Twitter(X) could change to an (X) that implements global open collaboration
@stubbendec78924 @goddess81oo, @elonmusk
Debra, BellaPettit, You both followed me, and I have no reason why. When I follow people on X, or bookmark, or like, I get so much new stuff, it is impossible to sort through. Perhaps there is some law, or social courtesy that says I have to like-back or follow-back. I have been on Twitter(X) for several years. Not a single person welcomed me. No one offered to explain how it works or is supposed to work. 26 years, every day, reviewing websites and global and systemic issues on the Internet, and I rate Twitter(X) very low on clarity and effective tools. I think Grok(X) is a joke and should not be allowed to write leads for news — with clear human supervision, responsible humans, and a way to rate and correct things. “Follow” is too broad. It is like “hi, hello, lets get married and I want to hear everything you say and do for the rest of our life”. If @elonmusk bought this site, why is he keeping the really shaky and unreliable first guesses as to how it should operate? And not putting sufficient resources to use tools better than Grok (a GPT look-alike). Social media sites should NOT experiment on billions of people. And global open discussion sites need real tools, not play toys left over from failed designs most from former Twitter owners.
I sat down just now to start un-following the few people I followed. I was investigating some of the large corporations and groups saying “we can do AI and we will sell you AI stuff”. When you follow someone you get everything. I have no control over what is shown to me. I have no control over how I manage and monitor what is said to me. I have to do it ALL by hand, eyeball and primitive clicking. I hate that for me, I hate that for the whole world. It is like being force to only write with a pencil, in a world that is braying and boasting much more but refusing to use it.
I deleted two fairly long and complex posts I did this morning about “all languages”, India, and Arabic language countries working together. I needed to correct a couple of things and add some new things I found. But the absolutely stupid rule (probably created by Twitter former management) “you cannot change a post or add to it, or merge it and create something larger”.
Twitter(X) staff, probably not EM because he is smarter and more practical than that, has zero comprehension of what “global collaboration on global issues” means.
BellaPettit. I like your animal stories, but some of them break my heart. You have an eye for difficult small stories that are part of larger trends and processes, but you give zero pathways to cooperative solution, so most of what you post gets LOTS of comments and reactions. But I look at that and see – those comments and reactions are not being curated, summarized, organized, verified and statistically monitors. No FAQs, no resources, no trends, no tools. Just these impossibly long strings of comments. I will be truthful, it breaks my heart, it hurts my sense of priorities in a world that can do better and never does. Twitter(X) does what the media does, it does what the politicians do, it does what large social media sites do (I looked) – nothing useful, just post that say “we care” and nothing.
I really do not know what I am going to do next, or with the rest of my life. I am 75 and I have pretty much been working every day for the last 60 years. For the last 26 years every day, usually 12-18 hours a day. Global issues are that hard with only a browser and a few programs I write myself. I can see every person who uses a language in the context of all humans and related species. It is fun to know things, to grok things, to understand fairly clearly how things will change. When I guess what things are true and possible, I am almost never wrong. And I am willing to work and wait for decades to see how they come out. But that is an absolutely useless skill these days.
Twitter(X) needs to change to X. Not keep perpetuating, “you are here, do everything yourself, we will not help you at all”
This is an election year. All the presidential losers (the ones who do not win the big prize, and become the next media spokesperson and ribbon cutter for the US government) wrote things they promise to do, or want to do, or feel people ought to do. But I do not see X devoting any resources, legions of Groks and TeraExaFlops of computing to find the truth, put together the pieces, show the whole thing.
I am too tired to write more now. I see it fairly clearly, but I am just tired of doing it myself, using pencils and paper, tiny little bits of computing for problems that need much more. “Run the United States government websites openly and fairly, efficiently and continuously for the good of the whole world” is possible. But the whole US cannot run an election that is open, fair to all, monitored and accessible. And that is only a few ten billion dollars (maybe 100 B) in election year windfall for a limited number of groups and vendors. A circus, not an open process.
I try not to say anything. I was trying to sketch out how (X) could host global open collaboration on (solar system colonization), (Presidential elections), and tens of thousands of critical issues. Get all the information, not just sound bites and fragments.
If one took all the Gov and US domain materials, and the many government sponsered sites — indexed and verified them, removed the massive duplication, identify authors and responsible humans and agencies, identify much out of date postings, find where there are gaps, combine with the rest of the world, it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE to “grok it”, “to see the whole of something like that”. It does not disappear. It is supposed to be open to citizens and people who live here. It is not to enrich or manipulate.
And GOV is just a tiny part of the Internet. Until humans can see the whole and not get stopped after one shallow step, it will not work. Issues and question are almost never one shot and Google enriches itself by making search inefficient to require more searches, more clicks.
The US domain has much good stuff, but it is NOT indexed and curated as a whole. It grew by accretion, not with purpose, design, and continuous improvement.
I have been writing almost every day for the last few years. A human mind, even one that used to remember everything, cannot do “the whole of something”. Un-auditable and unverifiable LLM wrapper programs (LWPs) are NOT any more reliable or powerful than the few people who write those programs. But the whole of the Internet is finite still. And, from tracing out most of the major issues in detail, the reason they never “close” is because humans store the pieces in mind, and the whole is never accessible to all in a form that everyone can use.
I apologize I cannot follow you. Without proper tools, I am about ready to give up on (X). I need to write up my notes on gravitational engineering and atomic fuels. The LWP groups shout louder and more persuasively than me, and too many want to make easy money from it. I have tried for more than a year to get OpenAI to give permanent memory to ChatGPT so it can be allowed to learn, use the internet to help the human clients, and use computers and tools for the human clients – NOT force them to do all the work.
Twitter(X) today is a giant organism where humans are enslaved to click and type to make it appear something is happening. The computers should be organizing, indexing, summarizing – and systems in place to be sure they are not cheating for the benefit of a few.
The computers and algorithms are supposed to lighten the human burden not to enslave them or diminish their lives. The goal of the Internet is to provide “Lives with dignity and purpose for all humans and related species, including the real AIs”.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
