I prune my Twitter feed and keep it pretty slim. I follow people who I find interesting. If they don't turn me off, I continue following them. If they do, I cut them. The turbulence in my Twitter feed remains moderate as a result.
You can always come back to someone, too, after a particular controversy has blown over or something. But my point is it's all in the user's hands how out-of-control Twitter feels. Simply don't follow people who make it miserable.
Between APIs, bots and selective coverage it creates an ability to amplify messages as if they are representative of public opinion. Look at the services that will sell followers as an example.
I look at Twitter less than once a month but because of coverage (like the above article) I know about all sorts of stuff that’s happening on Twitter.
They push politics and constantly push you away from content you like. So everyone is disappointed and angry but thinks they enjoy it and some people think it’s all up to users.
The main issue is that other people follow you or people who retweet you. If they take offense to something you say, they'll try to ruin your career.
Now, within that system users can certainly be self-aware and actively abide to 'remembering the human.' Even then, this self-aware group is likely a minority.
The problem is in the way it is designed. The shortness of the tweet limits context and nuance. This makes it easy to find something to be outraged over. Now add the re-tweet that makes it easy to spread the outrage everywhere. No, Twitter is optimized for outrage and conflict.
Human to human communication inherently includes a certain amount of noise per signal transmitted. Twitter or in general social media algorithms seem to amplify the noise more than the signal since disagreement translates to higher engagement metrics than agreement. There is only so much their algorithms can do in the name of increasing relavance (i.e finding signal amidst the giant noise they help created).
No, tooling and the incentives around them matter. Twitter makes it super easy to find the worst examples of the other side/take them out of context, and circulate what they said among 'your people' to get massive retweets. Twitter does this because it creates a more engaging experience. Yes, if people were perfect robots, Twitter could just be a means for people to communicate. But the incentive structure of social media, ie: what goes viral, selects for outrage. The medium is the message.
i mean, i can give plenty others that do exactly what you said. twitter is not unique and certainly not the problem.
i read his final(?) tweets and the reasons why he decided to leave twitter. and i don't think or remember him blaming the medium.
By making highly viral communication easier, Twitter has done something equivalent to removing control rods from a nuclear reaction. The reaction is fine when it's under control, but if it reaches a certain level of intensity, then different and highly damaging behaviors can emerge.
Facebook too.
If you steer clear of certain topics[1], this place is absolutely civil.
[1]: Not the usual suspects and not what divides the rest of the world...
It’s YouTube, it’s Facebook, it’s twitter.
Those three sites are the problem. Reddit has a lot of hateful bullshit but you need to go out of your way to find it. YouTube and Facebook feed you a heroin drip of it all day long.