A huge chunk of reddit is banning twitter links after Elon Musk did a nazi salute, can r/Sonic join in?
This all started with the most surprising place: sports reddit. More than any other community, sports reddit relies on twitter links to post news and updates and betting information. Elon Musk doing the nazi salute was enough to get them to start banning links in protest, and it's snowballed. A lot of places you'd be surprised would do this are joining in, like r/military. Further, r/Autism, r/pcgaming, r/kingdomhearts, and several other communities overlapping r/sonic are banning it. There are tons, and tons of marginalized people in the sonic community. Can we please join with everyone else and ban twitter links? I would love for this scene to show solidarity.
If you are worried that this is a "political" thing, you can easily find people on both sides of the political spectrum supporting this. The Nazi salute has no room in american politics, it is one of the few things all americans can agree with. This is not about republicans or democrats or any of that, this is about showing that it's not ok to get up on stage and seig heil. Nazi's have been THE badguy in video games for decades, it's one of the few universal enemies. Please let's band together! Sonic is incredible, it'd be huge for r/sonic to take a stand. If nothing else, a community vote would be appreciated. A compromise several subreddits are doing is that it's ok to post screengrabs of twitter if news is breaking there, just not link to it directly. The point is to not drive traffic to the site, that's the protest.
worth pointing out how terrible navigating twitter is if you don't have an account anyways. So many times I can't see what is being posted when someone links to twitter because I don't have an account. Using screenshots in general would make things so much more readable.
you can normally view the head of a tweet chain but not any of the replies, which is a problem if it's a tweet that is multi-post, or if you want to show something in the replies. avoiding twitter links and at least just using screenshots instead would do wonders for readability. Also, if someone deletes their account, the post information stays. I've seen lots of guides or interviews lost because they were hosted on an account that deleted itself. It's more readable and more dependable to use screenshots instead.
A screenshot showing the art is also good because it has the credit baked in. And a screenshot of a bad take means that Twitter account doesn’t get engagement from it. Win/win.
I have been reading the comments from artists and people who depend on twitter for a while. I slept on this topic before posting it, trying to take into account what I've read from people who expressed concern over this. I used to use twitter for my own business, so I definitely understand those arguments. I have tried to give my best idea on how to keep supporting those people and news sources without tunneling people into twitter directly, hence my recommendation to use screenshots instead of twitter links. I promise I have not posted immediately in reaction.
Also, because people keep asking in the comments: This is a burner account, because I'm not an idiot and knew that if I posted this on my main account, I'd get put in the crosshairs of sites like kiwifarms and they'd bombard my inbox with threats. Which is already happening on this account. So I made a burner to keep my main account from being poisoned. That's why this account is new.
Banning twitter is a net benefit with no downside if we can still use screenshots.
the idea is people should screenshot the tweet, including the artist's handle. That way the attribution is built into the screenshot. It's actually better because if anybody wants to repost the image, they'd have to explicitly edit out the artist handle from it.
Here's an example:
