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Comment by secondcoming | Hacker News Reader

It would be an interesting social experiment to see what happens if twitter turned itself off worldwide for a week.

The tiny fraction of the populous who spend hours a day on Twitter might have panic attacks, the rest of us who realize that Twitter (and social media in general) is a cesspool of toxicity and who never use it would carry on like normal.

The bigger effect is that many journalists get their scoops from Twitter. The legacy media would have a difficult time.

Good, they can go back to more traditional methods, of paying professional reporters to be in their local areas for those scoops. Rather than scrape what some person tweeted.

Id like that to be true but Twitter has 400 million users which is a large chunk of the developed world.

A sad week for the nsfw art community.

The VAST majority of twitter posts are created by a tiny percentage of people.

It's a tiny fraction, but they punch far above their weight. The discourse from there bubbles up to the news media and the entire culture.

Perhaps there's a middle way, something I've been experimenting with myself personally when it comes to digital devices: A digital Sabbath. Don't call it that of course, since it has religious connotation, but instead just... Turn Twitter off 1 day a week. Doesn't even have to be the weekend. Just close up shop on Tuesdays, give everyone a break.

We long ago learned that you can't be 'on' 24/7, yet we let ourselves fall into it with digital media/social networks.

Then the world’s media companies would have to report actual “news”.

Which is boring to them and essentially doesn’t attract the extra eyeballs they need to make enough revenue.

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