Comment by pcmoney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcmoney | Hacker News Reader

Overall I agree but I take issue with the Twitter smear.

People who were on Twitter saw this coming weeks ahead of everyone else. There is a reason Twitter the company (and square) went full remote before anyone else did and that reason is that there is data on Twitter that is immensely useful (yes there are trolls and fear mongering too) Twitter outperformed our CDC, the WHO and many others in terms of 1. Sounding the alarm 2. Promoting solutions 3. Challenging erroneous solutions/stories championed by our leaders (eg “we stopped this”) and institutions (eg “face masks don’t help”) AND it did this a full 2 weeks BEFORE mainstream media.

It continues to be a much better source of information than the vast majority of traditional media (and quite a bit better than WashPo IMO, lost a bit of respect for Cal on that one, still respect him a lot though)

Twitter can be just has “heartwarming” as other mediums and other mediums can be just as toxic. Follow smartly.

All the other mediums are based on “look at me” Twitter is based on “look at this”, its not social media. It is vital and useful news. What you will hear filtered through a biased secondary source next week on CNN/Fox (or in 2 weeks via a tertiary source on FB) you can see live on Twitter now.

I had to make a comment because I disagree so strongly with this sentiment. I am biased of course because I do not like Twitter in the first place, but I genuinely believe Twitter has made this crisis worse than it is.

Twitter naturally "outperforms" all other agencies because it thrives on disaster and outrage porn. Of course you will encounter all kind of alarm bells because that is what gets retweeted. Constantly and year-round. A broken clock may be right twice a day.

>It continues to be a much better source of information than the vast majority of traditional media (and quite a bit better than WashPo IMO, lost a bit of respect for Cal on that one, still respect him a lot though)

I passionately disagree, Twitter is not a better source information. It is merely a firehose of information, which is largely low-grade, easily digestible news that is often incorrect or misrepresented. None of it is vital nor useful. This has nothing to do with following smartly it is about how the website is built. Even if you follow smartly, at best you get an unbiased news aggregator where you might as well go straight to the source. Twitter is instant gratification for news addicts. Everyone wants to be the town herald that gets there first.

Sources on Twitter are also biased, even more so. I rather trust processed and digested news than person X that said Y and shows some shaky video of Z. Best recent example of the disastrous consequences are the comments made by a German official in the Berlin senate (hardly an important position) who went on Twitter to complain about the US holding back masks. That turned out to be incorrect but spread like wildfire and caused an international incident. The "slow" news actually investigated and called him out on it but by then the damage had been done.

Absolutely correct, thank you.

The only people on twitter who know what they’re talking about are the subset of scientific experts who happen to have a twitter account. But their papers and public press conferences are more informative than tweeting over the noise of twitter.

A really great example is the current hysteria over the “mask conspiracy theory”. A few minutes reading the WHO’s advice months ago told me more than everything people have posted since. Still, people post accusations at the WHO, apparently not even bothering to read their position.

People don’t seem to like experts, and twitter is an exaggeration of all that is irrational amongst people.

> This has nothing to do with following smartly it is about how the website is built. Even if you follow smartly, at best you get an unbiased news aggregator where you might as well go straight to the source.

Strongly disagree. From the consumer side, most non-technical people don't know how to set up "feeds" or subscribe to the topics they are interested in. Twitter allows you to do so, to pick the people that you're interested in following, and see what their thoughts are and what they want to share.

And from the publisher side, twitter has allowed various Health Care Workers to quickly get online and share what is really going on in various hospitals throughout the US. This would not have been possible with a platform that was harder to use.

Not on Twitter, quit FB in 2017, and I saw this coming months ago. Coming at this from a reasoned perspective, it is fairly easy to evaluate the wheat from the chaff were it comes to public discourse.

The social media hive-mind seems more like an out of control mob flailing about aimlessly. It's polarizing sentiment analysis stoked semi-random clubbing. But who can blame people if their leadership proves time and again to be untrustworthy and have very other priorities than preserving the public health? And no, this is not only a digg at specific 'current administrations' wherever on this planet.

One of the things most disheartening to me was to see 'scientists' putting policy before truth.

While using Twitter helped a lot to anticipate the events before confinement, I find that it doesn’t help much during confinement. It is saturated with people who are looking for information, while all there is to do is wait. Since there are much fewer people working, there is much less activity/information being created. The next question that using Twitter may resolve now is where this came from, « who did this », « who didn’t order the masks » and so on, it tend to be more conspiracy estimations or yelling at government than trying to anticipate on the crisis, and in that sense it now fits the negative description/addictive-inducing behavior.

+1 on Twitter anticipating this. I'm not a regular Twitter user by any means (it really didn't catch in the parts of the world where I live) but this platform was the only one in the Western world where one could see some of the real videos coming out of Wuhan/Hubei as the virus had just began to do its thing, and those videos had some "punch in the face" effect on people like me (as in: this thing is real).

At the same time the traditional Western media was just publishing some numbers (which never tell the real story) and were insisting on the political aspect of it all.

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