1/For a fun distraction from COVID, Trump, the New Cold War and all the other horrible stuff, let's talk about...Twitter mobs!

Here is my personal retrospective on the last five years of Twitter mobs - the Golden Age of Shitposting.

2/In the early days of the Golden Age of Shitposting - roughly, 2014-2016 - the alt-right, including Gamergate, ruled the roost. They were insanely aggressive, very skilled at mob tactics, utterly cruel and ruthless. They used bots, offline harassment, you name it.

3/This era reached a crescendo with the 2016 election, of course, and Trump was their apotheosis; they felt that they had "memed a President into office". https://www.popdust.com/post-ironic-media-how-we-memed-a-president-into-office-2630756951.html

4/But after Charlottesville, the Alt-Right Onslaught was stopped by a belated but effective institutional response. Nazi accounts were slowly but surely banned from Twitter. The algorithm was changed to make mobbing harder. There was an exodus to Gab. https://www.vox.com/2017/12/18/16790864/twitter-bans-nazis-hate-groups

5/The Banning of the Nazis changed the game. Mobs could still mob people, but instead of making a bunch of threats, hounding them offline, subjecting them to bot assaults, etc., all mobs could really do was to get a bunch of humans to say "You're stupid".

6/The Chapo Bros were (and to some extent, still are) the kings of this style of mobbing.

They have a much bigger human shitposting army than the Alt-Right, so they didn't need to rely on bots. And despite being jerks, they're not the kind of villains who would SWAT people etc.

7/From 2018 through just a couple of months ago, the Chapo Bros basically ruled the roost in terms of Twitter shitposting. The brief ascendancy of Bernie at the start of the 2019 primary elections made many think that they, too, were about to meme a President into office.

8/But although there are plenty Chapo Bros still around, their power has begun to wane. This time it wasn't because of an official crackdown, but simply because Biden's victory showed that Online hadn't conquered Offline as much as they thought.

9/That brings us to the third main group of Twitter mobs: MAGAs.

These aren't quite the same as the Alt-Right. They're far less tech-savvy. They're less numerous (and dumber) than the Chapo Bros, though they use the same basic tactic (repeating "you're stupid" over and over).

10/The MAGAs usually don't even really mob. They just waft through people's feeds like a noxious cloud, aimlessly shouting talking points about the Plandemic or Fauci or calling you a shitlib.

11/So the Golden Age of Shitposting suffered two big blows:
1. The banning of the Nazis after Trump and Charlottesville
2. The easy victory of Biden in the face of massive shitposting efforts

Now it may be finally killed by changes to how Twitter works: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056856/twitter-replies-limit-option-compose-screen-beta-app-features-new-ces-2020

12/Allowing people to turn off replies would finally kill off the last remnants of the Golden Age of Shitposting. You could still dunk with quote-tweets or screenshots, but you couldn't summon mobs into someone's mentions. That will be the end of mob tactics.

13/The Golden Age of Shitposting was a lot more shit than gold. But it probably has lots of lessons to offer -- about politics, media, social status, conformity pressure, availability heuristic, mob mentality, etc. We'll be unraveling these lessons for decades to come.

(end)