I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking all sorts of shitposts that I stopped using it. I've been significantly less angry ever since...
Trump posts and the comments look like:
“Liberals are the worst” “Trump is a god”
“Send 5 ETH to receive 10ETH”
Obviously Trump is a great shit poster himself, but virtually everyone with a lot of followers end up with nothing but stupid as their replies.
A Danish politician recently commented on the problem by saying that we’ve alway had village idiots, but social media let them lose.
and i recently went to a design conference where i saw bret victor give a great talk. i found out about the conference on twitter.
So what do you think the causal difference is between your experience and others? Are you just more diligent about curating the list of people you follow?
What is Facebook? It's an RSS feed of your friends and family's lives. Facebook has replaced Blogger et al, which primarily syndicated through actual RSS, because it was an accessible, simple way to a) create a feed and b) allow publishers to retain some control over their content (by e.g. blocking an undesirable consumer).
You had to have some technical competency to set up a blog and an RSS reader, and all Facebook did was fix that and bring the power of syndication to the RSS-incapable masses.
As far as I'm concerned, Twitter's value proposition is that it's supposed to be a continuous, temporary real-time vein on whatever is happening at that moment. It doesn't really do a good job of that filling that niche IMO. The only time I've had an impulse to use Twitter is during something like a live news event, and these days I think something like Snapchat does this better (though they're both infuriatingly difficult to access and navigate, decimating their practical utility).
In practice Twitter has regressed to the lowest common denominator of "microblogging". The thing that continues to give it power is its interactivity. Because the messages are so short and feel so quick, Twitter ensures that people will see our message, react, and that hits our feedback loops ASAP, demanding follow-on after follow-on.
One interpretation of today's Twitter is that it's just the unwashed masses clamoring for a fleeting glimpse of attention from someone they admire. This corresponds with Twitter's early adoption as a celebrity messaging platform for actors (iirc Ashton Kutcher was the first Twitter user to get 1M followers).
The only time Twitter's current incarnation is useful is when it allows the everyman to get a message to someone else who would be guarded, e.g., common citizens potentially inciting a credible presidential campaign as in the infamous Russ_Steinberg tweet [0] .
It's depressing to think that so much behavior hinges on this rabid attention-vying, but it's also impossible to deny the power when some otherwise-inaccessible influence is established. I assume this is why people continue to use it, despite the fact that 99% of tweets drop into the void.
I cannot filter HN's feed to only get content from the people I want to follow. And don't tell me about shitty apps.
Therefore it does not qualify as an RSS reader.
I just gave up.
Being on Twitter is like being at an on-call press conference with all of your subjects of interest 24 hours a day. It's actually pretty bad ass. It's not all heavy with prose. It's heavy with meaning.
Unlike my Facebook network, which is almost entirely composed of friends and family, my Twitter network is composed of prominent figures, projects, and companies in which I am intensely interested
For example, I am an American and I have a passing interest in politics. I follow the President of our Great Union, who is an avid tweeter. I prefer to interpret the news as it happens, through my own unique filter and perspective. Later, I read how others interpreted it. It can be a fun contrast and I prefer to be ahead of the punch, so to speak.
And it is interesting to watch because people get into arguments trying to convince each other seemingly but in 140 characters it just sounds insulting and terse. Well sometimes it is simply insulting: "Oh you called me a stupid idiot! Of course, that's a great point. I will step back and ponder an alternative approach to this problem"
in other cases entire subcultures that used to exist on forums have mainly moved to twitter, like the fighting game community or somethingawful-style humor
then a lot of people like to use it to follow celebrities, musicians or industry leaders
Explain this as though I'm a luddite who thinks command line email is better than bbs, irc, and everything else.
I mostly only follow my friends on social media, but I can understand the appeal of seeing in to the lives of your favorite celebrities.
The thing you don't want to do is try to keep up with every tweet. Just follow a bunch of people you find interesting, and once in a while pop in and see what people are talking about.
The reason these companies use it as a PR platform is obvious - there's a lot of users. I can't even fathom why it has lots of users though, at least not without mocking the state of society today.
And all the people in the software industry that I want to follow are on it.
Artists also use it as a low-effort gallery/WIP blog. Fun to look at stuff in that scenario as well.