Last night I participated in a Twitter Spaces conversation for the first time and it was the best decision I ever made. I’d like to give kudos to host Steven Steele for keeping the conversation civil. Civil discourse is something that I think is lacking in the world today and it is truly disheartening. The thing that prompted me to put in my two cents worth was a speaker who was very contentious.
The leanings of the room appeared to be more to the right than the left but Steven gave everyone their chance to speak up. The topic was Twitter Files and Hunter Biden’s Laptop. The contentious speaker appeared to be on the left and was at one point rude, but Steven shut him down but did not kick him out. Rather he muted him for a moment and scolded him for it, then unmuted him to let him continue. To that individual’s credit, he did apologize but remained confrontational. The gist of his opinion was that the Hunter Biden Laptop was a nothing burger and just would not listen to any differing opinion.
After working through some initial technical difficulties I discovered was a problem between the user and the keyboard. I made my main point, the main issue as I see it is not so much what Hunter Biden did or did not do but that it was being ignored. The mere appearance of impropriety in any government official ought not to be ignored by those that have a duty to the public.
We all have our own opinions on various topics and we are entitled to have those opinions, but experience has taught me that the court of public opinion is fickle and merciless. More often than not it(public opinion) is swayed by the media in a polarizing manner and it can convict a person without appeal.
I can say that Twitter is growing on me since I decided to break into the citizen journalist scene, but I do have one complaint. The desktop/browser version of Twitter Spaces leaves much to be desired. The only thing that can be done with the browser version is to listen and that in my opinion makes it functionally useless. So in order for me to participate in last night’s Twitter Spaces conversation I had to join via my phone and in order to not disturb those around me I connected it to my laptop via Bluetooth. Then listened in through my headset combo, my phone doesn’t have a 1/8 jack so that is how I had to do it.
The technical problem arose when I was put into a speaker’s slot in the Space, it turns out that my laptop’s Bluetooth connectivity is a one-trick pony. I can either listen or talk but can’t do both at the same time. So in order for me to hear what others are saying while in a speaker’s slot I had to take my headset partially off to hear from my phone’s speaker and talk through my headset’s microphone. Aggravating and inconvenient would be an understatement, but such is life.
I get that the devs are extremely busy and have other priorities, I also get that I am not notable enough to get Elon Musk’s attention and that he is a very busy man. But confound it! Why is the desktop/browser version of Twitter Spaces not at least as functional as the mobile version? I’m not the world’s greatest coder but I can’t imagine that it’s harder than Graph Theory.
Sighs, oh well. The overall experience in last night’s Twitter Spaces is very positive and while it was not my intention to specifically promote this site, my participation did have that benefit when Ian, a co-host asked me about a tweet I had tagged him in. It involved yesterday’s story about Twitter Polls. In that story, I showed just how easy it was to get bots to vote as many times as you want on any given Twitter Poll.
Since my participation, I got an immediate 117 new followers in under a minute and my tweets are getting engagements. People are tweeting about my little experiment, even Elon Musk has made a change to policy polls to allow only Twitter Blue subscribers to vote on policy polls. I have no idea if that is a direct or indirect result of my article, or if it was totally unrelated. Wouldn’t that be cool if it was?