Comment by not_jd_salinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_jd_salinger | Hacker News Reader

not_jd_salinger

I have a reasonable twitter following (between 5-10k followers) and have recently realized that I needed to remove the app from my phone and only occasionally check it from time to time on a laptop. I'm considering giving it up all together.

I've struggled a bit with this decisions since I've made a fair number of real friends through twitter (people I keep up with in real life after) and come across a lot of interesting books, papers etc.

But I've come to realize that despite its benefits, twitter is ultimately toxic to your mind. I've seen far too many people I care about slowly dissolve into a fever of dopamine fixes as they slowly contort their personality into a stream of memes and rants looking to gain followers.

I always tried to fight the urge to post stupid shit just to grow followers, but anything genuinely nuanced or thoughtful you post will have virtually zero engagement. This is fine in isolation, but it leads all conversations to eventually degrade in to a miasma of garbage thinking that is just a mix of groupthink, rage and memes.

The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all. This same type of thinking is what got me to drop facebook entirely years ago.

> The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all.

I laughed when I read this because I've replaced browsing Twitter while eating breakfast with reading my local newspaper. Today I was so upset by what I read in the paper, the feeling stuck with me all morning. In my head I composed several "letters to the editor" and only now am I finally moving on. I won't write those letters, but I probably would have engaged with that content on Twitter. I don't know what this means, but being outraged at the news is not exclusive to new media.

Your comment reminds me of this comic https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/mind-3

Perhaps with social media it applies as much to younger people as well.

This still seems healthier. You were angry about something presumably in much closer proximity to you, and therefore in a much better position to change/do something about. You didn't have an immediate way to fire off a response, so you had to think about it more. Twitter takes all those things and gives us the worst possible version: outrage you can engage immediately with, about issues on the other side of the planet.

I've always felt the fundamental flaw of Twitter is it focuses on people, and so ego gets in the way and ruins things. It's a popularity contest. Contrast that with say Reddit, where you can go to a niche subreddit and it's not about people at all, it's about the topic of the subreddit. Everyone is just talking about the topic, and no one cares who you are. I find that to be a much more healthy and enjoyable experience. And to be fair, mainstream reddit has a lot of ego in it too. My trouble is finding "niche twitter" seems to be impossible, after 10ish years now I still haven't found it. I'm convinced it doesn't exist.

edit: HN also fits the bill here.

reddit can be incredibly angry as well. Downvoting has advantages, but a disadvantage is creation of echo chambers where people feed off each other to get more and more angry, only hearing the worst from those who disagree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

I agree, but I think that mostly happens in mainstream Reddit. I still feel like smaller subreddits are still a nice oasis in this current era of the internet.

The focus on people has upsides too though. On reddit, you tend to see mostly content from people who post a lot, even if they are kind of dumb. With Twitter, you can choose to follow only people you actually respect.

That's a good point. Although for me, I find it frustrating that content on Twitter from an account can be anything. They may be known for certain types of tweets, but nothing stops them from tweeting completely random things. In general I find the signal/noise on Twitter is often quite bad.

To be fair, I'm not a fan of Twitter, so I'm pretty biased in this discussion.

As soon as I found myself one degree of separation from drama I packed up and left. It was a major factor in my livelihood and professionally very important, but it's not worth it. I've been adjacent to some people who the Twitter hivemind deathray has focussed its sights on, and it was deeply depraved/disturbing. For me Twitter has nothing to offer that'd make it worth risking that fate.

Facebook is actually pretty great for local community events. It allows for you to see what's all happening near you and you can add them directly to your calendar. Facebook honestly has pivoted to being a better tool to go out and do stuff socially than it is to actually post.

Reminds me of Nextdoor. Initially, you could only interact with people relatively close by. But then they opened it up to be citywide, to increase engagement, no doubt.

Now you see the same toxic behavior as on other social networks... the small community feel has been lost.

Probably some relation to Dunbar's number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

I think it would be funny to pick random accounts and a random topic for each one, then use a botnet to interact with any tweets from those accounts about their randomly assigned topic.

Could you gradually turn people into broccoli enthusiasts if they got 5x the engagement whenever they tweeted about broccoli? I bet so.

I have roughly half the followers and upon seeing similar dynamics, just started taking breaks and tweeting things of interest, but with a twist: I do not check on those tweets, until next session.

Works much better now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com