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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>Cultivate a good set of accounts to follow

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.

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i haven't used twitter in a while (and even then was barely a user because it was so overwhelming), but i suspect a lot of the twitter and social media backlash is an impedance mismatch between our signal-seeking antennas and the tidal wave of signal (and noise) that's 300M people chatting at once.

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.

It's an interesting problem because it's akin to going to a cocktail party and having idle chit chat and then someone brings up politics. Even if you agree with the politics of the person, by introducing it into the discussion, you have no choice but to "take a side" and agree with them on things (or not). All of a sudden, some nice banter has turned into a serious discussion. There's a time and place for those discussions, and the problem with twitter is that the discussions are ALWAYS going on, rendering it useless as a place for idle chat.

In person I think it’s easier to be oblique in your response so you don’t have to agree or disagree, or you can agree and disagree in degrees.

That's true. In person conversation is much more fluid and easier to wrangle back to a topic.

In the least you don’t usually have a column of people listening attentively ready to pounce at any perceived false step. Usually 1:1 to 1:3, though it can go up if your convo is “interesting”.

This mirrors my experience. Adding one more point, a lot of non-outraged content is manufactured. It was nice at first but then it was plain boring and kind of manipulatistic in nature.

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?

> they're still people so I get their angry rants about whatever issue.

"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"

Don’t follow anyone who has spats. Or mute. Or block the offending party.

I agree with everything you said. But this comment is a great example of a rant you don't want to see on Twitter.

It's a good thing nobody has to see it on there ;)

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