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Comment by feral | Hacker News Reader

Tech design choices can have profound social impact.

This is just a personal theory, but I suspect Twitter's choices have done huge damage to Western Civilization, by forcing, as a medium, a very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate. (Even more so than the media which gave us the term 'soundbite' ever did!)

So that sounds like a very overblown assertion, right?

But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate. For exactly the issues Antirez is raising.

I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.

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You might find Elizabeth Eisenstein's work of interest: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

I think we might see "Twitter as an Agent of Change" from a future historian. If we have future historians.

Oh, here it is, from 2013: https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/04/29/twitter-as-an-agent...

Eisenstein:

Book 1979: http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-...

Preliminary article, 1968: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720

Bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein

Obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/books/elizabeth-eisenstei...

Eisenstein's work is getting more attention this year, because it's the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Which, of course, couldn't have happened without the printing press and mass publication. It's a great book worth reading if you're into the geekier aspects of print history.

Quite honestly, I just happened to stumble across it last November. It strikes me as highly appropriate.

Is it Twitter's choices, or society's choice to use Twitter?

i.e. do you think Twitter would have reached the status of presidential communication platform had it not made this choice?

It's a fair question. I don't know.

But the causal ordering here shouldn't change how we feel about Twitter.

As an analogy, it's a bit like if you have a candidate running on a racist platform in an election.

Maybe you can validly ask whether they are causing racism or whether the racism is causing them; but either way you shouldn't vote for them.

Twitter did what was good for Twitter - becoming fun, addictive and compelling to use. People made a choice to use that compelling product. These choices worked out well for Twitter, but according to the GP, not well for the users, who unknowingly hurt their society.

Thank you for the concise summary of GP's post. I think tthe post you're responding to is trying to reframe the point with a question though: are you sure it's actually bad for society? maybe this is how our society communicates and twitter was just an expression of that.

In other worse, it's less that twitter influenced society, and more that society was waiting for the medium to communicate the way it wants.

You might just be 100% correct. I would still prefer the de facto dominating social platforms to enable more meaningful discussions and not promote the sensationalist statements format of "communication" that Twitter offers.

Society definitely responds to media influence. Sadly this is exploited in the wrong direction and rarely if ever for the society's benefit (mostly education).

> These choices worked out well for Twitter

You could say that, since it appears Twitter is now the primary platform for broadcasting outside of film/tv.

But is Twitter even making money yet? How sad and dumb would it be that Twitter had to shut down in a couple years?

It's just one popular platform at the moment. If it was IRC, Trump would have his IRC channel. Had Myspace survived long enough (in terms of popularity, that is), he would have a Myspace page.

Politics and companies go where the most people are and use that platform to the best of their own interests. If they don't have the knack for long analytical articles or short witty comments, they just hire people who do.

> If it was IRC

I think that is something to doubt; IRC was made for discussion and even long winded discussion. That would not work for Trump as far as I can see. The format of Twitter makes discussion hard / impossible. To really create proper reasoning, you need to link a blogpost and most people simply will not click on it.

There is a fallacy that society had a choice. News organizations are struggling for any means to hold readership interest, and twitter's format forces nuanced, complex issues to be shorthanded and misunderstood to readership outrage revenue increasing levels. Just follow the money.

Society doesn't choose the same way one rational might choose, but it definitely chooses. It chose facebook over myspace over not having a social network, for instance.

There is plenty of research showing that the patterns and atmosphere a platform promotes can have huge effects on conversation and discourse.

This is what we're doing with Lyra (www.hellolyra.com): using a respect for language and cognitive load to create an open, sensible conversation platform.

As far as I understand you can chat to exchange news or chat to learn. Twitter is to exchange news. What is yours for and is it any good at that?

Lyra isn't designed with any particular context in mind. We aim to allow the full expressive power of language, not imposing any ethos, topic or atmosphere. Lyra is a communication tool, not an opinionated social space.

You don't converse just to exchange news or learn. People converse to tell stories, to laugh, to discuss, to exchange points of view, to convince, to refute, to pass time, to plan, to reminisce... Lyra is like a blank sheet of paper. It doesn't tell you what to talk about. That's up to you.

Consider an alternate perspective:

There were other platforms that opted for a longer format. Yet Twitter became popular.

Perhaps the reality is that, had Twitter opted for a longer format, another platform would have taken its place.

Twitter may not be the cause of societal aversion to meaningful, dense discourse, but a symptom.

If Twitter had been preceded by a platform like it, but with longer character length, do you think people would switch to Twitter? I don't think so.

We actually have a case to compare to due to the curiosity of language: Japanese twitter. They can fit much longer ideas in 140 characters. It is a much saner place, and there is no shorter service leeching users.

It's far more likely that what keeps Twitter going is the social network of the existing user base and the vendor lock in of its APIs.

I think this is a much stronger historical argument. Twitter came out in 2006, the soundbite culture was a big topic definitely before 2006 (Jon Stewart, for one, had been campaigning against it for years by that point)

I agree.

Other people are pointing out that soundbites existed before Twitter, but it opened up the ranks of the public babblerati to everyone, and promoted it as a platform for public discussion.

I dropped Twitter years ago, subscribed to a collection of newsletters to fill the gap in technical discussion, and honestly, I think I'm actually more informed for it.

> very short 'soundbite' structure onto debate

But as you say the traditional media do this too - and have been just as instrumental in the rise of Trump. The "false equivalence" media structure, and the direct promotion of right-wing editorial through Murdoch news properties, are also extremely important.

Propaganda is asymmetric, it takes more energy to communicate and rebut with Truth than it does to fabricate lies. Truth requires precision, clarity and subtlety; lies are a dead-blow hammer.

Yes. But this isn't new and certainly isn't specific to Twitter.

The channel capacity is full of false. So responding takes more than one tweet of true. The medium of twitter makes it hard to rebut anything but the most simple statements.

Agreed. Twitter is only a clearer mirror of who we really are.

No, "conversations" on twitter are a reflection of the platform's limited ability to convey the nuance and subtle nature of truth in contexts that matter.

Thank you for saying "traditional media" and not using the word journalists.

Wanna bring my blood to a quick boil? Have a news program that pulls content from Twitter. And usually completely unvetted. Who needs legit sources?

It this regard, Twitter is an idea shit show. You can find just about anything said about anything there. So to pull more or less randomly is, to me, unimaginable and too often inappropriate and upsetting.

I agree. But I don't think it's Twitter's fault per se. It's just a tool. Sure it can influence, have an effect, but I'm not so sure it's powerful enough to create something from nothing. Especially given the fact it has a limit heavy user base, a fair number of casual and then a whole lotta non users.

My point is, I think the tendency for sound-bite intelligence (hold the applause, you heard it here first. Lol) was already there. I mean, Orwell gets at it in directly in 1984. Also, given the number of non Twitter users, I think this also helps explain why the whole culture shifted. Sure, there are Twitter users with offline influence but that many? I think not.

In any case, to blame Twitter is meta. It's a symptom of the problem itself. That is, less thinking and more simplification is the sign of the times.

Twitter is a more powerful a tool than most realize; twitter enables anyone with a public following to direct that public following as a shit-show army destroying any online presence of their opposition. Powerful twitter users direct their followers like an army, and quite effectively. One is POTUS now.

No needs to play the Trump card IMO. The minute politicians started using Twitter to describe their policy you could tell it was over. And it happened way before Trump.

> But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables. He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium

This is actually not true. Many of Trump's claims are challenged on Twitter and outside of Twitter. Maybe you don't like that he can directly talk to the people rather than twist his words to suit your narrative before heading it over to the masses

They are challenged, true.

But does this impact his tweets?

More importantly, I do not think Twitter is a good platform to present a statement /together/ with its challenges.

Just yesterday I looked at Twitter to read up about a back and forth between two developers I respect. I was reminded that Twitter makes it well-nigh impossible to follow multiple sides of a conversation. (Of course, calling what happens on Twitter a conversation is a stretch to begin with.)

Much of the time, when a tweet says that it's 'in reply to' someone else, the specific tweet it was meant as a reply to is not displayed to third parties.

If you extend this experience to the Trump scenario, it's a total fantasy to think his followers on Twitter are being exposed to rebuttals of his statements.

You see counter-opinions if you follow the person who expresses them. It's the inverse of discourse, and I agree it's cancerous to civil society.

I never got started with twitter, because it just didn't make sense, without a bit of practice using it at least. Thanks for confirming it is a general mess.

Yeah it's less because of places where news spreads among the savvy like Twitter (and Reddit, and niche communities like HN) and increasingly more about the "last mile" of news -- the increasingly fragmented and ethically unconstrained ecosystem where people actually hear news from.

Facebook is, in my mind, much more culpable, being at the point of the spear for the radicalization of last mile news delivery.

> Maybe you don't like that he can directly talk to the people rather than twist his words to suit your narrative before heading it over to the masses

It's telling that you chose to twist the original poster's words to suit your narrative with the least fair interpretation. Unchallenged doesn't mean that something gets edited to bits. Traditionally it just meant that, for example, a reporter would ask followup questions to expand an idea or attempt to get the subject to explain things they'd prefer not to discuss (e.g. “How will we pay for that?”), or that controversial claims would be presented with a response from a relevant expert.

Trump is obviously unwilling to submit his ideas to critical review (or even basic editing) and in that sense Twitter is perfect for him. He can hit send and millions of his followers read it without any barrier where someone says “uh, doesn't that contradict what you said last week?”.

Sounds a bit like: "Just give me the facts and let me make up my own mind."

This is a stupid attitude. This should not even need elaborating. There are always more facts pertinent to the situation than any one of us can process. We will almost never have the correct background to correctly understand and interpret the facts.

Some people voted for Trump because he "tell's it as it is" when he has been lying demonstrably over and over.

I would rather have a journalist (or five) report to me what Trump said, together with context that makes it meaningful, and pointing out when he is lying. For the same time invested that will give me a vastly superior understanding of the situation than reading him directly.

I'm sure we'll figure out how to have a meaningful public discourse within the context of the Internet eventually, but as it was when other technologies came about, those who are fundamentally interested in _not_ having a reasonable discourse that is listened too, but want to get their superficially plausible demagoguery heard are having their field day right now.

I'm not sure if you're trying to make a point with a misspelling, but the term the media gave us was 'soundbite'.

Fixed, thanks. Someone should comment about how autocorrect is destroying our civilization :)

(I love autocorrect which I think enables us to concentrate more on meaning of communication than mechanics - occasional errors aside!)

It's funny how similar the people on the left are to the people on the right. 9 years ago when Obama was elected with deft use of social media, the right was saying "myspace/youtube/social media" has damaged western civilization.

Now the left is blaming social media for the election of trump and damaging western civilization.

> But think about Trump. Twitter is his platform, and arguably he is the sort of President a platform like Twitter most directly enables.

Were you complaining about twitter when obama used it well to push his agenda?

> He gets direct unchallenged access to a mass medium, a mass medium which makes it particularly hard to counteract false claims or have reasoned debate.

You mean people have direct access to what the leader thinks? Is that so terrible? Do you really prefer a system when a handful of like-minded editors in media companies frame everything to their agenda?

> I don't have evidence to support my theory, all I can say is I don't think I want Twitter to succeed.

Because free speech is such a horrific thing when you don't get your way?

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