“It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

As shown with the horror movie tweets, literally anything said can offend someone. This is why I created a new social media platform for Cancel culture.

https://cancel.pointless.click

Twitter rewards being a dickhead. It was fun when everyone was allowed to be a dickhead, but now there's a protected class that cannot be criticised and freely sends death threats and the like to whatever bad guy they think they have that day.

This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet

I think the issue here is human socialization and not twitter or technology. People love to play the "did you see what so-and-so said?" game in all its variants, and as far as I can tell this has been true for millenia. It has nothing to do with a trending topics feature

I feel like there are many articles and books that attribute basic elements of human interaction to whatever platform the author was using to observe them. Technology does enable new ways to relate and creates some unique situations. But the basic beats of these social phenomena are the same as they have been for a very long time

Some form of this is happening to me on hackernews as we speak.

A long time ago, I had a lot of karma, almost a thousand. I was a model citizen for HN. But at some point, I must have posted a controversial opinion, and then HN decided they wanted to cancel me. If it wasn’t for a downvote limit per post, my karma would be below zero by now. Instead it has dwindled and deteriorated slowly over time, trending toward nothing. Nothing I do will move the needle to recover my karma, I’ve simply accepted that someday my karma will be so low that I’ll be shadow banned forever.

Part of this is my own fault, as my posting habits changed to more bitter and cynical tones as a result of knowing that no matter what I say I will accrue inexplicable downvotes, so why spend effort softening my words? But it’s amazing that sometimes a completely mundane post suddenly has -4 downvotes out of nowhere.

I wish I could see a plot of my karma over time, and know the exact point it all went wrong, so that perhaps I could learn and conform a bit better to the popular opinion. Unfortunately I know of no such tool.

This phenomenon is hardly unique to Twitter or social media. It happens all the time in schools. The local town newspaper could set off these sorts of things too (or national media).

I suspect it could happen in any case where there is widespread (relative to audience) information discovery of something and people who are all too happy to be mad at people.

Cigarette use was very common among people before it was shown that nicotine is a carcinogen. Since then, people have cut down cigarette usage drastically and most countries now require manufacturers to have warning labels on cigarette packets. I hope social media services suffer the same fate. It was cool to be on social media when it was new and people were genuinely happy that they could keep in touch with their friends and relatives so easily. Since then, harmful effects of social media—from privacy concerns to disinformation to psychological problems induced by their usage—have been widely discussed and established. So, just like it happened with cigarettes, I think it's time for people to collectively reject social media services and go back to communicating and expressing their thoughts like they did before.

It’s not Platform Failure, it’s culture failure.

I never have and never will use twitter as it it too toxic for any well adjusted human to use. This applies to all social media: facebook, instagram, twitter, tik tok, ... If people just stop using these abhorrent apps all of these issues will be diminished as never in the history of humanity has each single human had so much access to ... other humans which are not well composed together and are ready to jump and argue on anything for a bit of dopamine (same as me actually right now, arguing against twitter. I’m part of the problem)

Isn't it an education failure? Somehow we educated a generation of angry people who favor "narratives" over facts, who favor mind-reading or attack-of-motives over rigorous debates, who favor what justice or righteousness in their mind over tolerance, who favor emotion over truthfulness. With growing number of such people, I don't see how a platform can help. On the other hand, the same group of people will be in charge of platform, like what see in Twitter.

It's easy to formulate it this way, but the sad reality is that these are actual people reacting in this way, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes because it fits their worldview, sometimes because they believe that by expressing their anger they will really make the world a better place. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform, digital or analog. Social media just acts like an amplifier for all possible opinions.

It's a common theme, actually: many people believe that everything they don't like should be eliminated. That's exactly the opposite of one of the best developments of our civilization: that many cultures and people with completely different worldview can live peacefully next to each other and even collaborate for the common good.

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people", I quote this metaphorically, Twitter is used by Cancel Culture, yet you blame Twitter, that's typical Cancel Culture.

The article title is a misquote [1] from the interviewed subject of the article, in which the subject recounts a situation where their mundane tweet was replied to thousands of times, and was trending before and after because of a Twitter feature designed to highlight high-interaction tweeets from verified accounts.

This is essentially clickbait, because it sets up an expectation in the reader that cancel culture may be involved. I have a low opinion of intentionally manipulative titles, and consider them to be a platform failure.

[1] It's literally a misquote, because the interviewed subject is in truth even more dismissive of the concept of cancel culture, but all of this is a red herring, because no one in their right mind ought to think this bizarre situation was a manifestation of cancel culture. Don't pick this apart uncharitably, my assertion does not preclude from "people in their right mind" nonetheless believing in cancel culture; my assertion is that no one in their right mind should think that This bizarre incident was a manifestation of cancel culture.

Nonetheless, the writer does have a point. The 'trending' feature was easily manipulated in the past, and now that it's been changed to add some editorial commentary, it's now complete nonsense masquerading as newsworthy happenings. But the whole site has been like that since retweets were added, where everyone is just trying to ride the coattails of being adjacent to a viral tweet and go viral themselves. Lots of people claim they get value out of Twitter, but when you listen to their example, they invariable engage in curation of their friends and the people they follow, and stick to interest-based communities rather than bored people shitposting. There's no value in Twitter-at-large, except to the trolls and people who seek fame or infamy for its own sake.

But where the writer falls short is they don't present a clear alternative. They point a laser pointer at some bizarre event that only a few thousand people know about that blowed up a blue-check person's phone for a day, conclude the whole site a cesspool, and ask us to ponder in our hearts if we deserve something better. Yes, we do, and we use those sites, like this one, and engage with those communities instead. And I think a lot of people do. Yet some people still use Twitter too, so perhaps it fulfills a genuine demand for something after all.

It's interesting that naively you can't prevent "context collapse" and "filter bubble" at simultaneously: you must allow for people to be exposed to and engage in topics they don't really know anything about or contribute constructively in, or wall them off only into the communities that they participate in.

There are probably nuanced and ingenious solutions to this, but nothing straightforward.

Implicitly, this piece is making an argument for a return to gate keepers/taste makers of yore. I'm not sure that's better. For better or worse, would the BLM movement have the power and reach it does today if it were filtered through establishment news sources?

I don't know what the future of human interaction looks like on a global-scale omnidirectional communications medium...

... But Twitter ain't it. I deleted my account years ago and have never been happier.

I remember seing twitter early on and thinking it wasn't too impressive but guessed it was just an MVP and it could become fantastic in a couple of years when they added groups and topics and machine-to-machine and became a messaging backbone of the internet.

Instead they doubled down on being a massive high intensity low value channel: technically impressive yet sad.

> Wanna singlehandedly stop a disinfo catastrophe in October?

> Tell Twitter to eliminate Trending Topics for the whole month.

> Gaming Trending Topics was Wikileaks' strategy. It's how Pizzagate emerged from the fringe.

Pizzagate "emerged" from 4chan or 8chan, not as a Wikileaks' strategy. If we're going to talk about bad faith interpretations or "context collapse", I'd like to see an example that isn't so clearly false, almost to the point of it just being political bullshit.

I followed the logic of this story right up until it jumped into this nonsense.

I never got on the twitter boat. After reading articles like this, I'm glad I never did.

However, why doesn't everybody else get off? People must like it enough? Then the cycle will never end.

> Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage

Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.

What would happen if there was an app that helped victims of Twitter pile-ons start tweeting generic political hot-potato non-sequiturs when something like this happens? E.g.,

* Stop the Uyghur Genocide

* Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times

* a UK judge found U.S. detainment conditions so brutal they refused to extradite Assange to the U.S.

etc.

Now the recommendation engine can do one of two things: boost the hot-potato and bring heat from the relevant nation state actor(s), or ratchet down the noise and eat the cost of the lost engagement.

Edit: replace "app" with "static site with an unordered list of such geopolitical hot-potato non-sequiturs"

False. Sure, platform failure as described is a real thing. But the point here assumes that there are not roving gangs of people who have weaponized this platform failure as a form of virtue signaling.

Again, until you've had a few thousand people attempt to cancel you for a misunderstanding it's easy to keep repeating the lie that cancel culture doesn't exist. It does. It's real. And claiming it doesn't exist is the snake eating itself.

I mean to be fair, the opinion expressed in the tweet in question was pretty dumb.

> "We Need To Get Rid Of Twitter Trending Topics"

"We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ?

Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists.

Twitter is not about cancel culture. It's about using outrage to increase engagement. Cancel culture is just one natural outcome of the outrage machine. Cancel culture increases engagement from both sides and Twitter just loves it.

I deleted my Twitter and I feel great after doing so. I believe Twitter is a platform where San Francisco exports its social problems to the rest of the world. The result is riots, chaos and hate.

I don’t see what the fuss is about. “Alien wasn’t a horror movie”: just run of the mill flame-bait that started a flame war. Anyone who actually took it seriously needs to chill out.

And Kevin Smith should make a second movie.

And Event Horizon sucked.

It's a waste of time is what it is. We don't actually need so many people in the world. So there are a bunch of folks with no real purpose who are bored. They spend their time doom scrolling and pulling others into their void. Some of them also feel the need to vocalize. It would be far better if we just paid everyone $4k a month and otherwise we all minded our own business.

Its not cancel culture because no one was cancelled. A woman posted a shallow and clechéd understanding of what a horror movie is and it went viral. She wasn't banned for "community guidelines", she wasn't fired from her job she didn't have her paypal confiscated. She got some angry emails and retweets for a flippant opinion of the kind she regularly makes irl with zero consequences. This is rule 37 in action and blaming "platforms" is just a call to actually cancel people the author disagrees with.

There is a problem with platforms. But the problem is that they encourage unsuspecting and naive people to pimp their every thought and action for attention from internet strangers in exchange for getting blasted with targeted ads.