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Comment by dpeck | Hacker News Reader

God forbid anyone be multifaceted.

It seems the the rise of influencer culture led to everyone else feeling like they had to only be in a specific niche, and only speak about it or they weren’t going to serve their “fanbase”.

And you know they’re probably right that they wouldn’t serve that fanbase, but good grief has it made the net a generally much more boring place with space only for near-deified experts & influencers and perpetual newbs, leaving little room for anyone in the middle to have nuanced and varied conversations.

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no no, that's not the problem. reddit lets one person post in a particular place for a particular topic, and other places for other topics.

no one is complaining that a given person talks about multiple things.

people sometimes complain that there is only one topic on Twitter: the main stream, and therefore only one way to consume the things those individuals say. it's all or none, and that's what people are not happy about.

there's an argument to be made that "this is how Twitter is" which is valid, I think.

there's also an argument to be made that "my interests are specific, and everything else wastes my time" and I think there is just as much merit in that point of view.

This is why I spend more time on reddit than other social networks. Though they've tried to move away from it recently reddit has always been a content-focused network instead of a people-focused network.

You’re on Hacker News, which is exactly the opposite of Reddit for the reason you describe. dang reminded me the other day of this comment of his where he lays out HN’s position as a non-siloed site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

HN definitely has a topic, it's "things that hackers find interesting". Mainstream political news is usually off topic unless it's incredibly important. And you definitely can't post about that pizza you had for lunch, unless it's a rundown of how you built an arduino-controlled pizza oven.

Twitter has no topic at all. The interesting is jumbled with the inane, so the signal to noise ratio is very poor.

> God forbid anyone be multifaceted.

It's fine (and necessary) for everyone to be multifaceted. But it's not wrong to not care about some facets of a person you follow, in the context of social media.

Even two different people following the same person would care about different facets of that person, and not care about others.

The point is it's easier to manage the stream of information available to you if you can filter signal from noise in a way that you want.

Does that create a filter bubble? Maybe. Would it be better for everyone to read everything from everyone to get a broader perspective? Maybe. Or, maybe that would be worse, since there would be so much noise to sift through that the signal would be impossible to find.

I agree that it's extremely important that people be multifaceted. I also think people over-weight how important it is for them to express their individuality.

That said, I think the biggest issue is neither of the above, but rather that it's really hard to design interfaces that allow people to sort the signal from the noise. To weight/filter information. I just haven't seen it.

Back to OP and @JohnSmith: if OP worked in an office with @JohnSmith, OP could tune out @JohnSmith's pineapple-pizza rants … or walk away. This would be easy and natural. OP would that they were analyzing this and adjusting appropriately to maximize JS discussion while avoiding pineapple.

We naturally weigh, throttle, and filter the input of others. This allows us to take the good with the bad.

This is the nuance that Twitter—and most social media—lacks: how do I stay up on what matters most without being overwhelmed by what doesn't without separating content from context?

It’s not that there is something wrong with you posting that stuff. It’s that it ruins the experience for followers.

I follow a few hundred people who only post about specific topics they are experts in and it’s still almost too much.

The last thing I want to read is all of their half-baked political opinions thrown in with hemorrhoid complaints.

The truth is idgaf about the individual persona on Twitter. Being multifaceted is for friends and other real human relationships.

Back in the day, we’d tag our blog posts and people could subscribe to any subset of tags.

I don't need nuanced and varied conversations.

I don't care about @JohnSmith's political stance or what pizza he likes.

I don't think the issue is being multifaceted, that seems a really uncharitable interpretation of what he wrote.

Twitter is really great for almost any niche interest.

It is an absolute toxic wasteland dumpster-fire for anything related to politics (yes, even your politics) so sensible people would best avoid those political posts/discussions at all costs.

I want to follow @john-smith for his nuanced, thoughtful views on solid state batteries and EVs, and I'm extremely annoyed when he's retweeting moronic, tribalist politics into my feed.

Consider Asia Carrera as someone whose insights would be very interesting on a regular basis but who might also post content you would want to avoid.

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