelling about. Maybe they’re endlessly discussing a movie you will never watch.…

I am a millennial. That means the majority of my friends either have babies or jobs where they spend most of their day at a computer. These are not lives that translate easily onto visual platforms like TikTok or Instagram. If I open Instagram today, my feed is clogged with ads and posts by brands I no longer like and musicians I barely listen to (sorry, Dua Lipa).LinkedIn, however, feels like the last vestige of the centralized internet of the 2010s. For people who grew up using Bebo, Myspace, and Facebook, the way…

Why do it? When I wrote about Musk’s tweeting earlier this year, I leaned toward the idea that Twitter itself had led him into this 280-character recklessness. I described Twitter as a superhighway from your foot to your mouth. But now that he owns the company, it’s gotten worse—and seemingly more intentional. Musk seems to have programmed his Tesla navigation system to zoom directly into his own babbling trap. The definitive answer to why he’s doing this is only accessible inside the big brain of the man who rules Tesla,…

From the moment Elon Musk closed his Twitter deal, the network’s diehard users have taken steps to eulogize it. People have downloaded their own archive from Twitter. Others have started threads with screenshots of their all-time favorite tweets. And there’s an ongoing Google doc cataloging Twitter trends and memes, a guide that could serve one day to decode the hieroglyphics of the app.Whether Twitter goes bankrupt (as Musk himself has said is a possibility) or becomes an unnavigable stream of hate speech and deceptive…

And for the love of God, don’t blindly take voting advice from Elon Musk.Take a Walk on the Decentralized SideTwitter may be much smaller than other social media sites, but it plays an outsize role in public discourse. It’s centralized: You log in and are torpedoed into one endless, messy timeline, where political and media elites chew over the agenda of the day. “While the future may indeed lie in a collection of more specialized, interconnected communities served by Mastodon, Discord, and others,” Chris Riley, senior…