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Comment by jmmcd | Hacker News Reader

In the end, they're optimistic that Twitter can be a positive and fun experience, but I don't share that optimism.

They were on Twitter for at least a year. Presumably they had a number of positive experiences too mundane to mention in a story focused on the unforeseen consequences. I think in general, Twitter can be a good experience up until the time your tweets reach a broad audience, at which point, you run into the two problems of not being able to please everyone, and, offended people being the loudest people (in reviews, and every other kind of online discussion).

I agree, this article is basically a long list of unfortunate and terrible things.

If you can’t even keep the happy achievements of a guy with downs from descending into an angry internet mob, then there really isn’t much hope for a positive future for twitter, is there?

That's because the article is focused on the negatives, not the positives. There are negative people everywhere, in life. You have bad waitresses and good waitresses, people that cut you off in traffic and people that let you in. It's part of being alive.

Twitter is literally cancer. I'm genuienly scared of it - why would you go and share your opinion on it, if it can literally result in waking up the next day to find out you've been fired for your job and millions of people are talking about how awful human being you are, because someone read something out of context. It's just far too much risk to be yourself on it and write what you think - it can only lead to bad things.

Your Twitter is a self curated feed of the people you want to see. The idea that people intentionally seek out stuff to hate is a people problem and not a platform problem.

Sure, but I quite like to comment on things that interest me. I can do that safely here or some smaller forums that I frequent - like, there's nearly zero chance that a comment on HN will go viral and will be seen by millions of people. HN doesn't have that effortless re-sharing functionality twitter has, so controversial comments don't snowball into viral sensations within hours, they just can't. But on Twitter, that is a real risk - if I comment on a tweet by celebrity or a journalist and someone takes an issue with it, it can be retweeted instantly and at no effort. That's the risk coming from the way the platform is designed.

> Your Twitter is a self curated feed of the people you want to see.

While that may have originally been the intention of the site, and it might even be what Twitter still publicly claims to do, that is not at all what they actually give you now.

A couple of years ago, Twitter was awesome for keeping up with interesting new work in my topic area. More recently, it's a sh!t show of angry, snarky people I don't know, ranting about things that I either don't care about or could easily find somewhere else.

Maybe these people are all friends of a friend of a friend. I don't know and I don't care. I only log in when I have something to post -- usually some sort of shameless self promotion for a new paper or a talk.

Me neither. There are a bunch of core design decisions baked deep into Twitter that all encourage users to be confrontational and produce drive-by snark. I’m not sure how you remove those design decisions without turning Twitter into something that’s no longer Twitter.

What core design decisions? It's a real question. I closed my Twitter account when I realised it made me unnecesarily unhappy but without really knowing why.

Character limit and somewhat unadulterated spread of popular tweets would be my guess.

Encourages "drive by snark" and shows stuff to people that are likely to snark.

I wrote a whole thing on that subject :-D

You can read it here: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/

So far, my experience of Twitter has been overwhelmingly positive. As detailed elsewhere in this discussion, I have a disability and I have two special needs sons.

I don't share your pessimism.

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