The World That Twitter Made | Hacker News Reader

The World That Twitter Made

scholars-stage.blogspot.com

52 pointschkaloon15 comments

This is a great post, expressing thoughts that have been brewing in my mind much better than I could. I couldn't agree more with the fundamental thesis that 280 characters cannot lead to meaningful discourse as your exposure to different communities grows. In their own words,

> To run a high-follower account on twitter is to be constantly exposed to entire communities whose members will treat you as an enemy to be defeated or a buffoon to be humiliated the minute they become aware of you.

To me, though, this post begs the question: if having a large number of followers is so toxic, why do it? This post clearly misses the tight-knit blog communities of yesterday, yet they still insist on maintaining a public, high-follower profile.

If you are writing something worth reading, and only (mostly) care to interact with people who also write things worth reading, it doesn't seem prudent to open yourself up to the Internet at large. Private profiles can't be retweeted, and you get to moderate your reader list. Obviously, you reach a smaller audience, but if you are interested in "open and honest exchanges," finding people that are "intellectually interested," and getting away from the "bare-knuckle brawl," then isn't that a far, far better way to reach that goal?

> Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

I was going to cite that exact first quote because it reflects my recent experience on Twitter. Yesterday I deactivated my account. Did I have a large following? I think I had 1 follower, I used it to follow mostly artists and programmers.

So why did I deactivate my account? A couple of weeks ago I started following the debate around free speech because classical liberal values are close to my heart and it was like walking in on a car crash happening in slow motion. I just couldn’t take my eyes of it.

In an attempt to regain my sanity and creative thinking I’m going back to reading books and having private conversations with people, preferably in-person.

Edit: HN discussions it should be mentioned are still a bastion of thoughtful conversation which I would like to maintain. In respect to that please don’t make this thread political, my reference to liberal values was only to give an example of a topic largely infected with a negative discussion climate. Original article was more about the dynamics of conversation, not the topics themselves.

not that it's much use to you now, but you don't need a twitter account to keep up with someone... just use something like nitter that will let you add them to your rss reader

> why do it?

A lot of writers and the like that I used to follow reached this conclusion and quit.

But a few who aren’t as well established have told me they feel like they can’t, that it’s impossible to be a journalist or author in modern times without is. Is that true? I can’t say, but it’s unfortunate either way.

It's true that simply having 30,000 people with a quick reply button creates negative interactions, Twitter is also a website that makes money from advertising, and people watch more ads if they're "engaged". This incentivizes the website to show your content to people who will disagree with it.

An issue with closed systems like youtube/reddit/facebook/HN etc. is that when you read something that you don't agree with the only way to directly have an effect (whether you actually do or not) is by joining the system and further perpetuating what it entails. Yes you can affect it from the outside by writing articles/blogposts and hope that they get enough visibility to be shown in those areas but that takes much more effort (not a bad thing).

I think that world was already there. Twitter just made it apparent.

People were always like that, yes. In fact sites like Twitter exploit our worst human instincts. The point of the article is that the way in which we organize people into communities makes a big difference as to whether the outcome is largely positive or largely negative. Throwing tens of millions of people all together into one big boiling pot with a strict character limit is not a particularly great way to organize.

Not at all. Twitter gave everyone access to bigger microphones, and one of the main benefits of this went to asshats who would have ordinarily been booed off the stage.

The fact that these people exist isn’t new. They’re ability to do what they do at scale and to such a large audience is.

The instant nature and character limit of Twitter is what made it so toxic, I think. So now anyone can broadcast any dumb thought they have. If you were a blogger, you'd think about your thought more before sitting down and writing a long-ish essay about it (maybe you even learn as you write that your thought is wrong, incendieary, etc), but with Twitter...

In theory Facebook also offers this instant thing, but the idea with Facebook was, it would be limited to your friends/network...

Agreed. Those little bits of friction, whether it's needing to put the time into a blog and build an audience for it, or having some natural limits on reach, really matter.

At some point politics got intertwined with social media. Until that point ... social media was a pleasant place. I'm pretty sure had email been still active ... you would get a ton of political mails as fwds as opposed to spam.

The shit show that politics is ... is pathetic in all media irrespective of character length. Have you seen TV ? What excuses do they have, illiteracy ? The boomer crowd is dishonest. Heck anyone remember Ron Paul, who was a republican ? Maybe there should be an age limit of 40 in politics.

Surprisingly in YouTube, in some debate talks you find civility. People seem to miss out one thing, no other generation has been that active in politics for about 40 years. So that's actually a good thing as opposed to the passive acceptance you see in the older crowd.

What I think is sad is ... all this political energy going nowhere and except pointless shows of symbolism, which is fine in most cases but the lack of change is what makes the thing even worse.

We have a far too narrow view of what constitutes social media.

Every medium is a social one if you think about it and every social medium is political.

The medium has and always will be the message and when you get to the core you understand the message is simply the audience.

Do you think "primitive" civilizations compared to ours didn't have social media before the advent of the tweet?

They were operating on levels we haven't even begun to understand in our foolish pride.

We're as primitive as we were at the invention of electric light and our technological advancements have outpaced our morality. We're just amplifying the hysteria and confusion with our automated algorithms and always-on engagement and now every poor schmuck has a voice where once it was limited to the elites. You should be grateful that Twitter has democratized the inane blatherings of the proletariat to drown out the voices of so called authority.

Not all purpose of communication is political.

1. Information dissemination

2. Coordination

3. Persuasion

4. Feedback gathering

5. Social grooming (jokes, status updates, needs ...)

6. Artistic self-expression

All these are fairly reasonable in any social media.

Conflicting communication via threads is where they fail. Trolling is as old as threads.

Social and political are synonyms my dude but yes not all communication is political but all communication is social.

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