I’ve left Twitter. It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators | Hacker News Reader

I’ve left Twitter. It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators

theguardian.com

36 pointsacjohnson5526 comments

Twitter for anything political is horrible, but politics pretty much is horrible everywhere right now due to extreme polarization.

Personally I find Lindy West the author responsible for this horrible cultural polarization after all she wrote very similar horrible things on exgawker site jezebel, that targeted individuals for harassment as well.

I've actually found it to be a pretty good filter because you can curate the sources more carefully than you can on other systems.

Tumblr is a waste of time. Medium's too much of a commitment. Facebook is dead to me. Reddit's political feeds are full of trolls.

So that doesn't leave much left.

What makes that polarization horrible? Being able to take in so many different points of view, and trying to appreciate where they are coming from, makes it exciting and interesting. Discussions really become horrible when everyone agrees.

>Discussions really become horrible when everyone agrees.

"Discussion" isn't really the appropriate term to describe what I see on Twitter. I think "spastic digital shit-flinging" would be more accurate.

Certainly the "eloquency" can be incredibly low (which I am sure is exacerbated by the reduced character limit, but is still present in venues that allow for longer messages), but when you try to take in the underlying point there is still something to be gained in my opinion.

Granted, it's not always easy to try and take an objective look at heated messages when you, yourself, have an emotional attachment to the subject. Then again, part of the fun is trying to remain objective about subjects you are emotional about.

>it's not always easy to try and take an objective look at heated messages when you, yourself, have an emotional attachment to the subject

You're making a lot of assumptions, and none of them are true. I have no emotional attachment to fan drawings of cartoons I've never seen, or the shirt Kanye was wearing at a gas station, or what some politician I've never heard of in a country I've never been to said about home mail delivery or something equally trivial. Nor do I ever post on Twitter. I don't even have an account. But my eye twitches whenever "somebody said a thing on Twitter" somehow becomes news, or a trending topic, or a witch-hunt, or a cause, or a boycott.

Twitter is a wasteland of hashtags and horseshit, devoid of anything resembling meaningful human interaction.

> You're making a lot of assumptions, and none of them are true.

Assumptions about what? My experience is what it is. It's interesting that you are able to make the assumption that the description of my experience can be untrue. On what basis is that done?

My dislike of the level of discourse on Twitter has nothing to do with my "emotional attachment to the subject". It's a total shitshow regardless of whether or not I care or even know anything about the subject.

That's where your assumptions are wrong.

I have made no assumptions about your situation?

Twitter is useful as a type of news source, and way to be notified about certain important events in noteworthy people's lives, and organizations, but for any kind of actual human-to-human interaction it's correct that twitter is absolutely worthless. You're essentially muzzled and will be misunderstood the majority of the time, because everyone expects sarcasm and hate from everyone else, even when it isn't there.

All they have to do to fix Twitter is make the 140ch limit text become the 'headline text' and then allow each post to have an unlimited (or very long) length 'body part' that you can see IF you choose to click on it, to read the whole thing.

The other thing they need is to make it threaded for conversation so that each node has a parent node, so that to 'reply' to a node you make a 'child' node, under what you're replying to. HN does this to some decent extend. I've done this in my own side-project meta64.com app, but meta64 is not open for business yet so don't go there and then complain that it's not finished/working.

I totally agree with the expandable tweet. Down with the indexed tweet-essay! Down with having to quote blocks of text with screenshots!

Unfortunately, the overwhelming sentiment appears to be that posts over 140 chars would "kill the platform", as though it's some kind of pristine thing today.

The 140ch thing was a gimmic that made twitter go viral. That's all it was. It wasn't even an innovation. Limiting text is certainly no innovation. Twitter is afraid to change it, because it's the very thing that made them different to the point where they did go viral. But it has become so widely used by now that the 140ch limit has become a massive pain in the ass for all of humanity (due to it's pervasiveness) and needs to be changed, BADLY. They are embarrassing themselves and making fools of humanity with everyone becoming expert at abbreviating, and living with the stupid morass.

You probably already know that 140 char limit was a SMS medium restriction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob

It may have made sense to honor the 140 char limit so long as TXTMOB/Twitter served as a SMS gateway, router, aggregator, whatever. But Twitter abandoned that notion early on.

No I didn't know the 140 thing was from SMS. I just remember everybody talking about how ground-breaking it was at the time. Software developers tend to all agree Twitter was never an admirable technology but merely a gimmick that went viral.

I like how the contextual ads were all for the TV show "Man in the High Castle"...Likely because of the oft repeated word "Nazi" in the article.

Nah, that's pretty much all I get on anything on the Guardian these days, High Castle ads. Bezos must be spending as much on The Guardian as on the Washington Post these days.

This article is at least 3 years too late to be unique. I suggest anyone who feels the same way should switch to using the broadcast platform of the huge media platform they work for to opine to their many followers-- oh wait...

Promoting censorship is dangerous. Twitter is an option-- NOT a requirement. This is easily the 10th nearly identical article some arrogant reporter has written about their choice not to use a social media service.

How dangerous is it, really? Most only communities have some form of moderation. And besides, I think that there really must be options for shaping the feed that reduce the ability for abuse to be magnified. See https://twitter.com/StateFarm/status/811603055762436096 for an example of not doing that.

Super dangerous! Sure twitter is a big private company it has the right to moderate content-- but should it. Reddit also moderates content. The NYC moderates content, sure the founding family "controls" editorial responsibility but does Carlos Slim mexican telecom magnate excert his >14% financial interest to "shape the feed".

America is a community, yes we need "some form of moderation", but we enter into a very slippery slope when anybody but the community chooses what "moderation" means.

Reddit is a decent example-- albeit still flawed; of how this can work. It is states right, sharding, seperation of concerns, or a subreddit type model where small microcosms choose what is acceptable.

I dont agree with the KKK and hate speech is terrible, but if it is limited to speech I am all for it. I, like I assume many, will use my power to ostracize and dissiauade people from being hate mongering racists-- but it is helpful when I can identify who they are when they self-select to dress up like ghosts 365 days a year instead of just the end of october like many other Americans do.

Edit: to be clear, I am all for free speech & freedom to organize-- not all for the kkk obviously...

I've found it useful for signing into things I don't really care about enough to create a real account for.

And the occasional irrelevant tweet.

I can't see legit utility to twitter except for citizen journalism and fan engagement.

everytime I get downvoted for saying this but writedown.co is a free immutable microblogging platform as Twitter alternative and you are welcome to be one of its first users. The emphasis is politics.

For content creators Twitter can be both an invaluable tool and their worst nightmare.

If only Twitter could fix that second part they'd probably be able to turn the tide.

We delete Nazis on mastodon.social

Don't rely on a closed platform for your communication.

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