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Comment by md224 | Hacker News Reader

I have a different perspective: Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. "Controversy" is just another name for clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind and will likely continue to occur until the extinction of our species. These clashes occur within discursive spaces, and Twitter is one such space.

This is why I'm bullish on Twitter. It's a space for conversation, and people want to converse. (Also, it occupies a unique middle ground between message boards and real-time chat.) The other two spaces I can think of are Reddit and Facebook, and there's enough differentiation to allow all 3 platforms to peacefully co-exist.

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The parent comment was not about Twitter Reddit Facebook coexisting or not peacefully, but about the logic of all of them competing against our public health.

IMHO we should regulate the hell out of them each time a significant harm on society can be proved, like we did for any other things that humans ever invented. But tech evangelists will say that time is different because 0 and 1 are being exchanged

regulating speech is a practically and legally thorny issue not just because tech bros are dumb and lazy

I'm not immediately seeing the connection between legal arguments of curtailing speech and "tech bros" and their intellect or work ethic.

Can you clarify what you mean?

Tech evangelists will say that not because "it's different" but because we never agreed with regulation so we've built tools and platforms that embrace free speech. That's the entire point of something like Twitter.

Or at least it used to be until the politics of the employees shifted to be more mainstream.

The end-goal for a lot of us is a fully decentralized internet that is technologically impossible to regulate.

Fully decentralized internet lol. The internet economy is much more centralized that the old world ever was There is no problem at all identifying the big players that have too much power

There's more to tech than companies, examples:

Linux: open, distributed development, massive success Bittorrent: p2p, massive success Bitcoin: fully distributed, massive success (pending)

There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.

Look, everywhere there is power, there is abuse of power, it does not matter what source of power it comes from. The only thing that helps is having another power that checks it.

Centralization isn't bad; often, it's welcome, as by its nature it's more efficient. Bitcoin is a good example of how not to do tech.

Beyond that, you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized. The reality is, governments and markets are two sides of the same coin. They both strive centralize control.

> Bitcoin is a good example of how not to do tech

Bitcoin is a great example of exactly how to do tech. I'm pretty sure we probably fundamentally disagree on most things :)

> you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized

None of the technologies I listed are private enterprises.

> Bitcoin is a great example of exactly how to do tech. I'm pretty sure we probably fundamentally disagree on most things :)

I disagree about that, but I don't really think we have that many fundamental disagreement. For instance, I get why many honest people like the decentralization and censorship-free ideas in Bitcoin. I share some of those values, too, but I put a different priority for them; for me, in case of Bitcoin, all those benefits are heavily outweighed by the energy footprint.

> None of the technologies I listed are private enterprises.

No, but that part was referring to the second part of your comment, about "taking Google over government intervention any day". Maybe I worded it too strongly, though.

Yeah, controversies are natural, but they're not the only reason for discourse, and if controversies crowd out everything else because they're addictive or because they're encouraged to keep activity high, then that's a problem.

> clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind

> This is why I'm bullish on Twitter.

Fuck Twitter. Its roles and permissions structure is a disaster to effective and FAIR communications and there is little reason by Twitter to disallow the more viral concepts circulating within its web. Time to deploy active measures to give humanity some means by which education on these concepts can occur.

Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy.

When in human history have public spheres like Twitter existed? The public sphere up until about 50 years ago for most people was strictly local. You could not broadcast dumb narcissistic ignorance for free to millions of people. It wasn't possible.

Twitter is not good at what it does. It does not elevate public discourse. It's the equivalent of all the newsteams beating the hell out of each other at the end of Anchorman 2.

If you're bullish about Twitter, maybe we should be bearish about our chances as societies and as a species, because Twitter is full of examples of some or our worst behaviors. It's no surprise Trump loves it.

Just as an example, check out this tweet and its thread:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/96125316896862208...

It's 32,000 tweets of people shouting at each other.

The tweet is in fact excellent, and the phenomenon predates Trump : stock markets will go down on good macro news in fear of interest rate hikes. This has been going on for at least 5 yrs, if not 10.

This fact has nothing to do with Trump.

Was meaning to link to this one:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/96127083356920217...

I figured the tens of thousands of tweets of people saying hateful things to each other was evidence enough. That thread will do, too.

Touche, and I did not mean to deny your evidence of thousands of hateful tweets.

I was just pointing out Trump said nothing controversial in the aforementioned tweet.

I'm not sure that's relevant to the OP's point - it's the arguing beneath the tweet they were referring to, nothing to do with the content of the tweet itself.

I think it is relevant to point out that is not the content of the tweet which evokes this arguing.

What if the size of the sphere is the determining characteristic about the level of discourse? I just read Geoffrey West's book, "Scale", and it is interesting to think of a sub-linear relationship, with "quality of discussion" on the y-axis and "number of people participating" on the X.

It's possible the current state of "bad" affairs is a natural consequence of the democratizing power of the internet itself. Reduced friction means anyone can participate; more participants means lower quality of discussion.

Just a theory as I try to synthesize West's ideas.

Yeah, I agree with you. It's very Eternal Septemberish. Many of the political discussions about the flaws of democracy are probably relevant here, too.

Zakaria has some similar arguments:

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

This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites.

We have a tendency to see size and democracy as obvious goods, but there are certainly some limits there. It's funny how around the time Digg got going, all the talk was about the "wisdom of the crowds". Not sure anyone wants to make that argument today after 15 years of social media.

Eh, I think it may come down to Dunbarr's Number more than anything else. People can only have a certain number of truly close friends/connections at any one time, and when you get beyond that, you see clashes and the social structure breaks down. Maybe Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc are simply too big, so people break into separate tribes rather than get along with each other.

It's the purest form (yet discovered) of McLuhan's Global Village: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeDnPP6ntic

Fittingly, I first learned of this concept on Twitter.

I find the concept of "elevated" public discourse to be very questionable. Elevated to what? Your standards? Your opinions?

That tweet gave 32k people a chance to voice their opinion on the topic. You may not want to hear it but I bet they appreciated the platform that gave them a voice.

I'm really glad we live in a society that gives people more tools than a voting booth to express themselves.

Usenet and similar distributed messaging systems (FidoNet) have been around since the 80's. Twitter made it accessible.

> Twitter made it accessible.

Which is the real problem.

Usenet was better because it was before the Internet was interesting to the general population. Twitter sucks for the same reason YouTube comments and /r/all suck - regular people.

Yep. The Internet in general was better before it was interesting to the general population. Take me back to the late 90's, please.

Is that sarcasm?

There clearly are some problems with the Internet, but nobody is forcing me to use Facebook or Twitter.

But there are some things I emphatically do not miss about the late '90s: Slow modems; even with ISDN, the Internet was painfully slow. Also, no flat rates - in Germany, the phone companies charged for dial-up connections by the minute. No mobile Internet. No Wikipedia. No YouTube. 10 MiB-sized mailboxes. TFT displays cost more than the entire PC I was using at the time (with a crappy CRT display). PCs with less RAM than todays HDDs have in cache. Windows 95 and 98. I could go on and on.

About the only thing I miss more and more often is that I was twenty years younger.

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