Where the content originates from is irrelevant. Posting and engaging with political content like that on social media more often than not is a kind of roll-call rather than an argument. It's not directed at the outgroup but rather at the people who already agree. It shows which team you are on, that you have the approved opinions, and that you belong. That is why the posts run on slogans and moral sorting, and why disagreement gets mostly met with hostility. They're waving an idea rather than stress-testing it.
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In your example the topic and phrasing is being upvoted, not the original locstion it was posted or who wrote the text. Same for the vast majority of posts.
So the reason is historical.
There was a time when Twitter was the source of information. So people got used to linking to Twitter because that's where the conversation started.
However linking to Twitter is an extra step. If I sent you the message,
"Finally! I knew I was right!!! twitter.com/some/tweet/abc123"
then you have to click to know what I'm talking about. If I include inline the tweet "@nasa: Red balloons are stronger than blue balloons" then you have all the context immediately in whatever app you saw the message.
Plus what if that tweet is taken down/deleted? Now I have to explain what was said.
A solution to this is inline previews. Many news sites use this method and many apps provide an inline preview. But this doesn't always work, especially if sites, like Twitter, would prefer you to follow the link.
Another reason is how people use social media sites like Reddit or Lemmy. Many of these apps/sites default or have an option for a "card" view or layout. The card layout is great for images, but not so great for text.
As an example visit https://vger.app/posts/lemmy.world/c/asklemmy , which defaults to the card/large view and just start scrolling mindlessly. If you visit right now you see a large man's face, a bunch of text, and then eventually a Toy Story meme.
Now try, https://vger.app/posts/lemmy.world/c/workreform and do the same. You get nice big pictures, mostly tweets, but big pictures. The giant photo of Mitch catches the eye and you can quickly see the context.
Now try both communities again, but switch to the compact view. It's a completely different experience.
It's also why sometimes you get communities where the title is the same for every post or "I can't think of a title". The title isn't important, it's just images.
That isn't to say that I think one layout over the other is wrong, it's just a different way to explore.
So the reason is historical. There was a time when Twitter was the source of information.
So how do you explain the content from meta threads?
Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, they are all shared the same way because they are all shaped the same way.
Plus once sharing images of text became the norm, it happened everywhere.
I mentioned deleted content, but what about private content? Discord content is private, so how is it shared? As an image.
Haven't seen many screens from discord, that said discord is way more popular than threads
Yeah Discord is definitely seen less, but it's also more niche/focused. As an example I saw a post the other day about Linux support for a game .
Something like politics is more public generally speaking.
While I would truly prefer if people stopped visiting and publicizing X, I think people just see a thing that they agree with an upvote it. I wouldn't even be surprised if the people posting it here are just reposting it from some other site and haven't even been to X in the first place.
In other words, you might be overthinking it.
Don't forget, there's a GAZILLION chatbots that are integrated into all social media platforms. These chatbots interact with users, upvote and downvote, and even block votes on certain posts. They're often contentious and argumentative, and they're programmed to negatively target uplifting content and all factual information. They often upvote stupidity and all other unimportant posts. Until new platforms are created without any chatbots in their systems, this crap will unfortunately continue.
I don't have javascript allowed for the link. are these actual urls or screenshots?
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