Soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, I became interested in the platform as a relatively free venue for gathering and expressing news and opinion. X includes a service called Spaces that allows people to talk to each other without censorship.
Listening was a revelation. After years of tight control, it was liberating to hear what actual people including real experts had to say on any and every topic, without interference in real time. Now the same service is deployed by many organizations and podcasts for live shows.
In those days, and it is probably still true, any account with a substantial following could open the app and attract a few hundred people to listen in and comment. I tried initiating a space on several occasions and it was a real rush.
Something interesting happened one day. I follow the New York Times (NYT), and noticed that the paper was holding a live session on some topic. It was a ridiculous topic, though, something about marginalized trans people of color or something like that.
Curious, I hopped on. To my amazement, despite a torrent of notifications, there were only about a dozen people listening in (the count display is right there). And even they began to fall off after a few minutes.
Perhaps that is when it first dawned on me. No one cares about this nonsense. There is no real market for kvetching about such topics. Everyone is pretty sick of it. The NYT can go on day in and day out about such things but getting an audience is another matter entirely.
Something happened to my consciousness that day and continues to this day. I came to realize that the woke blather pushed out by these venues survives only because of their crazed ideology (born of the Ivy League) and their legacy power as outlets. Other than that, they don’t really have a serious audience.
Yes, the NYT has many millions of followers on X. But their posts have far less engagement than you might expect. And much of the engagement is merely making fun of them.
A post I just saw warned about the desperate cold weather in the Southern states today. More than half of the responses were poking fun: you call this global warming? So what: it is winter! That sort of thing. It’s all pretty funny. X users are nothing if not irreverent.
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