On Using Twitter
medium.com
medium.com
However, later on I realized that Twitter is actually a "outrage generating machine". Everyone is outraging over every trivial, even wrong, thing at every chance. This was very toxic. And since I was addicted to Twitter, it was affecting my mental sanity in very subtle ways.
Later on I unfollowed 90% accounts and stuck to those accounts which strictly tweets only about programming, math, history and other such stuffs in robotic manner (I.e. without any hidden agenda or connotations). I unfollowed everyone who have even a slightest chance of tweeting about politics. Also I stopped tweeting and replying to anybody.
Suddenly Twitter became a bit nicer place and now I only spend may be 5-10 min there.
If you can discipline yourself and carefully choose whom to follow, Twitter is great, otherwise it is a toxic hell.Just don't follow any political figure or any people who outrages on daily basis. And don't even try to debate there. It is not a debate plateform. It is broadcasting platform.
You get a clear stream of useful, relevant content. Unfortunately this also gets framed as a "filter bubble".
I want a filter bubble.
The problem in practice is that twitter actively fights you doing this. It tries to pour raw sewage into your nice clean stream and you can't stop it. You see what other people have liked, or what's popular or lots of other things I don't want to see.
At this point in time the biggest value of twitter is it's userbase, it's critical mass, people are on twitter, they're not on mastodon.
Even with all the barriers in place, the truth is that Twitter still works better through a third party application.
Your feed comes through relatively unmolested, with just the things you want to follow in the order you want to follow them.
I think describing a "topic-focused, outrage-free" curation strategy as 'filter bubble' is somewhat asinine.
"Filter bubble" is a dirty term because it suggests at best an isolated, distorted view of how things actually are, at worst active exclusion of valid dissent. The point is that important details aren't being noticed in the domain of what has attention.
I understand a lot of outrage comes from righteous minds who want to make the world a better place (or prevent it from becoming a worse place). -- All the same, just excluding outrage feels more like it's (at worst) ignoring 'allegedly important, unrelated things', rather than ignoring 'important, related things'.
In the old days this work was done by an editor and published in a periodical fashion. My recurring quip about social media is that it’s helping us collectively realize the value of good editors.
I have thought about this before. I believe internet lacks enough echo chambers. In real world, people automatically segregate based on their income bracket, community, values, lifestyle, job, family (kids or not?), healthcare, accessibility to various things, etc. People have all sorts of stereotypes and things they expect other people to conform to based on visible factors. This isn't possible online. There is too little information and our stereotypes will never be correct (too big number). It shocks people. In real life, oh that's a catholic person. Of course I would expect them to say this. Too much difference in opinions leads to defensiveness rather than acceptance. You cannot accept 180 degrees but you can accept 10 degrees slightly left.
If you use a third-party app, you won't get most of that. You'll just get a reverse-chronological timeline of people's tweets and retweets, and I think some allow you to filter out retweets.
Or maybe using lists
Not if you use Tweetdeck.
One thing I noticed in my own time on Twitter was that this is easier said than done. It's very difficult to accurately gauge whether something is 'without any hidden connotations'. I'm not a historian or a biologist or a sociologist. I'm not a scholar of constitutional law.
There may not be an agenda there, perhaps not even an agenda consciously realised by the author, but it's hard to accept the idea that we can escape 'connotations'. Very much like how the best propaganda appears as fact, or how ideology must first present itself as non-ideological, this gets extremely tricky when it comes to something like history, or even biology.
Similarly, the mere presence of a plurality of ideas is insufficient to overcome this.
I suspect that many who would follow your advice will find themselves still trapped in very similar bubbles of ideology, but this time without the knowledge that it really is ideology. This is a more insidious kind of politicisation, because it primes the user to put down their critical guard in the fact of a lack of 'hidden agenda or connotations'.
From what I understand he wants to avoid the "professionally outraged", not necessarily to scrub his feed of anything remotely "ideologically-charged".
I don't often go on Twitter anymore, but from what I saw and from what other people report, there seem to be some "wars" going on where people are just shouting random stuff at each other without even so much as attempting to have an actual debate. I can see how following such exchanges can feel tiring and a waste of time. However, most tweets I used to see from people I follow are mostly matter of fact and technology-related.
Of course, they sometime stray from strictly IT talk to more personal things. For example there's a woman who would sometimes tweet about her daughter / being a mom. Could this possibly be a vehicle of some sort of ideology, such as feminism / women in tech / whatever? Sure. But it only comes in once in a while, I can jump over it, and it has never devolved in any kind of screaming match.
Having said that, I think it's far more interesting to look at the medium itself. Marshall McLuhan, after all, did say "the medium is the message" or "the medium is the massage".
Twitter was first conceived as a micro-blogging service. You simply gave status updates about what was going on in your life, or a part of your life, or whatever. Then @ replies, # tags and re-tweets were introduced. Re-tweets weren't even invented by Twitter, it was something users started to do, and then Twitter implemented it as a button:
https://www.annehelmond.nl/2013/01/19/on-retweet-analysis-an...
The same is true for the # tag which was introduced by early user @chrismessina.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Messina_(open-source_adv...
Then there's the history of Twitter itself which is mired in strife between the original founders, and changing different strategic visions as things suddenly - and rather unexpectedly - took off, thanks to the mobile revolution. Twitter is, after all a business, and not a very successful one at at that: it only turned it first annual profit in... 2018.
Why this backdrop? Because if you use Twitter, the feed of tweets you see is inherently distorted by this historic context. Twitter is used as channel for direct conversation between individuals... but it was originally never intended to become that. Twitter is used for marketing purposes to wide audiences... but it was never originally intended to be that.
The same is true with most social media. They were conceived by a few founders on a very limited premise - which was indeed rooted in their own personal context of affluence - and everything else became improvisation along the way as users took the concept and then started using those tools in novel, unexpected ways.
None that implies that these platforms don't carry value, are unusable or a lost cause. And neither does it excuse how the strategies and the visions of the past 15 years didn't result in affordances that curb discrimination, polarization and intolerance, but sometimes even reinforced them.
What this means to your average user, then, is that social media present a particular biased representation of reality; just as much as you would find in mainstream media. It's up to the user/reader then to be critical and understand that these continuous feeds of disparate thoughts are only presenting you with so much truth about the world.
Historians are taught that true objective historiography doesn't really exist and a pure fact based overview of history isn't informative. The interpretative nature of historiography doesn't make history any less valuable. As the famous French historian Marc Bloch wrote:
"The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings."
Marc Bloch was the founder of the Annales School together with other famous historians: their work informed contemporary historiography up until this day. Beyond academics, Bloch saw active combat in World War I, joined the resistance in World War II and was arrested and executed 3 weeks after D-Day. He was also Jewish. Context matters, and Bloch was acutely aware that he wasn't just writing history, he was also very much being part of it's making.
In the same vain, in actively using Twitter, users are shaping it and forming it's history.
Everything old is new again. Twitter is fine. It’s people who suck. Exercise your own restraint and freedom to associate. Externalizing blame is to throw up your hands and to join all the other naysayers in yelling at clouds.
FREE and natively supported and part of Twitter domain itself, on my feed?!
As for the rest of your comment, the personal is political. Twitter is personal. HN, for example, is much more of a water cooler type beat.
Your normal feed forces you into a much more "all or nothing" approach. Someone who often tweets useful stuff but also lots of noise, you either have to put up with the noise or miss their good stuff. In Tweetdeck, just their good stuff shows up.
I'm not sure how Twitter works now, but I imagine that a system of bot generated topics rather than direct following would be better suited for people like me.
Hashtags don't work, anybody can put any hashtag they want, even when the tweet is completely unrelated to the hashtag.
And that was one of the brilliant things about Google+:
You could post under different topics so people could read my programming or local posts without having to cope with my religious or political posts (just examples, I never got around to the two last ones I think).
Another thing was - after Google lost the nym wars their ux for using pseudonym accounts became one of the best I was aware of (no, it is not the same as the multiple-logged-in-accounts ux which I find rather unsatisfactory, but I guess parts of it lives on in YouTube were I can still see my pseudonym(s) when I log in.)
I don't think that would work thesedays. If you had a political post, I'd say you'd correctly keep it in its correct circle (based on you highlighting the feature here), but since Google+ was a thing, a new generation of twitter addicts have the mantra of "everything is political, even looking at a keyboard is a political act, politics affects everything you do, even if you just sit there, so that's why my political rant is in your model train collector circle #sorrynotsorry"
So they'd abuse the circles feature with that mantra as an excuse.
I want a social network where I can choose to follow people and some tags - want to be able to follow you, when you are not talking about politics and remain 100% ignorant of any posts you make about politics.
As you get older, you just don't have all this free time to sit there and scroll through garbage.
If you are tweeting about programming in a robotic manner while black people are being murdered by police, or while we rush towards a blue ocean event, you do have a hidden agenda.
Pretending that you can talk about the programming in a 'neutral' way is a radically political opinion. I get it, you actively and loudly don't want to discuss anything that isn't immediately interesting to you without making you have to question anything. But at the very least you have to concede that that itself is a strongly political statement.
What do you mean by “in a robotic manner”?
> ...you do have a hidden agenda.
What agenda? Why is it hidden?
> Pretending that you can talk about the programming in a 'neutral' way is a radically political opinion.
Why do you think that’s a political opinion? Why do you think it’s “radical”? What is it radical in relation to?
> I get it, you actively and loudly...
What do you mean by “actively and loudly” here?
> you... don't want to discuss anything that isn't immediately interesting to you
How do you know that? Do you know the GP?
> that itself is a strongly political statement.
What is?
This is the best way to use Twitter, especially your decision to not post or reply to anyone.
We're all prone to say something stupid on online, and if we attach our real identities to those statements, like many people on Twitter, someone somewhere will weaponize it. And, if you have enough "clout" on Twitter, something you tweeted yesterday, or a decade ago, can end your career. This is the world we live in.
I bet you still see politics trending every day in the "Whats Happening" Section. It feels like Engineers at Twitter are working overtime to promote their political agendas, and don't care that some people may not be interested in politics, or their opinions. I deleted my twitter for this reason.
Also, check gopher too. You can check out HN thru gopher://hngopher.com and avoid commenting, just lurking out the post and the comments. Use lynx, or better, sacc. That way youl'll avoid all the attention traps.
Man I'm so done with that. Even cultivating a group of accounts on say a topic ... they're still people so I get their angry rants about whatever issue. And I respect their right to be a person and tweet about what they want, but that's a double edged sword as far as my interest goes.
I really don't want to see a twitter spat, ever. Even if I AGREE with someone I'm following I don't want to see them act like a child or sort of yell at me / the world whatever concerns them at the moment ... I just don't, it's not helpful, I'm not learning anything, it's just yelling much of the time.
>Who has time for this?
Amen.
I think it's US-centric though (at least from how I used twitter). The same is true for India and few other countries where you can only find manufactured content.
Maybe it's related to population size. Social media and twitter segregate based on countries rather than states more. Given cities in India have more people than entire countries, the end result of more averages combined will be the same?
Another relevant comment I found:
Only something like 10% of users tweet regularly. I wouldn't be surprised if most twitter accounts are run by PR firms, bots and blue check marks. The other active ones are probably alts of power users who were self aware of their behavior and decided to be anonymous.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/22/21148516/twitter-suspends...
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17990946/twitter-russian-trol...
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24072286
Easier to explain by manipulation from wealthy and state?
a single human isn't evolutionarily equipped to tease out useful information from that much constant and ever-present signal. we're designed to tell if an eye crinkle means the coincident stream of words are more likely true or false.
we're also constantly making attribution errors via twitter in the same vein, attributing to individuals things that only apply to systems and groups (akin to the idea that there is no average person), generalizing in ways that are bound to be flawed but unable to help our collective selves.
i say all this to disagree with the idea that avoiding (angry) opinion is necessarily the "right way to use twitter". it's maybe a way for an individual to avoid drowning in the deluge of signal, but it does nothing to find the truths that must be washing over us at the same time.
"Why X happened to me and why YOU should be enraged, a thread"
"I'm mad, so I'm going to make a thread, in hopes of it going viral and, later, can be used for my own financial gain: a thread"
1. Follow people with high signal to noise ratio. These are people whose full time job is creation, and no marketing. Eg. Scientists and engineers and certain types of artists. Politicians not so much.
2. Use the mute feature liberally. Go into settings and mute the name of every major politician in your country, or politicians that are popular world over. On every part of the political landscape. Go to their accounts and block them too. Politics is a mind-killer.
3. Some people tweet good stuff, but retweet crap. You can go to their page and mute their retweets.
4. Follow people you disagree with ideologically. Don't get trapped in echo-chambers.
5. Create lists of people for stuff you are interested in, but don't want to pollute your main timeline with. There you can tolerate a bit lower SNR.
> 2. Use the mute feature liberally
No point in following them if I've muted everything they say.
Seriously, there are very few people remaining I've seen on the right who are prepared to make arguments that aren't immediately infuriating, based on something clearly wrong, or in support of people and policies who are harmful to my friends.
When I say ideological difference, I mean people who have different fundamental values. Say socialism vs capitalism. People from both those camps can disagree with each other, but still respect the arguments others make and learn from those arguments.
Obviously, when I say arguments I mean academia level arguments, not party-rally-slogan level arguments.
I don't know how I'm meant to deal with this other than just blindly trusting Twitter's algorithm of what ends up on my home feed (which I don't really want to). Maybe what I want is for Twitter to differentiate between announcement/public style posts and posts that are intended for a smaller community of followers, but that probably goes against the nature of the medium.
I hold myself responsible for this whenever I tweet something as well, but it seems like the only way to do it 100% is to make different accounts for different topics (e.g. one account for tech/programming, one for politics, and one for casual life stuff).
I want multiple streams like circles from Google Plus (yes the dead Google Plus). It was the only thing I found on Google+ which is missing from all other social medias I am using.
It's also a quick way to access an account without having to search for the account each time. You're probably thinking that defeats the purpose of a 'list' if there's just one account in it, but it's been my go-to method for a long time now, and I have bookmarked so many useful tweets, and I sometimes even reference these gems in blogposts, or share the tweet with friends on other social media channels.
It's all about having the time to /mull/ and assimilate knowledge rather than drinking from a firehose.
It feels like using Twitter or not has been an uninterrupted argument for years, even on HN, as if on one end your rational brain knows Twitter is detrimental to your mental health, but on the other end: it's a great dopamine, and outrage dispenser.
I'm extremely careful not to engage in anything related to identity or politics on Twitter. I've added a big list of muted words and accounts (trump, politics, gender, queer, republican, democrat, sanders, etc.). Many of these are topics I find interesting and discussion worthy, but the twitter format doesn't allow space for anyone to formulate actual cohesive thoughts so the result of discussing anything contentious is just people shouting at each other. Once I avoid these topics and stick to discussing tech, twitter is fine.
Muting is makes using Twitter much easier, when it's working. Sometimes muted words and phrases find their way through the cracks.
I follow several people in the game development industry, and historically used to see a lot of interesting technical articles being shared on Twitter within this community. That seems to have declined unfortunately, though there is still some.
I follow various people who have a habit of posting dumb funny jokes (usually puns) and memes. Not everyone likes that style of humour, but I do.
I mute or unfollow people if too many of the things they choose to share are things I don't want to see (like outrage bait).
For example, I probably never would have visited CERN or Chernobyl without it.
TLDR AI research community is quite active on there so it's a good way to keep up with big news and conversations (and more).
I think the usefulness for most people is equal parts keeping up w news/conversations and funny memes.
But it's the worst platform to have any type of discussion. IMHO if they would remove the "retweet with comment" feature, and start considering comment threads as comments instead of posts (so make a clear distinction between the two), things would be way nicer to navigate, but that will never happen.
The best way so far is to mute everything annoying.
Many of these artists are also likely on Instagram. But that'll require using a Facebook product, if that's not your thing.
"Hey here's a quick CSS tip!"
That's about it in terms of positive interaction where I didn't have to eventually prune that account ... but that's about it.
It probably helps that quick tech / CSS tips sort of fit inside the world of a tweet, but nothing else does.
Many OSS people aren't on Twitter. They're on IRC, Mastodon and mailing lists.
Much saner, less mobs, less sensationalim, less tribalism, less bullshit.
I've been exposed to people and thoughts I otherwise wouldn't have. This broaden my perspective.
Personally, I follow the rule that I will only tweet stuff I would be still excited to read in 5 years.
For this case to happen, a few things must align:
1) Important and accessible to enough people on that platform such that effective hashtags "coalesce" and the event becomes searchable
2) Recent (or ongoing/changing) enough that new information available in first-hand accounts has not yet made it to news reports.
3) Not flooded or taken over by bots and malicious accounts.
I wish there was a platform (or ideally an open standard linking multiple platforms effectively) where I could have the interaction I just described but on a much smaller scale. An up-to-the-minute first-hand witness of "whats going on". Essentially, the "raw" news. Technologically, Twitter should work just fine for this. But there are significant problems currently with reliability, trust, and misuse that I believe lead to the general problems people have with twitter which then prevent it's use for the type of "first hand accounting" I've described here.
Twitter is full of weird people who are the core potential audience of my creative/intellectual stuff. (HN in contrast is not.)
I also use it to keep up with things that will soon become political issues - that has a much smaller amount of noise to signal, but even so.
Ideally, I would love to be able to follow people only for some tags, but that would make twitter nicer to use so that is not going to happen.
Can also be pretty handy when you're at a convention/event.
* Novel ideas.
* Insight into how VCs think.
* Access to people.
Honestly, I really enjoy John Carmack's feed. He was a childhood hero of mine and it's great to read his stuff.
It is only social in the most twisted sense of the word. Rarely do you interact in a positive way.
Stopped reading there
(I know there's some weird campaign against pronouns but that doesn't mean that all people writing on the internet are now "him")
Listening to a variety of viewpoints in good faith is a good idea. Tribal, internecine discussion is usually much more predictable than that, though. I liked the term "internet of beefs" for that.
I do like the idea of recognizing that people are human, and not just political abstractions. But, I can also understand how natural the 'internet of beefs' stuff makes political abstractions the most convenient way of viewing people.
"Learn to listen to your discomfort. Sometimes I find myself reading something that makes me think, “I respect this person, but would be uncomfortable holding that opinion myself.” In such cases, it’s worthwhile thinking about why I find it uncomfortable. Is it someone speaking from unacknowledged privilege? If so, is this is a good moment to call them in (either in DMs or in public)? Alternatively, is it uncomfortable for me because it challenges my privilege? If so, that is worth sitting with and trying to learn from."
PS I'm old school in the sense that I don't have any inclination to tell you about who I am, but rather delight in the simple act of sharing ideas.
In short, political twitter gives us false sense of agency. Really we're draining themselves of energy needed to do the real work in their lives. And frankly, we have so little control over political events in the end...
1 - https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2020/08/06/political-twitter-o...
Think of it like any other social network feed and try not to take it seriously.
They literally cannot be irrelevant because they're official presidential communications - "The Department of Justice on Monday told a federal district court judge In Washington, D.C. that Donald Trump’s tweets are “official statements of the President of the United States.”"
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/government_says_trum...
see also just a few months ago. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/01/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-says-sto...
Anyone who uses themself and their own social reach as an example of why a platform is irrelevant doesn't understand basic demographics.
On the one hand, yes this is true.
But on the other hand, someone needs to tell that to "reputable" news sources such as the BBC who report on Twitter as if it was real news, and therefore shape real public opinion and even public policy.
In other words I can only agree with you if the consensus is that "news" sites don't matter.
https://vancelucas.com/blog/scorched-earth-quitting-twitter-...
Hearing about 'snitch tagging' for the first time (I have to admit I am not a frequent twitter user). Is it really frowned upon? I know the act of 'talking about someone and not tagging them' is called subtweeting and it is also frowned upon isn't it?
The takeaway for me is to stay away from threads like this.
Also the advice to 'let the third party know about the conversation privately' is interesting. I can see how it may help you evade backslash but from game-theoretical point of view it seems to me to be worse for the 'subtweeters' as it provides them with less information.
Subtweeting is usually just venting about someone or something. And by its nature it's ambiguous.
> The takeaway for me is to stay away from threads like this.
Correct. There's enough fighting on twitter already.
Interesting! I wasn't aware that anyone was doing double-anonymous peer review. I would love to know how that is working out.
One of the biggest challenges was to decide what to do about ArXiv and pre-prints in general - most researchers keep track of new papers on their area, and therefore it is likely that they will be assigned as reviewers for a paper that they have already seen (and for which they already know who the authors are). This issue came up for a vote a couple years ago, and the chosen answer was to not disqualify papers for this outright but to kindly ask authors to refer from doing so.
At the same time, "88% consider double-blind reviewing at ACL conferences to be important", and only 14% of reviewers would penalize a paper for not including a relevant pre-print. This seems to me like a fair compromise. There is also work in progress to either talk to ArXiv to allow for author masking, and/or to create a new pre-print server that allows it. There is a very detailed report on the results of the survey in [1].
A second issue is whether the reviews should be made public, because it could compromise the double-blind process. The general result of the survey [2] was against it, where "support for public review tended to be inversely correlated with reviewing experience (and) female respondents were less likely to support public review than male respondents".
[1] https://www.aclweb.org/portal/sites/default/files/SurveyRepo...
[2] http://acl2019pcblog.fileli.unipi.it/wp-content/uploads/2019...
https://blog.siggraph.org/2018/10/the-magic-of-technical-pap...
Nonetheless, I thought Twitter was doomed to create terrible outcomes from the moment it was born. You cannot share any new, meaningful, and serious thought in 140 characters. Every single one of my experiences and attempts to use it afterwards just confirmed my initial belief. I would much rather interact with people on IRC, via mailing lists, or on HN than do so via Twitter. Twitter is a cesspool.
Which servers do you prefer?
Like what?
I guess I also use it for occasionally for 1-on-1 communication via DM's and @mentions.
It's not my only use of Twitter, but I like how this way both stores the link and shares them at the same time.
(btw, @henrikwarne)
They're both internet forums with 330M Active users, both have basically the same content and same level of discussion. Think we need to start being more honest about what Twitter actually is and stop pretending it's the real world.
I just skimmed through the article (it's long, I don't have time to read the entire thing). I completely disagree about her overall statement. I prefer not to talk politics in my public twitter account that is used to follow people on topics I'm interested in (politics is not one of them). That doesn't mean I don't comment on issues like police brutality, human rights, sexual harassment, etc. But for me those things have nothing to do with politics.
> I’m a white, cis, female, straight, abled (currently; this can change) US citizen with a PhD, raised by parents with advanced degrees.
Gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, citizenship, education, and affluence, respectively. Another notable one would be incarceration status, at least in the USA.
On Twitter...
There have been efforts, advocacy, and 'conversation' about lots of such topics beyond just what folks yell about on twitter.
Twitter is a weird little world, and it is not 'in America'.... and arguably there is very little 'conversation' on their either.
How could they not? Such issues are frequently the subject of legal contestation, and the writing and administration of laws are inherently political. If you mean that you'd rather focus on policy issues than party identity that's understandable, but they're a corollary of the representative government model. Further, there are relations between the issues you mention, eg the set of people who care a lot (or not) about police brutality tends to overlap with the set of people who prioritize (or discount)_human rights, and so on.