Some stories are completely missed, due to not being Twitter friendly (to many words, hard to boil down to a tweet). Other non-stories are blow out of proportions because it was big on Twitter, even if no one outside Twitter cares.
They are both bad, but in very different ways.
On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel bad when you finally exit the app.
When in doubt, follow the money.
Definitely. It's really one of the few sites I block using my hosts file when I get a new computer.
To me, it feels like a small library of really cool books but the library happens to be housed randomly inside of a giant lunatic asylum.
I’m not sure if I understand how Twitter is systematically dividing the culture.
I really don’t think Twitter is the root cause of this. But I may be wrong.
It's a really basic algorithm that captures the equivalent of groupthink.
Twitter should learn from Tiktok and Spotify. Their algorithms work very differently.
Spotify has allowed me to discover some great songs just by creating a Song Radio from a song I liked. And it has also broadened the genres I listed. And spending 5 minutes on Tiktok's For You Page can help me feel better after a stressful day.
On the other hand 5 minutes on Twitter can easily lead to more stress in my case.
I feel like this "we" is misplaced. In a broad sense, yes, these acerbic tweets are indeed being made by our fellow citizens. That being said, Twitter tends to amplify the messaging of a small and vocal segment of it's vast userbase. It's a vicious cycle because exposure begets exposure and anger begets engagement.
A medium of communication is not neutral. A book is not just word of mouth stories written down. There is a feedback loop in there that a book becomes something entirely different.
I mean if we take things to extremes and make a platform that we can only communicate with 4 letter words, what words do you think are going to dominate engagement and take over the platform?
Twitter doesn't synthesise things, but it fosters an environment where people are driven to write more controversial, outrageous, engaging things by tight-loop-feedback classical conditioning. It's not magic – the people posting such things are partly to blame – but Twitter wouldn't have half as many problems if it just showed random tweets to people. Instead, it shows people what it thinks will keep people on Twitter; short term, that works, but long-term it destroys Twitter's value (and value of everything Twitter touches, as a side effect).
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Trump was banned from Twitter first. Any one with mildly right wing opinion is insta-banned from twitter. Blue checkmarks are strongly tied to institutional approval and fringe institutional voices are given a megaphone.
Twitter perpetuates the current class system. So those in power have no qualms with it.
Phrases like 'Nouveau Riche' or 'Paise aaye, par aukaad nahi aaye' (money without class) have existed in different cultures for centuries. This is not a new concept.
You think the elite all think the same? No they have their political differences. But you don't have to cry for him the GOP has its own media empire.