As a former social media analyst, I'm quitting Twitter
madrox.substack.com
madrox.substack.com
Personally I follow a bunch of vendors of products I like, a whole ring of C++ and developers, as well as a few game developers. So I have a quite pleasant and informative Twitter experience because I am selective.
And I should say, it's not even necessarily about politics. I'm not a huge sports fan, and in the same way, I would like to be able to unfollow posts about sports, etc of friends on Facebook.
Mods can surely delete comments that outright state anything political, but they don’t control the fact that the votes are controlled by the community and the votes favor things that fit in with a particular political world view.
All this to say, a vote-driven platform with an overwhelmingly one-sided user-base is not a great place to host a community.
You’re confused about what I’m saying. I didn’t refute that some group can gather in a special sub for right-wing topics while carefully banning thousands of wider users.
What I’m talking about is hosting a non-political community. The entire user-base of Reddit, on average, is leftist and those views leak into your community in the form of votes against/for particular topics.
> What exactly are you doing here on HN? Injecting politics, how are you any different than the folks you're complaining about?
Again, you’re confusing explicitly discussing politics with the effect of an echo chamber enforced by votes. Do you need me to explain the difference further?
Nope. You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about intent. It’s much broader with entire classes of ideas being oppressed and other bad ideas being accepted with refutations shunned.
In other words, if everyone is sitting to the left of you, maybe you're just sitting really far off to the right.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/3e897a...
https://social.techjunkie.com/demographics-reddit/
It’s not that there is anything particular about Reddit that attracts leftists, it’s just dominated by a young demographic that generally skews far left of the wider population.
> other words, if everyone is sitting to the left of you, maybe you're just sitting really far off to the right.
It’s not “everyone”, it’s just a simple majority of the users on reddit, which demographically is sitting to the left of the wider population.
So (setting aside the fact that a two dimensional political spectrums is bullshit) yes, I’m sitting on the right side of the curve in Reddit’s user base. But so are most professionals, parents, etc (I.e. folks over 25). And you only have to be sitting slightly to the right of the median before the vote ratio steam rolls you’re world view.
> and what you see as an enforced echo chamber is just the vast majority of users sitting in the middle of that bell curve doing their thing
That’s literally a fucking echo chamber. A community that has a voting mechanism that reinforces the views of the majority and suppresses anything unpopular with that majority group.
Are you sure you're sufficiently equipped for a discussion about echo chambers and politics? Doesn't appear so. A moment of introspection might serve you well.
It can’t be both. Either Reddit is biased and I don’t lean the same way or my comment said nothing about my leanings. Figure out what point you’re trying to make before throwing vague statements out.
> Are you sure you're sufficiently equipped for a discussion about echo chambers and politics? Doesn't appear so. A moment of introspection might serve you well.
Says the person who was incapable of actually engaging in a discussion about echo chambers and instead engaged in a personal attack.
Settings/Privacy & Safety/Muted/Muted words
You can put in all your political words like “Trump” “Biden” to remove from your feed
This has improved my Twitter 10x. IT people can be so annoying on Twitter, they basically all have the same political stance. I have a lot more respect for the people who just tell people to vote.
If newspapers have not evolved before the internet into just readers sending their mails it's because of the ultra low quality of nobody's view on anything.
Social media made us believe they were helping us share opinions to get the conversation started more directly, but in fact they just wanted to sell us toothbrushes while we were addicted to the fast food equivalent of journalism. Then it influenced journalists as well who dont know anymore how to lower their quality to get us to read them, now. Again to sell toothbrushes so they can survive.
And yes this comment itself is obvious, low quality, self contradicting too
Twitter has escaped Twitter. It is now everywhere, intertwined with other 'social' media, with other Internet forums, with traditional media.
You (we) cannot escape Twitter's nefarious effects any more, it doesn't matter who you follow directly on Twitter, it doesn't even matter whether you are on Twitter or not. Your 'timeline' may be clean and interesting, but you're still exposed to Twitter's virality.
Changing who you follow won't clear Tahrir Square or Kiev Maidan.
I follow too many people to categorize all fo them, so my hack is to wait until someone tweets into my main feed. Then when they do I add them to a list and then unfollow them. Ideally that means my main feed is empty.
The problem with this approach is that a lot of smart people are political right now. I'm political and so I appreciate this and know where they are coming from. But it does make it hard to have a single-purpose reading experience. For example, my feed of basketball twitter accounts is great when there is a game on, but it actually not all that different from my list of political/news accounts the rest of the time.
But overall, I think this is the approach to take.
The problem he's raising is that at a social level, extremists voices spread much faster that sane ones because the way Twitter (and others) are built. The the tool of virality, once used for marketing, is now used to cripple down society. Sure you can pick who to follow, but as you can see from stories like pizzagate more and more people are having hard time choosing the right people to follow, and that makes our world a dangerous place.
He's not leaving Twitter because he didn't his experience. He's leaving because he thinks it's harmful to society and he doesn't want to be part of it.
When people tweet about a professional interest like code, and their other interests, and family things, and random fun stuff, your timeline gets noisy. Likewise, if you follow people because you like code, and more people for your other interests, and you follow your friends, and fun stuff, then it gets really noisy too.
I follow a lot of people for frontend dev things, but also some more people for wildlife photography, and local Northeast UK tech scene stuff. I had to cut down from following about 1000 people at peak to 300 because I couldn't keep up at all.
If you can focus who you follow and what you use Twitter for then it's good, but for most people who have multiple interests it's not. Lists help a lot, but you need discipline to use them well.
* blocking popular and/or controversial political figures
* blocking whole list of controversial or outrage keywords
* training myself to skip tweets by outrage machine when they succeed to sneak through above two filters
* unfollowing anyone who has poor signal to noise ratio. More tweets about outrage than about anything I find useful.
With all these my twitter experience has been relatively pleasant.
I find this to be the most frustrating part of Twitter. There is a significant contingent of subject matter experts that freely co-mingle personal commentary on unrelated topics with their 'thought leadership'.
It was know as Google+, allowed people to post under different topics from the same account and also create multiple pseudonyms that one could easily switch between.
Besides, for some reason the most annoying people from Twitter and Facebook never "got it" so it was mostly just photographers, electronic enthusiasts, Linux people and gardeners (at least that was my bubble).
Edit: also frustrating: for some reason the focus of Mastodon and ActivityPub seems to be on Twitter-style interactions, at least that was my impression last I checked.
On Twitter it’s easier. I follow baseball, ancient history people and museums, local topics, and some tech topics, and a tight list of COVID sources due to my job. But 2020 is a crazy year and even very typically narrow focus nerds are political and upset.
I am on vacation now for a few days, but normally I have the Freedom service open a window of access for Twitter and HN briefly twice a day. Anything useful, then I paste URLs into my todos list.
Twitter us about just following very interesting people.
Don't scream.
Expecting people not to talk about these crises is like expecting Europeans living through WWI not to talk about all that ugly trench warfare business.
I've broken my rule recently to tweet covid-19 data and science. I try to make these tweets especially factual, but I have allowed my own views, which have changed over time, come through. This has become a political arena I cannot stay out of. I've been insulted by people I previously respected in the professional community, just ad hominem attacks, no data, no science, really no objective content at all.
The right way to follow the right people on Twitter — bookmark/remember link to their profile & newer clicks on "Follow" button.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+15%3A11-32...
Background: a man has two sons. He gives half of his wealth to each. The older son is a regular hardworking fellow who stuck around and helped and obeyed his father. The younger one squandered all of it away and after falling upon hard times, realized the folly of his ways and came back to his father, full of repentance. The father threw a large feast for him.
“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”
So don't bother trying to not die, since you can respawn and have a feast thrown for you.
The context is a religion where faith in an ultimate authority- adopted at any point in life so long as it is judged sincere- is rewarded eternally after death. (And in less gentle interpretations, lack of faith is punished eternally after death.)
It's internally consistent as a tool of indoctrination, but a good example of how religious tracts are a questionable basis for systems of morality.
And it's a rather precient parable because jealosy of a sibling is a common thing.
When others overcome something difficult, like addiction, I try to celebrate with them. I don't sulk and complain that i'm not getting enough adulation for never getting addicted in the first place.
The son came back out of desperation and didn't even get his pre-planned speech of apology out of his mouth, he just showed up.
A more positive view: The story is about celebrating the good (his brother/son came back!) and not focusing on perceived injustices. In other words, gratitude.
So when someone who didn't understand that before sees the light it is a great reason to rejoice. Now we have one more person who sees the light.
The brother who stayed at home should feel the same, if indeed he too has seen the light too. But if he didn't he didn't. I think that part of the story is really simply saying yes there are people like that too who do things only to gain a reward without understanding the intrinsic value of co-operation and love.
You must have missed that part of the story. The hardworking son who stayed home has been working on the family business, growing it, and is set to inherit everything including all the growth that has happened. He's still getting his half plus interest basically, which is worth far more than a single party. Meanwhile the son who wasted his half isn't going to get anything else now. The party is a one time thing. The hardworking son is set for life.
The older son has it made.
1. He came home empty handed. This doesn't really mean he won't leave again nor that he will make up for the damage he's done.
2. Why the other brother has to work like a slave with no reward? Not even a promise to change the current affairs. Just the old empty/vague encouragement "what i have is yours <but not now, later...>, we must all work <but actually you work and I watch.. >".
Let's make this a modern story about the financial crisis in 2008. The party guys get bailed out by the hard working people. Big Party?
Fast forward 2021: party guys will be rewarded even more.
There’s another story in the Bible about this, the vineyard workers. Workers are hired for the day with the promise of a day’s wage. Some are hired in the morning, others at noon, afternoon, and an hour before dark. The morning workers are angry because everyone got paid the same, and the vineyard owner reminds them that they were paid fairly, and that they should not let what others receive damage their contented-ness.
Christianity’s emphasis of forgiveness and full welcoming has been criticized by many austere and rigorously just religions and philosophies.
Seems like a useful philosophy to keep your workers (or, by analogy, a populace) in line.
You might be so happy as to celebrate and use that money on something frivolous. Does that mean you should treat all your money this way all the time?
To the elder son's complaints,the father merely responds (in the present tense) "all that I have is yours." Has that son perhaps not understood what he was in possession of?
This is entirely situational, of course, but may help explain what you described.
People designed these things, and today feel guilty about doing so.
Fine, no one is holding you to not thinking it through, I can personally give someone a pass for this.
But to make a routine about your lack of foresight, when others clearly worried about it? Worse, were such an argument to be successful, it would be a statement on the rigor of the audience, and not the people trying to clean their reputation.
As to why I wrote this, I thought HN readers may be interested in my take on how we got here, having worked in the space professionally. After all, social media tech used to be a big thing on these forums back in the day.
Then again, maybe there's also a lesson in that we expect anyone who writes anything now only does it to farm clicks.
Even here on HN, practically anonymous and without an e-mail address tied to my account, I mostly feel that my own contributions just aren't as valuable so instead of contributing I just read.
For almost any service, having to create an account is usually where I stop being interested. Even dismissing the cookie pop up is too much work for a website where I might only be for a short period.
What feels weird about it is that in my generation this seems uncommon. I have absolutely no idea what any of my peers are doing with their lives...
It's not a room, but a city. You've clearly been spending time in a bad part of town. Ruthlessly curating lists of people/accounts worth following will transform your experience.
So in the end the tailoring capability makes itself an obligation, which leads to users floating in their own opinions and information bubble, leads to ... interesting ... outcomes when the real world comes knocking.
This is markedly different to how it has been before with specialist forums etc. There, while there was coalescence around particular topics, the range of opinions and personalities participating was otherwise quite open and the ability to filter was limited (or rather, elective in a way that twitter feed curation is not). There was certainly some self-selection at play but it's intensified massively with the shift in dynamic.
Facebook has the same issue as twitter of course and I suspect many other platforms as well - One mitigating approach is to try and keep conflicting views on your feed but it quickly becomes so tiresome that your engagement with the platform as a whole drops.
I'm not sure there's a good approach other than to go full wargames.
Tweets are almost always very bold statements with little nuance.
But who has time for that? The OP said he was thinking about it while working on his car. A real life thing that I expect is a lot more satisfying than staring at phosphor being "ruthless" to strangers.
Given how many hours of daily television are consumed by your average 1st-world person, just about everyone.
Reddit I think has the potential for the best discussion platform. The people are the biggest problem, and upvotes are a good idea, but doesn't seem to work in practice
I love things like IM groups/discord servers because they are somewhat hidden and hard to find. You get invited by a friend or see a link somewhere and join and when you do join you tend to stick around for a while.
Mike Tyson says: “Social media made you all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”
1. Only following industry people and chefs. Basically just work and hobby. Anyone that strays into politics or social issues is hard cut. Not because they're wrong for doing so, but because with an anxiety disorder I'm not equipped to handle the constant bombardment of that. 2. I got a plugin that blocks the trending topics. 3. I have a keyword blocker for anything politically or socially related.
With that my experience has improved dramatically, but I really only was able to curate that experience because I work in the social media marketing industry. Regular users aren't as well equipped in the slightest. It's great because now I can use it for networking and my interests in a way thats much better than Facebook groups (which is what I formerly used to make industry connections).
This needs not only the software to exist (what plug-in do you use?) but the regulatory environment to allow / support / promote it and controversially the default settings - which I suspect will be the biggest political fight - I think we need to explore the concepts of Libertarian Paternalism exposed by Richard Thaler.
As for the keyword blockers that actually is a Twitter feature now though it's a bit buried. The "hard cuts" I talked about were a combo of unfollowing/muting/blocking depending on how aggressive they were / are.
If no to the second algorithims are flat out impossible. They aren't magical genies regardless of what you believe. If no to the first you can't even make ill-considered laws.
Even somehow having the concept is no guarantee - it could be a largely useless tautology of the Drake equation. If we knew the density of intelligent alien life and parameters of signals they would actually use we wouldn't be asking why we haven't found any yet. If you cannot obtain the information how are you going to tell if it is "beneficial" or "balanced" as opposed to your own assumptions as articles of faith?
A generation or two ago most of the western world fought wars over the spoils of the industrial revolution - and built a political-economic environment that benefitted individuals and shared the wealth more so than in hundreds of years.
The countries that do this again for the digital revolution are going to benefit as much as the west did last time.
It might not be us.
Writing the software to guide our lives is the easy part. It's not about social media - that's just the obvious part. This is going to be about all parts of our lives - banking software that considers your long term budget and stops you buying the crap item on amazon.
Software that sits down each evening and reviews how you spoke with your wife / child / co worker
I am going to have to put this into a book form to gain any traction - plus it's 1 am so I am likely not making best sense, but this is so inherent in the technology it just seems obvious as a next step. We will be guided by technology - we cannot possibly absorb all the information in the world so something will curate for us.
The political challenge of the 2-C is defining what does the curation and on what terms. Facebook optimising for engagement is wrong on all counts. What is right is politics not algorithm.
Not much more content in the actual piece. Seems to be very fashionable these days to either quit social media or traditional journalism for substack but honestly I feel like it resembles self-advertisement combined with mediocre pieces more than anything of value.
The argumentation like in this piece is usually that there is some bad incentive that these independent platforms avoid, like virality in this case, or being beholden to someone else, but I don't see how this isn't true for independent publishing.
If you run your own platform you potentially still want it to go viral if you want to monetize it (which I assume why people post it to sites such as HN or reddit, read social media), and you're beholden to your readers in a sort of patronage like relationship.
I think the messages that are effective on Twitter are true of all media whose goal is to reach as many people as possible. The things that work on Twitter did not start on Twitter, which I mention. Word of mouth marketing was coined in the 70s, I believe. What I believe makes social platforms more vulnerable to it is the user's inability to protect themselves from the messages of its most effective extreme actors.
The purposeful marginalization of RSS takes on new meaning in this context. RSS consumption enables control. Great for users. Not so great for other more power-hungry entities.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24840310
:-(
I wrote an article explaining the Fediverse, but really you can just search online for it. https://torresjrjr.com/archive/2020-07-19-guide-to-the-fediv...
It's decentralised and federated, and works on sane, standard protocols. It essentially rips out the problems caused by massive centralisation. I'm a big advocate for it, and for good reason. I believe we're currently collectively around 3 million users and growing, so it's definitely not a niche. It's not a magic wand of a solution, but it delivers where it matters the most.
I'm not at all fannish though and I think Twitter appeals most to those who are. It gives them a connection to celebrities and that's a very deep seated aspect of our cultures.
I'm more into learning and we can learn something from everyone so I spend my internet time more on long form media that dives deeper into subjects that interest me. Sometimes a tweet I've seen will lead me there so I don't think it's worthless, but most of those I see are referenced somewhere other than Twitter.
The users's I follow, usually science and tech, mostly post interesting stuff.
Actual, now is a very good moment to do so. Quit before the election. You're not going to miss anything healthy.
I just spent 5 minutes clicking around and still can't figure it out. How much is it? Where does my money go?
Reading a piece on Substack then clicking "Subscribe" only to have them demand my email address with no additional info is really off-putting.
„Build your audience on Substack, or bring them over. When you're ready, you can add paid subscriptions.“