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Comment by undefined1 | Hacker News Reader

quitting Twitter will improve your life, but here's the problem:

it leaves it to the most radical.

and why is that a problem?

because there is a pipeline from Twitter into the real world, especially via journalists and politicians who live on there.

what's the answer?

I'd love to hear ideas! but I think either we need many, many more reasonable voices on Twitter (an uphill battle, given the platform rewards and optimizes for outrage) or the pipeline needs to be severed or replaced. the latter is probably the way to go, but how?

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I often remind journalists "real people don't use Twitter". It's not entirely true, of course, but it's largely bots, people pretending to be bots, celebrities, people pretending to be celebrities, and journalists. It's performative.

Journalists outsourcing their job to squeeky wheels volunteering outrage is a problem with the journalists' superiors, customers, and sense of duty, not with the channels of communication available to us by technology and law.

But instead, we will suffer through algorithmic and legislative harrassment because the user is always the problem, not the corporate marketeers.

Reasonable voices get downvoted. Social media rewards extremes.

To begin with: we’re a tech community. Building a better twitter is possible, so build it. Even if you don’t build a winning app, you could demonstrate ideas or designs for alternatives. It could even be mock ups or prototypes. Contribute ideas to making a better world.

One approach is to leave twitter to the addicts manipulated into rage and just waiting. Either people will “develop antibodies” to twitter (PG) or it will destroy itself.

As others have pointed out, the real world institutions can solve the problem by breaking the connection between ML-induced outrage and their policy decisions. You shouldn’t feel like you have to take that on yourself, but I guess if you liked that idea then you could campaign for it.

If you stay on twitter you might improve the average level of discourse, but don’t overestimate your ability to resist the feedback loop that will constantly be trying to find new ways to trick you into engagement (and most of the time, enragement). You’re only human and it’s relentless. It doesn’t seem very sophisticated but even a random search algorithm will work given enough tries. You’ll also be legitimising twitter, which is questionable because they are knowingly creating this problem (disclaimer: I’m on twitter).

Regulation of social networks is on the way, twitter probably peaked with Trump, and I think you also have to think about opportunity cost, eg arguing on twitter vs building something that improves the world.

> Building a better twitter is possible, so build it.

It's been done. For example, app.net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net I deleted my Twitter account and joined ADN. But not many followed that example. Most people stuck with Twitter, ADN never reached "critical mass", and it eventually shut down.

I don't think this is a technological problem. You could say it's a marketing problem. The critical mass is essential to a social network. ADN didn't get it. Mastodon hasn't got it. Twitter has it, Facebook has it, and it's just hard to compete with that.

> I don't think this is a technological problem. You could say it's a marketing problem.

Yes I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. Perhaps App.net really was better, that's great - it means we know how to solve the problems of twitter (given I haven't heard exactly how it was better, that makes me sceptical).

But I think what you mean is _replace_ twitter, which is not what I was getting at. That is not just a tech or marketing problem but a business problem. I believe that's possible too. But the skillset required is probably outside of the average HN member, so I was tailoring my comment for a tech person.

Another way tech people can contribute is making chrome add-ons that improve twitter, demonstrating how it can be better.

Again, that's separate from launching a company.

> given I haven't heard exactly how it was better, that makes me sceptical

ADN was a subscription service. The common expression is always true: if you're not the customer, you're the product.

> ADN was a subscription service. The common expression is always true: if you're not the customer, you're the product.

There's a false implication here that ADN was better than Twitter but failed only because Twitter's business model is worse but lucrative. I think that's really not true. If you could build a product that people liked more, even if you made less money you'd still win.

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