The new silent majority: People who don't tweet
axios.com
axios.com
I know a lot of folks in my field side by the stance that everything is political, even code. Call me irresponsible, but I've honestly led a much happier and stress-free life living in the fantasy world where that is not the case, and I can enjoy my hobby in open-source without Github issues becoming a shouting match that spans 200 comments from people who aren't even invested in the codebase.
EDIT: typos
If I play boardgames with Sue, that's enough. We meet, enjoy a beer and play some Catan and go our separate ways. That's a fine relationship.
If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'm happy just playing some Catan once in a while.
Historically you didn't need to know everything about everyone. Your friends will always have opinions or lifestyles you will find disagreeable - that is the nature of human existence.
Humanity either needs to "agree to disagree" on wide swaths of things we care a whole bunch about (abortion, firearms, lgbtq, etc) or we need to go back to not discussing those things in public or polite company.
My $0.02 is that it's easier to fall back to rules of polite conversation than fix our compulsive need for agreement.
Using the example above, there's nothing stopping that person from bringing their whole self to board game night. They're choosing to avoid certain topics with a certain group of people, so I would expect some of that behavior to cary over to social media.
If I think about something like the "close friends" feature on instagram, I have some friends who just share way too much with everyone, but I've got others who use that feature pretty heavily.
Not true, unless they're hosting.
I expect most people that held a job prior to social media (or-- really, holds a job in most industries except tech outside of a few cities) will happily tell you that people readily pass on such opportunities.
This was also during the trade war, so these same guys were shit talking Trump and calling him a fucking retard too.
Good timez(?)
> exactly the issues that the vast majority of Americans actually do agree on.
cite?
Those three issues are polling in the 50-60% range on Pew research, and tend to fluctuate heavily based on recent events and question wording.
For example, you can't "agree to disagree" on LGBTQ rights if you belong to one of those categories. See also pregnant people and abortion rights.
Why can’t you? Is it impossible to imagine civil friendly people who simply do not share one’s views on these issues?
It's not as polarised these days, but it was within my lifetime that consensual homosexual sex between adults was illegal in many parts of the world. It still is in some countries. You cannot "agree to disagree" when someone believes you are broken or sinful or whatever and wants to put you in jail.
That's just one example.
I'm straight, white dude. It's very easy for me to ignore issues like this, because most of the time, they're in my favour. That's just the world.
In the real world, two very different people might meet and start to build a history and a good deal of rapport and trust with each other before ever getting anywhere close to a divisive issue. When they do eventually get there, without a mob watching, without the fear of every word going in the permanent record, the conversation would likely be far less of a dumpster fire, and minds might actually be changed.
As it is, a lot of the discourse you see online is indescribably bad, and I think a lot of it is down to throwing two strangers into a conversation that they would never naturally arrive at upon first meeting.
the conversations are about important things that effect your life, the conversations themselves aren't important and don't actually effect your life.
I believe it’s very important to be able to calmly and genially argue points which are important to you. There may not be any value in merely being able to argue calmly and politely for points in which you have no interest.
With LGBTQ it is therefore not just a difference of opinion on taxation, or a few percentage points difference in a tariff. For trans people it's about whether the other person even acknowledges that you can be trans.
Ie, these debates are not between "pro-lgbtq" and "anti-lgbtq".
Instead most of these debates are more nuanced and complicated. I picked the "trap" debate because it's hotly contested, with both sides swearing up and down they are pro-lgbtq and both sides would even claim to be more pro-lgbtq than their opponents.
Which is to say, you can probably ignore the debate and not care, still be pro-lgbtq, and go back to playing your board game, even with friends who have a different ideological position on that particular debate.
A lot of social media fights are about this scale.
I think mutual respect also plays a part here. My respect, demeanor towards, and willingness to play Settlers with someone who believes LGBTQIA+ people are sinners depends a lot on whether or not that person engages in honest, consensual debate and respects the human on the other side. That is how we form good relationships and strengthen our collective understanding. I wish to underscore the importance of consensual debate, especially when there's a power gradient.
I will say though, "Do gay people get basic rights" is _very much_ still a subject of debate. Sadly.
Eeh, it's still "do gay people get basic rights" for many even in the United States. I've seen folks have last wills overturned by family through insidious legal maneuvers. I've seen doctors refuse to contact patients with biopsy results because their patients were trans. And I've seen folks even withhold paychecks from LGBT folks because of their religious nonsense. So, basic rights are still a matter of contention until it becomes not merely a legal formality that LGBT folks are equal under the law but that the entire population does not even think that they have a chance to violate those formalities and that they feel bad about thinking of doing such a thing. Until that happens, LGBT discussions will always go back to "do gay people have basic rights?".
On the contrary: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/texa...
I would equate a trans woman calling themselves a trap to being the same as a black person calling themselves the N word. It's a way of taking back a slur.
My preference here is to refer to people however they want to be referred to. When I adopted that view, I thought it was very safe but it has actually landed me in hot water many times. I still stand by it though.
Reclaiming != identifying as.
The person you're defending even went on to say that his mentality has gotten him into hot water. The fact that you didn't read into that as "I have no idea what I'm talking about and these people clearly didn't want to be called this" is disconcerting.
And yes, if you are not a person of color and you use a slur traditionally used to describe a person of color to describe or talk about a person of color, you are racist. Full stop. The very fact that you're concocting some outlandish situation where you'd magically be allowed to use slurs is extremely telling, though. If you had any idea what you were talking about, you wouldn't ask that.
Maybe you should stop opining on things and listen to the parties these things affect. The usage of slurs isn't yours to have an opinion on if the slurs aren't words for you.
Slurs are partially the actual word and partially the intent behind them. Once you get to know someone very well, it's typically the case that there is an understanding of no mutual malice between you and them. It is this context that "reclaiming" comes into the picture, because you have a shared perception of what the intent is. You might've heard of the "n-word pass"–it's kind of a meme, but before it was the concept was legitimate and the sentiment was that you're on good enough terms with someone that they know you're not trying to be malicious to them when you use it. It's a sign of trust, and to put it in vernacular, you can't "transfer" a n-word pass because it's a product of your individual relationship.
Putting it a in slightly different context, I (jokingly, of course…) call my mom old and senile when she forgets something in a dumb way ("Where did I put my phone, I've searched the entire house…oh, it was right in front of me where I put it down seconds ago"). She knows I am not directing hatred towards her. With that said, just because I can call her old and senile doesn't mean you can do it, or that I can go do it to any middle-aged woman. But because both of us know each other, it's totally fine to say this among ourselves because it's shared language to us.
Now, with that in mind, I don't think the commenter actually was trying to justify being able to go around calling any person they saw a slur. How would they get in trouble for this? Well, I look different enough from my mom that our relationship isn't immediately evident all the time. If called her old and senile within earshot of someone else, it could definitely look like I was being a jerk if they weren't aware we knew each other beforehand. If I did it around other women of the same age, it could really cause issues. I would certainly not consider either of these a wise thing to do, but in my eyes these are really more a lack of tact or maybe misunderstanding of the context you're in rather than just a racist person wanting to be racist.
(You might be wondering why I would choose to use these words at all…I think the answer to that is really what reclamation is about. Nobody wants to be old and senile, but it's a thing that happens. My mom appreciates it that it's something we can joke about, and I think it helps her deal with it in a way. My understanding is that mutual use of slurs on friendly terms has a similar effect. There's a more extreme form of reclamation of "I think anyone can call me these words, even if I don't really know them, because I'm just really confident/proud of this" but I understand that's not for everyone, and it's definitely something that you can't just assume about people.)
Anyways, to circle back to the original topic, I don't even think my interpretation is a good faith interpretation, it just seems like the more likely interpretation, which is that the commenter has situations where the slurs is normalized and even encouraged by the people who they apply to. You seem to have interpreted this as "the commenter thinks that this means its OK to use them generally because they are racist" but this just doesn't seem to be the case to me. (And if it is…I definitely don't support that.) That's basically all I wanted to bring up.
(One final thing that has more to do with the sentiment of your comment rather than its content, which I think is solid: it seems like you wrote it from the perspective that I'm, at best, woefully misinformed and isolated from marginalized communities, and at worst some sort of closet bigot which you can discern from my comments. I'm a real human being with real empathy and real experience and real faults! I understand that this is a topic you're passionate about, perhaps maybe one you're tired of discussing, but you don't have to attack me to express your opinions on it. Even if it sounds like I'm disagreeing with you, I'm here to interact with new perspectives and learn from them. I only ask that you don't immediately dismiss me as close-minded, as doing so from the start only makes that more likely, rather than less.)
If one, however, goes out of their way to harass transexual people when stating this preference, then yeah, it's a bit transphobic. Intention matters.
I'd say it is a probably a minority position but it is a genuinely held one
I wonder what their position is towards someone who prefers trans people.
They'd consider it fetishism, unless said person was also trans and only preferred other trans people because of wanting that shared life experience.
Their point was that thinking of trans women as different to women as a group was inherently bigoted.
Whoever brought it up has some deep unresolved issues, however. Or was fishing for an argument.
EDIT: It's like fetishes. Preferences are fine and should be respected, but they're also better kept off private. Telling people of a specific ethnicity you're "into them" is also kinda creepy.
This was in the context one of those kink quizzes regarding what things someone was into, so genders, fetishes, bodily features, sex acts, etc. It isn't like someone just announced to a bar "I'd never date a transperson" out of nowhere.
I think that depends on your social circle.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385 has some examples of people for whom this was clearly not a strawman as of 5 months ago.
You can choose to hold that opinion if you want, but most LGBTQ+ people and their loved ones will choose not to interact with you as a result.
That means one side thinks the other side is a child abuser, and the other side thinks that bigots are going to throw them in prison for being a supportive parent.
This is not something you can be "polite" about.
2. It was a clarification of existing rules
3. It does not make "supporting your child's gender transition" a jailable offense.
The order says subjecting a child to invasive medical procedure can be abuse, and that doctors and teachers have a legal requirement to report abuse.
Here is the order for your reading pleasure:
https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-dfps...
Where "subject" appears to be the most general form possible, as far as I can tell from context.
Even puberty blockers are on this list! You're not supporting a gender transition if you can't touch hormones at all.
Wow, finally a law against infant male circumcision!
In Texas, of all places; whodathunkit.
Edit: also wtf does that have to do with sex? Do you mean the larger subject of child consent in general? Because contract law would be a less extreme example of children not having power of informed consent.
I absolutely hate that my ability to participate in modern society without harassment for things that are inherent to my existence is limited and I hope that one day we can move past this kind of foolishness as a species.
For gay, it means keeping secret over pretty large and important parts of life. As was explained to me by gay who was super civil, but did grumbled and complained about a lot of stuff that was said when it was safe to talk more openly.
Of course, let's put the transphobes and trans people on the same room. That should play out well, like KKK and black people and Nazis and the Jews, right?
And again, I'm talking about fairly fundamental things here. If someone is pregnant, that's pretty conversation worthy. I also can't imagine someone not discussing seeing a new partner.
Ironically, the things you can "agree to disagree" on tend to be the ones that might not come up.
But not all pregnancies are wanted. I have had friends talk to me about their decision wrt an unwanted pregnancy.
There are even Ls and Gs who think Bs are "faking it".
The trick is that it's not a boolean question. Someone can be gay and anti-trans and this is trivially true.
I've seen a shirt that says "Bi now, gay later"
If you have a stronger source I'm open to being convinced, but otherwise I don't find one anecdotal account very convincing. I can't easily get to the cited books to get any more clarity they might have.
Oftentimes a position, belief, or disagreement is a projection of other underlying fears and discomforts. Or maybe it's simply rigidly structured views that need additional time to process new shapes.
If an intergalactic enemy suddenly showed up on our doorsteps and started attacking us, we'd all band together.
I think I know why gay men tend to take this view way more often than the rest of the acronym, though: straight men don't hit on gay men, but straight men constantly hit on lesbians. If I had a nickel every time I heard "I can turn you straight," I'd be closing in on a couple dollars by now.
The common theory is roughly the opposite of this: people disproportionately share their better moments on social media. Its users project the impression of having a much better life than they actually have. This bias is one of the reasons social media is so awful for 'FOMO'.
edit Of course, that's not a direct contradiction of your point. The positive/negative dimension is different from the which-aspect-of-your-life dimension.
share their more extreme moments. Not automatically "better", there is an awful lot of tweeting where people are essentially exposing their mental illness and successfully soliciting support. While no one is going to FOMO on misfortune itself, people certainly do FOMO on the attention announcing your misfortune (and as a result identifying with it) brings.
That resonates hard with some stuff I'm seein' now.
They all basically revolve around one truth I think.
The internet doesn't radicalize people. People radicalize people. The internet is just full of people who are already radicalized in their daily life, and they are using the internet to radicalize others. Whether it be for the left, right, or even some weird alt thing.
Penny Arcade even has their own comic strip theory called "G.I.F.T of the Internet".
Theirs is more simplistic though in that it stipulates that the anonymity of the net is the problem insofar that it gives people a fake sense of security to be who they really are on the inside. For better or worse. Usually worse.
I think all of our ideas on the matter basically resonate on the same singular issue. That people were already nuts to begin with. The internet is just making easier to identify which are fucking screwballs and ... the rest.
But then that poses a new problem. Mob mentality even of righteous people is still just as toxic as the mob mentality of fucking idiots.
Nothing gets people going like someone saying something divisive or controversial after all.
So pretty soon most of the feed is divisive bullshit.
I get it definitely happens with folks texting friends links or sharing it via email, but the friction with those is higher and it gives time for folks to think more than the feed interface.
It’s highly efficient psychological pressure/engagement and maximizing the focus towards the engaging content that is the real problem IMO. It makes something that someone could think about (potentially) and choose to stop into something they become hyper engaged with constantly and can’t turn off.
Shiri's Scissor: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
We however, do. This is why the human element side of things is my target. Even if the algorithms change, not much will if we don't.
No one is going to approve a ‘say anything as long as it bumps ratings immediately’ algorithm, but almost everyone is going to try to do at least what the top competitor seems to be doing.
Which is algorithmic/ML based engagement optimization, with some kind of ‘but not the most controversial if it’s literally nazis’ type filter for things with too much political blowback (aka calls for insurrection), or legal issues (child porn).
If you look, it’s literally almost everywhere now. And earlier they didn’t even have the ‘not literally nazi’s’ filter.
It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all agree to not do that, or even try to enforce that people don’t do that.
Algorithms require input to give you output, right? So even if you are correct that badly created algoritms are to blame, we still have the people who fall for the algorithms outputs because they are feeding it the inputs.
To put it simply, it all goes back to the calculator/computer quote in regard to their users. They are only as smart as the person using them.
So, from that point of view; there are a lot of really dumb users on the internet.
If 99 out of 100 users input not-BS, and 1 user inputs BS, but the algorithm picks the 1 users BS input and feeds it to the other 99 first so they get angry and yell at each other over the 1 BS input together - that is a historically unique situation.
If it does it at scale for cheap, that is also a historically unique situation.
If it does it without a human being directly involved in the choosing and pushing process (and feeling bad potentially!), that is also a historically unique situation.
If someone sees all 100 users posts together, it’s easy to see the BS is BS. If the BS post goes to the top of the feed and is the first thing they see, and the normal posts either don’t show up, or only a few of them show up? That is a completely different experience for the consumer of the media.
They might feel worse about it later because they know they shouldn’t have reacted that way, but in my experience that doesn’t help as much as you’d want.
Doesn’t take much to get a mob going unfortunately.
I for one, have no doubt that the removal of the internet from most people's lives would reduce most of these problems to a standstill for the time being due to how exactly right you are about the effect of fast and long reaching communication has.
That doesn't mean that I want to remove the internet completely from everyone's lives though. I just accept that many to most people aren't capable of handling it yet. Not yet.
All these theories that people have on the other hand are them trying to grasp and come to terms with the very fact I just stated. I mean look at them right now. Some of them think algorithms are fully to blame, but this kind of behavior from humans has been around for centuries and beyond now. The only difference through out time is just the speed and distance of which communication occurs.
So, the internet itself is not to blame for anything. The people are, entirely and thoroughly. The internet is for the most part right now, an inanimate object with zero agency or sentient logical thought processes. For now.
And here's the catch... even if it ever gains those things somehow; it will still be the fault of humans if it turns out to be a giant piece of shit; since it is learning from us.
So, Zubiri... still think I don't have a full enough grasp on this yet? Quite contrary, I probably have a larger grasp on the full details of this problem than most people who try to figure it out. But thanks for your input.
I tend to agree but it's an oversimplification of the problem. There is a fantastic book about the psychology of radicalization by Robert B Caldini "Influence"[1] that has apart from the more common scenarios like exploiting reciprocity etc the idea about saying things out loud. There are 3 stages, you get people to read it, then you get them to say it then you get them to sign it. Once they say it it will be hard for them not to sign it since it means walking back on their argument and society likes consistency and hates flip-flopping. After you get them to sign, it's now recorded in history like something that can compromise you in future. Even you delete it you have said it before. This is relevant on especially for things that go viral or have a large audience. How does that relate to social media?
Especially on platforms that enforce a real name policy you get shallow thoughts because people are careful (LinkedIn is a good example). But even on things like twitter / reddit people will have followers and a karma that they attach themselves (their ego) to.
We do not communicate by saying things but we immediately jump to the stage of writing it down. Now these are usually not well thought out opinions since they haven't been argued in a group and tested against our peers. We blurt out not opinions but brain-farts that we test against an audience but at this stage they are already written down.
If the message shared is popular you get the likes flooding in where every person is likely not to read this message more than once before liking / sharing. But the effect on the author is different because they end up reading what they wrote several times as a way of congratulating themselves and reliving the moment of gratification. So it's actually a form of self-radicalization on half baked thoughts (than radicalization by others). An important step is missing where the author of a message can verbalize the idea with real people f2f before jumping to "the writing it down" stage. That makes it harder not to double down once critic is expressed by an audience. Add to this tribal culture of in/out groups those who will oppose the message can be drowned out with a click of a button (I'm not arguing for letting trolls take over and abolishing mute/block button, but these don't exit IRL. Anyway I'm only trying to deconstruct the process)
There are very few people on social media humble enough not to drink their own kool-aid. The majority of users are absolutely eaten by the system and spat out again without realizing what happened. the concept of writing it down is so powerful that we have even built a legal / trust system around it where we require people to scribble their name under something they have read to make it binding.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practic...
These people seem to think that humans aren't at fault for the actions of their creations. They seem to think that algorithms are capable of having agency for their actions... This couldn't be further from the case.
As for the content of your reply however, thanks for being a little more nuanced in it all. Yes, a self contained echo chamber is definitely not going to help things. That said, what you are saying is effectively saying as well "If you proofread your own comments, you are risking radicalizing yourself off your own ideas." But further than that, you are also stating "Those ideas are just half baked".
Well in some people's cases that may be true, but as per the usual problem with most of these arguements; it leaps right past the true actionable agent in the problem and heads straight for blaming X thing that people have little control over. Psychology is one of those things that people have less control over than other people would like to believe. I know this because I have had to literally retrain psychologists over stuff like this during the times they figured they were fixing me. HAH, jokes on them.
(It was always something like "Those people don't control your actions" and I would always reply with "When did the chain of actions and consequences begin in your mind over this subject matter?". To this they would usually start it with 'me', when I would correct them and say "it starts with the person before I, because my actions are based off the consequences of their actions. Therefore while they may not 'Make me' do anything, they certainly do present possible options for me to take, and I tend to take the ones that they like the least; usually due to them being the correct action."
Now, from that little bit of a side story, do you see how your opinion of psychology being the answer might be a bit of problem in its own right? Your assumption basically ignores the fact that there is a chain of consequences for every action taken by every single person connected to said subject matter.
So while the person proofreading their comment might be 'radicalizing themselves' using their own propoganda; you are making the mistake of thinking that just because they have X opinion other than yours, it must be bad. This is a common mistake made by... drum roll please... radicalized people. Especially so in regards to folk who are on the internet far more than they should be? I end that with a question mark because it's mostly an observation so far that I cannot concretely say is for certain the problem and cause to the problem.
And so now we are back to the crux of your point. The half baked idea that gets reiterated over and over again due to be re-read. How half baked is my reply to you? How half baked is your reply to me? Was my original comment even half baked to begin with, or is that just your view of the situation through your own subjective and thus potentially biased viewpoint? Get the point?
The problem is many things DyslexicAtheist. But all of them stem from one single source. Humans. This is why I blame them and not the algorithms or the psychology itself. Why?
Because both are creations of humans. Psychology is just an attempt to understand something we didn't create, so we created a method of understanding it. Faulty as it may be, it has its uses. Algorithms are the same thing in a way. We created the fabric of which they exist, but we still don't understand fully how they operate. Or to put it a better way, we don't fully understand yet how to create them to make them operate exactly how we want. And then furthermore from there, we also do know how to create them well enough to make them do exactly what we want from time to time as well; which has its own problems.
Youtube's algorithm is a good example of the creators only having a partial understanding of how their creation works. (If they are to be believed every time they say "we aren't sure how this works")
Twitters is on the other hand a good example of them making an algorithm to do exactly what they want it to do, and it does it really well. To horrific results.
Both together are my point insofar that algorithms and psychology are only part of the general overall answer. They are not the end all or be all. Humanity is that, in regards to this problem. We are the one factor that if removed, all the problems cease to exist. But we can't exactly go removing ourselves... Well, we can... but that has new problems attached to it.
Meanwhile, the people with the half baked ideas as you put it, are just stating their opinions. You may call them half baked, but who are you to judge others opinions when yours probably aren't that great either to begin with? right?
And that right there is the real source of all the problems. People's ego's.
Once you get over your ego, all of this becomes much easier to understand and accept. But getting a human to do that is fucking hard.
Anonymity means more honesty, which is far more interesting than an adjusted and boring corporate world full of advertiser messages and the latter is all you would ever get. That said, the loudest voices on Twitter or Facebook are mostly not anonymous, anonymous boards are mostly far better places to discuss anything. Some abuse it, but without it we would see a much worse net.
It's extremely easy to dismiss all of these as equally irrelevant. In fact many do (not saying you are) - "I don't care if you are black, white or purple. I treat everyone equally". "I don't care if you're straight, gay, or curvy - what you do in the bedroom is no business of mine". These attitudes SEEM like they are non-judgemental and egalitarian, but they tend to miss all the implicit ways in which the dominant society does NOT treat people equally in these circumstances. And being asked to be treated equally gets perceived as asking for special treatment until it becomes ridiculous: "Gay people want special treatment by asking gay marriage - they're not being discriminated - they can already marry someone of the opposite sex".
It's easy not to care about race or sexuality when society treats yours as irrelevant.
So, what would you have us do?
I treat each individual as an individual and interact with them based on their individual actions, not based on any immutable characteristics.
I fully support inclusion, diversity, honesty and good citizenship and speak out when I see bigotry, hatred and abuse.
It seems like you're implying that doing so is somehow disingenuous or posturing and that I need to do more. Do I understand you correctly?
Should I, as a middle-aged, heterosexual, "white" male, carry around lots of cash so I can give every woman, POC, differently-abled and LGBTQ+ person I encounter US$20? As "reparations" for the white male privilege that I never asked for, don't want and actively argue against?
This may seem like some sort of anti-progressive rant, but it's not.
So, other than trying hard to be a decent human being and interacting with and about others based on their actions rather than some immutable characteristics, calling out hatred and bigotry when I see it and supporting political candidates who do the same, what exactly do you propose that I do?
I don't see anything in the OP's post to suggest that. I think their point is that being merely indifferent to (e.g.) gay people isn't actually a neutral stance in the context of a homophobic society. But you state in your post that you're not merely indifferent, so I don't think anything OP says applies to you.
All anybody wants is for you to support the movement for their rights in whatever ways you feel willing to. Often times the "I don't see colour" people are just sticking their heads in the sand about ongoing racial issues, and won't do anything to help combat racism (even voting, the literal smallest political action you can take) because they believe that it's good enough that they personally don't mistreat people for their race. Sometimes these types of people will actively oppose progressive movements in the style of "I'm against racism but affirmative action/BLM protests/Black girls code is political correctness gone mad" stances.
What people are generally asking for is for you to argue their case if it comes up with friends, vote for politicians that want to rectify institutional problems, and even join in protests or rallies or voice your support publicly if you're willing to do so.
I have no control over what other people do, think or say. What other stance can I take?
I know. I was being hyperbolic with the US$20 bit.
Upon reflection, I interpreted GP's comment as moralistic and condescending, which colored my response in a bad way.
My error was I did not attempt to see their comment in the best possible light and that's not fair to them.
Others who've read my comment appear to agree.
>Often times the "I don't see colour" people are just sticking their heads in the sand about ongoing racial issues,
Sadly, those who pile that sand on these folks' heads are never held to account.
I suspect that many of those with their "heads in the sand" would be less inclined to ignore the intolerance if the sand shovelers (dump truck operators?) were shown for the venal, cynical scum they are.
More's the pity.
Of course - individualism in a political sense means the rejection of collective action. It usually boils down to the belief that people's political actions should be limited to financial transactions - solving climate change by individuals recycling, solving food insecurity by individuals donating, that sort of thing. I knew you were being hyperbolic, but a lack of familiarity with institutional or systemic change made me think you might be missing that option. That's not a criticism; it's really common in the US.
> Sadly, those who pile that sand on these folks' heads are never held to account.
Yeah, I was considering saying in my original comment that targeting those types of people has been a conservative strategy for years now, but figured it was political enough already. It seems its easy to switch people over from "nominally anti racism but also anti change" to "nominally anti racist but practically anti anti racist, ie pro racist" by getting them to support counter protest movements escalating in extreme from "all lives matter" and "its OK to be white" up to believing in the white genocide conspiracy theory.
> I suspect that many of those with their "heads in the sand" would be less inclined to ignore the intolerance if the sand shovelers (dump truck operators?) were shown for the venal, cynical scum they are.
Unfortunately people aren't very easy to reason out of positions they've dug themselves into. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, as they say.
I suggest you re-read the comment to which you replied. Perhaps you'd like to revise your barely concealed and completely unfounded attack on the straw man you created around my comment.
From your reaction I'm guessing the sand shovelers you think are scum are the "woke" people but I hope I'm wrong.
That's as may be, but you focused on a single sentence ("I have no control over what other people do, think or say. What other stance can I take?") in my comment and ignored everything else I wrote.
You then deigned to forgive me (and 300+ million other people) my ignorance.
...a lack of familiarity with institutional or
systemic change made me think you might be
missing that option. That's not a criticism; it's
really common in the US.
I'll wait with bated breath for your next brilliant missive.
> you focused on a single sentence [...] in my comment and ignored everything else I wrote.
I did address you saying the $20 thing was hyperbole, but I guess I'm not sure what you wanted me to add to the rest? You said you misinterpreted GP's comment - okay? What am I to add to that? It's not much of a prompt for discussion.
And you interpreted that incorrectly.
the "stance" I take (in this case, support for the equal rights and equal opporunities of all) is the stance of one who doesn't have governmental or corporate power to directly impact change other than my behavior and my advocacy.
You interpreted what I said to mean that I'm powerless to effect any change. Which is unfortunate since not only is that not true, I neither said nor implied anything of the sort.
All that said, I suspect we're, in large part, in violent agreement on this topic.
Go back and read the comment[0] to which you originally replied. You'll see that it makes clear what I think.
My apologies for not listing every possible activity. I'll make sure to write a Phd thesis here in future.
As for the rest of your paranoid (and condescending) blather, I can do without it. From now on, I will.
Black girl programmers should not be black girl programmers, they should be programmers. And they most certainly won't face discrimination because of that. I do think that treating people differently will breed animosity and it does not solve any problem.
> Black girl programmers should not be black girl programmers, they should be programmers. And they most certainly won't face discrimination because of that.
This is a perfect demonstration of the "head in the sand" position that leads to conservatism that I was talking about. The whole point of "black girls code" is that black girls have less opportunity to get into programming, which is a form of systemic racism given that programming is a lucrative career. It's not an identity thing, it's an access thing - it's an outreach program.
It's also absurd to claim that black women never face discrimination in the workplace.
You seem to be starting from a belief that equal opportunity and discrimination based on race are solved problems and then putting yourself in opposition to programs that try to alleviate these problems (which actually do still exist).
I don't see how my position leads to conservatism. If I prefer not making race a relevant attribute in an outreach program, I guess I am. But the label doesn't mean much to me.
There perhaps aren't many black women in programming yet, but opposing a new racialized world is not sticking my head in the sand. I am pretty actively opposed to it.
The idea that progressives are creating a newly racialised world where before everything was meritocratic and equal opportunity /is/ the modern conservative line, and it's a lie. The whole reason for outreach programs is to counteract lack of opportunities that are race based - what exactly do you think racism is?
Actively opposing programs designed to counteract racism, is supporting racism, you do realise that?
Your accusation is weak. I disagree and I think a lot of programs are racist and should be opposed on that merit. I am not talking about outreach programs here. There are much more relevant factors why specifically black women might be underrepresented. If I generalize that to women, the reason is sexism. I don't believe in these simple explanations and much more importantly I believe these facts do not allow for anyone to be discriminated, which has to be said specifically also extends to white people.
New?
Are you claiming that the genocide of the indiginous peoples of the Americas, the centuries-long enslavement (and then another century of legal discrimination) of Africans, discrimination against indiginous peoples of Australia and New Zealand, domination of South Asia by Britain, etc., etc., etc. wasn't "racialized"?
I suppose you could try to argue that all that was a long time ago and is irrelevant to today's society. But that doesn't really work. Laws forbidding marriage between "white" and "black" folks were in full force in my lifetime.
Or Are you claimng that The Spanish, Dutch, British and Portuguese conquerors and slave traders in the 16th and 17th centuries were pushing for the equal inclusion of Africans who "emigrated" to the Americas and the indiginous peoples of the America into their societies?
Are you claiming that the genocide of indiginous American peoples and the maintenance of slave economies that excusively used POC weren't "racialized"?
Are you claiming that the differences in family wealth, quality of education/infrastructure/housing, treatment by law "enforcement" agencies and a dozen other testable, measurable ares aren't the result of centuries of a "racialized" world?
What is new is that those who have been murdered, enslaved and discriminated against are being given a platform to speak out about the legacies of those centuries of mistreatment and the ways that discrimination is embedded into our societies.
And I haven't even touched on the appalling treatment of half the population (women) as well as those who want to live and love (LGBTQ) as they need to.
So, when you say you are opposed to a "new racialized world," to what exactly are you opposed?
Is it equal rights and opportunities for all, regardless of gender, melanin content or national origin?
If that's what you're opposing, I can certainly understand why you're upset. Please do elucidate.
These position are as non-judgemental as it gets. Gay marriage is a separate issue but many support it because of such positions.
Dominant society in liberal democracies impose almost no values on anything related to that and it is even part of the curriculum to educate people on different sexuality. But I think that problem is solved since a few generations. In many countries at least. Saying such positions would be judgemental is actually moving backwards again.
> All these twitter/facebook/youtube bans are trying to put a genie back in a bottle, Parler is gaining steam
Did not age nearly as well.
https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/5ofih3/beforeafter_t...
What a time to be alive
At some point you have to branch off and learn from others.
My pet dream: Everybody Gets One, maybe two, things to be "radical" about. You reckon the earth is flat? Sure. You don't get that AND vaccines are micro-chipped AND an antisemitic 9/11 theory. Spend that token wisely.
I for one am happy about all the toaster fuckers who have a place to talk about it, maybe get help if they think they need it. The alternative would be that we all get mashed into an amorphous blob of the same middle of the road opinions that keep everyone happy.
Yuck.
Someone below this mentioned this was how Google+ was intended to work.
They are great in my experience, but if people started posting politics news I could see how they could turn bad.
I can see why limiting what you're presented with never took off from a marketing point of view. I think this is rad though.
I'd love the same for a podcast. I don't want to create 5 separate podcast channels, I want to have a main one and then have sub-channels that people can subscribe to.
It doesn't have to be this structure, it can be another way to allow us to have more power over the feed that we're seeing, giving us filter/search/sort/algorithm options.
So, in short, I love your suggestion and wish the next generation of social network implements it in some shape, whether that be from the incumbents or new ones.
Twitter needs to incentivize using hashtags.
John Carmack can add hashtags to his tweets.
Someone can create an account that hashtags and quote retweet John Carmack’s tweets.
We are naturally inclined to be negative. Or, said differently, it takes a LOT less effort to be negative than positive. On social media it's just way too easy for people to pile on.
I think this hits on a critical aspect of cyberspace's impact but phrased in a new way for me.
My view has been that it allows individuals to split their personalties and actions into discrete entities based on a blend of the account/platform/information environment and relative cause the account/platform exists in support of.
But another way to look at it is what you've said - the whole person comes out through the various personalities they have online.
There is a niche but famous sci-fi book called True Names* about a similar idea: people have their true name in real life, and a digital nym that's just as valid per the impact of the nym's existence as the name. Operating the balance, and making a choice which to embrace (name vs. nym) is the big question.
The novella was written prior to cloud computing and twitter/reddit/VR, and reading it now with all that tech in place is really something.
> If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'm happy just playing some Catan once in a while.
> Historically you didn't need to know everything about everyone. Your friends will always have opinions or lifestyles you will find disagreeable - that is the nature of human existence.
This hits the nail on the head perfectly, IMHO. Unfortunately, even the activities you describe have become politicized. For example, Settlers of Catan rebranding to just Catan.
I use Facebook for my entertainment, reacting on car memes, sarcastic memes and genuinely car things and sports. Oh and I watch TV on Facebook. meeting people real life in this city has been.... ehhh special. (But I think the things I do on Facebook isn't special, there isn't that much politics.)
I don't forget the times that I laughed so hard some posts, because it so funny.
But at the end of the day... it's people and nothing is going to fix that.
Twitter isn't dumber.
(Assume this was written with kindness)
Or shift the subset of your views that you're exposing to a set that would result in a mutually enjoyable conversation.
In person you can also be passively present and still interacting without saying much. But on twitter you're not even in the room unless you speak and generate reactions, the most reliable way to get a reaction is to be irritating rather than cooperate to generate a mutually good time.
I imagine that many people have a similar experience. You're yelling into a megaphone but it feels more like you're writing an entry in your diary.
On twitter, it's really easy for my to ignore all the insane and stupid things that complete strangers blather about on there all the time. There's a ton of noise, but just enough signal for me to check in regularly.
But then suddenly I see a ridiculous post from someone I truly care about. Someone who I've known for years and know their spouse and kids and families. I can read their post in their voice as if it were said to me, personally. And now I'm angered and incensed and putting up maps and charts and pins in my head preparing a response that this person whom I care about deserves.
But they weren't talking to me. They were shouting something crazy into a cacophony of crazy strangers. If we were at dinner we would have a long, deep, and nuanced conversation on the subject and we'd listen to each other's points and respond accordingly. But in 240 chars they're wrong and now I will reserve two hours of mental capacity to argue with myself about why.
Nope. Just block them, knowing I'll see them next time they're in town, and we'll have a real conversations about real things in a forum more befitting two people trying to understand each other.
Except... is it their ego? Or is it some surrogate persona?
It has always struck me as more of a performance. And that's the problem with social media. Rather than encouraging an individual to be themselves and arrive at their own values independently, it on the contrary encourages inauthenticity -- perhaps not intentionally by the developers of the websites in the beginning, but it emerges through behaviour of the users.
Rather than accepting of all people, people with deviant-discourse views are vilified very publicly, and either remove themselves from the platform or instead surround themselves with supporters from the deviant side. Social media does bring people together, but it doesn't bring everyone together, it just promotes the formation of ideological tribes.
This effect of uniting and dividing people into tribes isn't constrained to social media. Marketing, advertising, indeed many aspects of how capitalist society has evolved has a similar effect of forming tribes. Adverts and marketing tell people that they should do a thing, and then those who agree gravitate to that product, and those who disagree gravitate toward an opposing product or a steadfast disapproval of any product in the space, and they come to define themselves by that approval or disapproval.
Ask a person to define who they are. They will tell their name, their age, their occupation, where they were born and/or live, and then they'll most likely move on to what they like and dislike, what they believe and don't believe. They define themselves according to details they think are important to others and in relation to other things, usually things made by corporations or governments/bodies of power.
- A name doesn't define a person, it's simply how you refer to them in conversation or get their attention without ambiguity in the presence of other humans.
- Age also doesn't define a person. People look older and younger than they actually are all the time, and in my experience it has little bearing on the person's wisdom or intrigue.
- Occupation matters not. All you need is the understanding that your occupation is what you do to pay for food, water, shelter and your hobbies/downtime. It can also be what you actually want to achieve with your life, but this isn't essential as long as you have awareness.
- What a person likes and dislikes is not a defining feature, it's at best an expression of a person's taste. It is a description of a relation between a person and other things. Tastes are easily feigned to please others, easily changed and highly likely to change over time, and while they can be used to stereotype people, I'm pretty sure stereotyping people is considered a bad thing to do.
- Belief and disbelief aren't defining and also don't make a great deal of sense, since to believe is to hold that something is true without data -- holding that something is true OR false without data is nonsensical, and thus pointless to communicate to others, because they'll either have the same nonsensical belief or an opposing one, and probably won't be very amenable to having their belief(s) changed since there is no data to argue from.
Ultimately, people don't know who they are, they know what their profile page(s) should say, and these "defining" characteristics are most likely things for which they are a willing standard bearer, things that they want to shine out like a lighthouse to attract or ward off the types of people they will get along with and not get along with. There are people that do have a notion of who they are, but I suspect they are likely too scared to reveal it, precisely because people are polarised, capricious, and unforgiving.
Perhaps that's what it is, social media actually encourages people to both fall in line with a stereotype and to stereotype others. Certainly, I think social media also distorts the personality of the user as well. I avoid social media like the plague, primarily because the content social media sites generate is of little interest to me. I have absolutely no understanding of why anyone would want to do social media stuff -- so I cannot speak from any personal experience.
I've created a profile on some of them for the sake of communicating with someone who refused to communicate by other means, but never have I felt inclined to use the platforms because... it's just not for me, I don't understand it. I prefer to toil in the shadows and live my life, without sharing it.
Anyway, something I have observed throughout my life is that the personality is performative, i.e. most people will act differently if they have an audience. It either causes them to withdraw and hide features of who they are, or it will encourage them to reveal as much of themselves as possible and even to fabricate features of their persona that aren't authentic.
This kind of behaviour is easy enough to observe in work contexts, and my intuition tells me that social media must surely have a similar effect on people. With thousands of people watching out for what banal thought you share next.
The result is that not only are you exposed to the whole of the other, but you're exposed to the super-other that forms (depending on the subject type) through audience demand and expectations, or through the subject's desire to provoke a certain reaction in their audience, or indeed to attract a certain audience to serve their agenda.
Much of the social media landscape is essentially just memetic. Probably quite fascinating to study if you're interested in how utterly twisted and inauthentic people can become by living an observed and performed life, rather than simply living according to their own principles, resolute and only subject to observation when necessary to achieve, say, professional or academic goals.
* * *
I'd like to bring up something Douglas Adams wrote about in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. He imagined an alien race called the Belcerabons, who enjoyed peace and success, no doubt in part thanks to their being a wholly quiet civilization. A Galactic Tribunal of other races, envious of their success and perceived smugness, infected them with a disease that gave them the curse of forced telepathy -- every thought would be broadcast from each Belcerabon to the rest of their kind. The only way that they could silence the artillery of communicating their every thought to each other was to constantly talk to each other instead, probably preferable just to retain some control over communicating private or awkward thoughts and instead talking about the weather etc.
While Adams was undoubtedly poking fun at the sorry state of the human race when it comes to those nauseating conversations about the local weather conditions and what was eaten for lunch on a previous day, I do find it amusing that constantly bombarding one another with banalities ought to be considered a curse, and yet we have somehow managed to develop our civilization around technological platforms for that very purpose.
The original American Experiment allowed this sort of thing. Big Important Nationwide things happened at the federal level; everything else was done by the States. It's a pretty good idea.
All social media suffers from the "talking to nobody/talking to everybody" aspect. A post on a social media site is really just you talking to yourself out loud. But it's a public place, and therefore everybody can hear you. So they talk out loud to themselves, but at you.
If this sounds like a gaggle of homeless people shouting at each other about everything and nothing, that's because it is exactly that, only with a $25B market cap and a P/E ratio that looks more like the onset of hypertension.
It's the algorithm's decision to serve up the choicest bits with the highest polarization scores bc that seems to have the highest correlation with overall engagement.
And feeding the compulsive need for argument seems to be the more profitable strategy over providing a framework for truly polite conversation.
I think that when we read, or we're on the computer, we are in a kind of trance. Our unconscious self is exposed.
It expresses itself, we all harbor a lot of dark feelings. And we are reactive. It's not a rational self. It's a self that gropes for the good stuff and kicks against the bad stuff and that's about it. Like an animal.
It is also exposed and vulnerable. So when the flame hits we feel it deeply.
I imagine us all to be like that demon in The Exorcist. A raging ego trapped in a world of words. Playing mind games. And when we are told that it's holy water, it burns just fine.
There’s a third option, which is that discussion can lead to actual moral progress where society decides that certain views are just beyond the pale. A few decades ago people might have ‘agreed to disagree’ on whether interracial marriage was ok. Now society has formed a consensus on this issue and anyone who’s opposed to interracial marriage is part of an isolated fringe.
Saying that we should agree to disagree on controversial issues sounds superficially reasonable - especially when you’re exhausted from reading some awful twitter thread. It won’t necessarily sound so great in retrospect. It’s also a luxury that people directly affected by the relevant issues don’t always have.
The real problem isn't people debating controversial issues, which is fine and healthy and necessary for progress. The problem is the way that platforms like Twitter incentivize hot takes, rapid response, bullying, and other behavior that's not conducive to rational discussion.
Also, anyone who thinks that intemperate public discourse on controversial topics is a new phenomenon should check out some of the things that Thomas Moore and Martin Luther said to each other: https://meansandmatters.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/my-favorite...
I have a slightly different view of this. People's opinions on things are always in flux, even if they sway heavily toward one side. What we see on social media is a person's opinions without the context of a human interaction. On social media, we see Sue's emotional response to politics without her having to negotiate that emotional response in relationship to another person sitting in front of her. She may "believe" what she says in the moment she types it, but put her in a room with a friend who disagrees and you can watch how her views shift, push back, concede, change, challenge, etc. On social media, there's very little of this taking place, because there's zero human intimacy at work. It belief in a vacuum not in relationship.
1. Reaction/Social Interplay:
If you play Catan (or tennis or amateur theatre group etc) with a person for long enough you will come to know these bits about them. However, as most small country town people know, you ignore or otherwise put up with "their stupidity" while trying not to shove what they see as "your stupidity" in their face. This is respect for others.
Such respect helps preserve the alliance to get the outcome you want - a game of Catan. Hence, even Sue-the-Otherwise-Intolerable isn't all bad, they like to play Catan like you do right?
As you eloquently advise, the internet doesn't "hide your stupidity from others" so that is grating. It also doesn't promote people ignoring your stupidity. It promotes "engagement"...
2. Shared experience
Experience is how humans build trust/relationships. Y'know, a first date cliche is a movie then coffee or dinner. The shared movie experience forms a basis to trust each other ("Well they didn't yabber on the phone the whole time so they're not all bad...") and then talking about the experience after may yield new insights on that experience. And those insights are attributed to that person alone ("I didn't think of it that way, very good point Sue." or "Nope. That's just stupid Sue.") even though the experience itself is already in the past!
Even though virtual experiences can be such a basis - IE Game of Thrones as "viral" thing - I submit that in person experiences are more powerful by far.
You tolerate Sue-the-Otherwise-Intolerable in person to get your fix of Catan. But you wouldn't do that for a virtual Sue, you'd just move onto Bob, Mary, Joe or Jane or whoever else the game's matchmaker throws up.
I totally agree that social media has made this a bigger issue than it used to be before social media. It also doesn't help that these social media sites are likely trying to feed you some intentionally controversial content as fear/anger can keep you engaged. Facebook showing a coworkers controversial political opinion on a matter right at the top of your feed feels intentional.
I've also found social media, as well as the mass media constantly bombards you with the idea that you must pick a "side". If someone is anti-immigration, pro-abortion, pro firearms, and pro lgbtq you'd think it would make some of these online peoples heads explode. It's like they think it's not possible to have opinions and beliefs that align with both political "sides". The division that social media and mass media companies push is what I find is one of the most toxic things in the world currently. Trying to profit off creating hatred. It's pretty disgusting.
You can't 'agree to disagree' on those topics though, specially when laws ban abortion, for example. If you think we should do that, then making laws regarding those things (abortion, "don't say gay") would need to be completely forbidden and you would need to let people do what they want.
Two out of three of those aren't just random positions. If you believe someone else is literally advocating for murdering children, I can see why you would judge them. Similarly, if you see people oppressing people like you for some reason, you should judge them.
I will admit, I have no idea what the disagreement in modern society is with relation the LGBTQ people. Like, I can articulate both sides of the abortion debate. Hell, I can even understand the sides about firearms. But what is the dispute about LGBTQ?
Blue side wants trans women to be treated identically to women, based on their personal conception of identity, not necessarily tied to any external or societal factor. So if they say they're a trans woman, you call them "she" regardless of how masculine they make look or dress. Being trans is a valid and inherent part of a person. We need to educate children that gender is a social construct.
Red side disagrees with the notion that personal identity overrides societal norms. It's an imposition, or a farce, to call a man in a dress a woman. Why should we change thousands of years of grammar because some people are nutcases? Being trans is a mental illness that instead of being treated is being celebrated and normalized, in turn harming society. It's a shame you're ill, but keep that out of our schools and get help.
You can see how these viewpoints are not going to get along
Does this cut both ways, where LGBTQ+ people also don't have to listen to how straight everyone is? I doubt it. So yeah, how about no? How about there is agreement or nothing? Because there's no way straight people are going to agree to disagree about whether they should be allowed to discuss their sexuality.
I'm curious what you think you mean because there is no good answer.
I also wouldn't have had to comment at all if people weren't casually asking people to instate don't ask don't tell in social settings.
You could have just as easily not commented and I could have been dealing with the original commenter. You decided to comment, defending his absurdity. You don't get to now tell me I am "looking to be offended," especially when you take the side of the less reasonable position.
We aren't saying good or bad, we aren't assigning value, we are simply saying controversial. Like, obviously you feel you have to fight everyone if there is so much as a chance someone is attacking you - that sort of supports the argument, no?
And no, my original argument was not that LGBTQ aligned folks should go back into the closet or any such nonsense as that. It was mostly that if you have hot takes on deep in-community debates (I give several examples above), maybe don't share them on twitter and disown everyone around you who disagrees.
Again, read arguments in the strongest possible sense. Read the entire context.
1) You have yet to provide any concrete examples of what it is you mean. You keep going "but I swear this isn't what I mean." Thus, I can only conclude that you mean the whole.
Am I to think you're saying that LGBTQ+ people shouldn't be allowed to discuss marriage rights, even though straight people have been afforded that right and freely talk about their marriages in front of people who are affected by laws outlawing their unions?
Am I to believe that you're saying that we shouldn't talk about whether trans people should be allowed to change their names without gender/sex reassignment surgery, even though straight people regularly change their names, get plastic surgery, and what-have-you?
There are no good answers. The very fact that you've not acknowledged that there is no good answer is the problem here. You could just accept that you're wrong, that this is offensive no matter how it is interpreted. But no, you feel an incessant need to defend yourself because you, as a straight man, couldn't possibly have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to LGBTQ+ issues and, thus, couldn't possibly be offending people.
2) You have yet to acknowledge the fact that you could just casually throw that in there without a second thought is the problem. The fact that you didn't need to think "does LGBTQ+ really belong here?" Your very doing that contributes to anti-LGBTQ+ and "don't say gay" mentalities.
What world do you live in where being _any_ of the LGBTQ spectrum is some overall totally safe and hunky dory existence!?
And if that wasn't bad enough, your fellow LGBTQ friends likely have all kinds of "ready to rip your throat out" hot takes - or did we already forget the shunning and rejection of Buck Angel?
Yes, it is unsafe to be LGBTQ+. That is exactly why you can't put it in a box and go "you're not allowed to talk about these things in social situations because my game of Catan is more important."
Really ruminate on that last point. Your game of Catan is more important to you than whether the people in that game are comfortable being around you.
It's amazing how strangers on the internet can just star gaze and determine my gender, sexuality, race and so on. It's less amazing how often wrong they are. I'd really take a moment and think whether predicting someones identity is aligned with your ethical beliefs on those topics.
If you want to fight straw men, please have the courtesy of doing it in private.
And no, I think you should think a bit harder about what it is you said and how you said it. It's easy to claim that isn't what you meant, but you've yet to provide any concrete examples of what you mean, which I called you out for and you proceeded to be flippant. This is also a sign that you know your argument is lost.
You can continue to claim straw men, but you've yet to provide evidence that I've actually created a straw man.
EDIT: Moreover, if you want to say we should just not discuss LGBTQ+ issues in public and try and justify using a slur and then call LGBTQ+ people the problem when they get angry, maybe you should have the courtesy of doing that in private.
Again, it's easy to say that I'm creating a straw man, but the facts are thus.
The OP said:
- My games of Catan work because we don't talk about things.
- Social media is bad because I have to confront the fact that I will disagree with people on things.
- These things that I will disagree with my Catan buddies on should either be "agree to disagree" matters or matters that don't get discussed.
- LGBTQ+ issues were one of the examples of such topics. Neither option is acceptable for LGBTQ+ people.
No examples of what sort of "LGBTQ+ political topics" either of you might mean have been given and yet I, the one providing examples and countering them, am the one creating the straw man?
All I can say is that, once again, you need to listen to the people affected when they say that what is said is harmful and stop acting like the LGBTQ+ people are the problem for telling you that it is, in fact, harmful.
EDIT: You're also defending a man who actively tried to justify using a slur. Doesn't reflect well on you, does it?
Yes, countering "examples" one has oneself provided is AFAIK pretty much the definition of "straw man".
Wait, what slur? I'm lost.
Because straight white men just are "on the wrong side of history, everyone knows that", or what?!?
Are we to think you're honestly too stupid to see that discussing marriage rights is something totally different than talking about their actual marriages? We can, if you want. If not, we'd have to conclude it's a conscious tactic; twisting facts and your opponent's words into something they didn't say or doesn't happen.
We could then think this is a constant tactic of yours... But I'd prefer to ascribe it to temporary rhetorical overheating in discussing a burning cause. Hope you've put out the flames and cooled down now.
Discussing your existence?!? Who the F said your existence can't be mentioned?!?
You're really not doing your cause any good with these ever more ridiculously hysterical arguments.
Yes! A thousand times yes! You are speaking out of my heart with that comment. That's what most current social networks get wrong. Just because I know someone, or met someone IRL and am now connected on the platform, I do not want to always know what they are up to. It's a pull not a push!
My wife is quite active on social while I'm not part of any social media (HN doesn't count, right?). We both have quite a different options about some political issues than our friends. It's been strange observing how her views about our friends are more negative and polarised than mine. Like, I don't really know or care what they think about politics, or what they think about my views. They are my friends and it's okay we disagree on stuff. When I meet them we seldom discuss about the dividing things, but when we do, we do so in respectful manner.
I think when meeting in person we tend to find similarities with each other. In social media it's the opposite.
We're not really equipped to be so connected to people we don't agree with about everything.
Well... that would only be true in an urban environment. And historically, urban environments accounted for an insignificant share of the population.
The normal historical experience was that you knew everything about everyone else and they knew everything about you.
Thing is, personal social media accounts don't expose you to the whole of someone else, they expose you to that part of someone without the buffer of small talk, low-level real life social interactions, non-verbal cues, work/school/routine-based camaraderie, and, as you put it, enjoying a beer and playing some Catan.
The problem is that without that part of social interaction, you end up with raw opinion or dogma which doesn't have any "soft" dimension or transition layer, and that causes people to be reactionary rather than accepting.
I’m a little burned out fighting over user preferences across social media that seem to always toggle themselves back to whatever default the platform wants that day.
https://gist.github.com/robinsloan/a045d26c513681f13680f319f...
It does show retweets, though.
Twitter isn't code. Why would you expect someone to limit what they publish to code topics just because you want to limit what you read to just code things? Their Twitter account is their domain. There's no reason why someone shouldn't tweet about code and other stuff if they want to.
I honestly have no idea why people think they should have any say over what someone tweets, and even suggest that people are wrong to tweet the way they do. That level of entitlement is baffling.
Please don't follow me on Twitter. You'll hate my account.
You can still tweet whatever you want, but Twitter would be more usable for many people if you could cherry pick the signal and get rid of the noise.
Followed, of course, just for that.
Hey, an old retweet of yours already got me blocked by some fuckwit who, like Mike Pence, can't trust himself to be alone with women other than his wife, so that's a win all around! :-D
Sorting by "Latest" rather than "Home" makes it so you don't see their likes and replies. I would recommend it to anyone.
I don't use twitter anymore but when I did I used these features to make it less toxic.
Still gonna get the retweets, but you won’t get the most “engaging” stuff brought to your attention which tends to be the worst.
I am not sure what the solution is. It’s a societal pandora’s box and it’s open.
And then I realised I hated the trajectory I was on, and I deleted every single post and the account.
I now have an account and, like the article says, I don't post.
Twitter is a bonfire of nastiness.
You either give in to it or you have to commit to spending an awful lot of time ignoring the cesspit of general awfulness, and pretending bad faith is good faith for the purposes of dialogue with sealions who learned their chops through Gamergate.
If you tire of all that (or if you are a woman and tire of the astonishing, violent sexualised nastiness that you disproportionately attract) and make use of the conversation controls so you can continue to peacefully discuss things only with people you want to, everyone else accuses you of being "aFrAiD oF dEbAtE" or censorship, everywhere else. (Including here.)
Stuff that.
You do not get to take part in any community without having a political stance - being part of a community is communicating that you agree with the morals and values of the community and wilfully accept them - thats the basis and general agreement of a community, it's what differentiates a group of people from a community.
Now, Im not sure that turning a blind eye to the consequences that this has is inherently wrong, that surely depends on what impact the concrete political/moral/ethical stance has, but I disagree with the notion that, really, anything is apolitical. In context, everything is political, and we have to live with the notion that anything we do has impact on other people, as long as the consequences of the the thing we are doing is visible to other people.
Your second argument is "everything affects everything else". Using that argument we can prove that we're all mass murderers for keeping our thermostats at 70 degrees. One reason this way of thinking is so useless is that it fails to single out actual murderers (i.e. the person who pulls the trigger).
It's what drives engagement & wins votes.
One side views abortion as a moral sin. The other thinks that access to healthcare is a value and have a moral obligation to fight for the rights of women.
There are a bunch of issues like that.
For me right now my LGBTQ community is being used by Republicans as an election issue. An example where one side thinks (or pretends to in order to win votes) that it's some political issue, while I and many others feel like it's a direct attack on our lives akin to racism & racist jim crow era laws.
How about all the people who view abortion as a sin but think it should be legal anyway? You know, like Joe Biden and every other liberal Catholic.
You're just spitting out talking points.
But even that example still mixes morals, values, & politics. Joe Biden values legal autonomy & access.
And it is a fundamental campaign issue. He would not win the Dem primary if he was against abortion. You can't un mix the two it's blurred.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EXVrzOACv4
Edit: It's also a lot easier to stay "apolitical" when you don't have any skin in the game (or rather, don't think you do). When your rights don't feel threatened, it's really easy to go with the status quo.
You can also turn off retweets for those people. Twitter does seem to have some idiotic take on what I want to see.
Which is itself a political stance. It’s not a universal truth but a very narrow political ideology. Never mind that “political” is not a well-defined thing to begin with.
If we can’t agree to neutral territory then one of the sides is going to have to win. Because you can’t bully your way to victory.
We need more meetings of the mind and fewer meetings of unfalsifiable rhetoric. Fewer crusaders and more peacemakers.
Folks try to have nuanced discussion on Twitter but it's not possible when it's so reactionary and atomized. I no longer tweet either. I go on Twitter to find interesting people to follow in other forums, not to talk to anyone. I am a silent tweeter, heh.
Also, there are so many narcissists there...
Ultimately most of the outrage/cancel culture/ and other political tribalism tweets originate from a relatively small fraction of users. I’ve blocked thousands of users over the last few years and it’s working out great. It almost feels like the old days of using Twitter. :)
Conveniently, these are people who want everything to be about their political values and beliefs, and anyone who disagrees is a fascist/nazi.
> everything can be viewed through the lens of politics
You wouldn't say "everything is geographical" because that would be absurd (just as absurd as "everything is political") but you could view most topics through the lens of geography if that was the hammer turning all your concerns into nails.
Words my Dad taught me as I was growing up, but only really sank in the last 5 or so years ago.
> It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
But I read the quote as essentially saying:
"You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
But maybe some people don't take it that way.
The advice has been written and uttered in various forms for millennia.
> If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications.
> But I read the quote as essentially saying: "You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
How many of your personal experiences are you reading into a context-free aphorism of the ages? Friendly suggestion: you may be making this same mistake when interpreting words in other situations.
What meanings or implications does the aphorism have other than "some people (fools in this case) shouldn't ever talk?"
We've established you think I've misinterpreted the aphorism and that you suspect there's something socially off with me, but we haven't established what you think the aphorism means. Go on, educate me.
This even shows up in tech - Bill Gates isn't exactly known for widespread political opinions, and while we all know he was probably not a great person early on, he's now generally contributing to universally approved causes, and otherwise just there, so to some extent he's a symbol of the possibilities available through tech.
Meanwhile, you've got Elon, who I think would be reasonably similar - if he could stay the hell off Twitter and stop overpromising so goddamn often. He could have ended up as a symbol for the commercial space revolution and the surge of EV popularity, but instead he's polarising and often hated.
Generally, polarisation isn't great for authority figures. Even in politics this is sort of true - relatively centrist parties often have broader appeal than extreme views. (Though because politicians are our means of changing things, there's also an aversion to politicians with no opinions at all.)
You probably haven't been following Gates lately. His reputation has tarnished in the last couple of years.
2. Divorce
3. Melinda hinting that 1. had something to do with 2.
I kept quiet. I decided bitching was too tiresome / nobody was getting anything done, nobody was getting better by having complainants flung at them.
After I established relationships with various folks across the groups, I had folks from every team come to me / were available to me in ways they never would for each other.
My job was 2x easier as far as getting help / information / cooperation compared to the folks complaining non stop.
There were groups I agreed with / disagreed with (one group was straight wrong about nearly everything), but throwing a fit just made for worse relationships.
I still made suggestions to folks whose job it was to manage these groups, politely, gently, often quietly, but if they did or did not fix it / repeating myself wasn't a big focus for me.
I've long since given up on right and wrong (well outside real moral issues) and more about how to get to the end as best as possible with the relationships / people available.
Even moral issues don't have objective right and wrong. The idea that there are base moral facts is ridiculous, and without fully understanding each others priors arguments about ethics are rarely productive.
Sexual abuse of toddlers?
Unprovoked abduction and torture?
I think there certainly are base moral facts at the extremes of behaviour. Evil exists. Malevolence exists.
But I agree that most behaviour isn’t so extreme as to be easily judged without the understanding you describe.
> having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people.
You can be polite while not facilitating the counterparty in a way that's useful to you but in the short term feels like you're giving up something. People often can't get past that temporary feeling of losing so they don't venture into it.
“Your team isn’t pulling their weight”
The immediate reaction might be “Yes of course we are, how dare you!”
Now you have two options. It sounds like they have rejected your premise. Do you double down and try to force a verbal capitulation? “No, you are all really doing nothing!”
Or do you leave the seed you have planted: “Oh, alright then, good to hear it.”
The second option works way better. What they said in their immediate reaction is not predictive of the longer-term response. The longer term reaction might be that the team quietly increases their performance. If you went the confrontational approach, you would have ruled that out.
I bet if you tallied the executives of F500 companies, you would find a vast majority of them do not have a blog, or even a Twitter. And of those that do, you'd find most of them using it as an explicit asset (e.g. a VC tweeting for "thought leadership" that increases dealflow, a CSO building an audience to sell to, etc.). You will not find many of them tweeting personal political opinions, certainly none outside of the orthodoxy.
IMO, it's a miscalculation even to post thoughts aligned with the orthodoxy — you don't know how the environment will change. Five years from now, maybe we'll be cancelling all the people doing the cancelling today.
What you talk about is what I would prefer the world to be, but the reality is everything depends on marketing and especially marketing in social media.
In the end it's the crux of the whole thing. Is [X terrible thing] something that's like the weather, something that it's useless to yell at? Or is it something like climate change, also nearly useless to yell at, but with enough fighting and unity we could actually make a difference? And the answer for any really difficult question is going to be an hard one, no pithy saying will tell it to you.
(Though, agreed, far too much shouting is of the irrelevant, angry, useless kind.)
—A Russian (or Italian) saying
(works either way, as it turns out)
The outcome doesn't matter, so it's time wasted.
Social media not only removes that moment of reflection, but it actually spreads explosive verbal diarrhoea. The commercial platforms are incentivised to encourage conflict and divisiveness because it drives traffic therefore profits. If everyone was encouraged to be nice and friendly on social media, people wouldn't spend as much time on it, so less eyeballs on ads and less profit.
I don't think that is the complete picture though. Having spent some time on alternative platforms that don't have the profit motive, I have noticed there is still a tendency for many people to be slightly outrageous, presumably simply because it attracts more engagement, and those sort of people like the attention. Say something sensible and you're not going to get loads of people replying "I agree", so after spending a lot of time writing sensible comments you end up wondering if anyone has actually even read them and you start to think - what's the point?
I wonder how (or even whether) you could design a platform that encourages sensible and penalises outrage.
My uncle taught me that one.
I would rather reveal my ignorance or say the occasional dumb thing than remain bogged down by my own ignorance or stupidity because I adhere to some proverbs about silence that I read on the internet. Making those mistakes is how I grow.
It is rare to find someone online advising readers to ditch their pocket computers and disconnect their laptops. It would be like a newspaper pre-internet advising readers to stop buying newspapers. Therefore, everything read online must be weighed against this self-serving bias. Web traffic is the lifeblood of Google, Facebook and their ilk. If people go offline, the losses would be substantial. The civilised world can survive offline, as it did when many of us were born, and for centuries before, but Big Tech and their wannabes cannot. This is because, generally, they are only internediaries (middlemen). They sit on a computer network, observe and manipulate traffic of the people who use it. These companies want people online 24/7. As the article states only a minority of people have complied. Contrary to the title, this offline majority is neither new nor silent.
I eventually learned I share a name with a tech journalist who is very active on Twitter, and occasionally I would get tagged instead instead of him. Every time, I would respond with the Navy Seal Copypasta, broken into eight twitter sized parts. Eventually they banned me for this.
And thus ended my Twitter adventure for good.
yeah, people like you should be banned
Certainly on HN that person would/should be banned right away (which is part of the reason HN is the best place on the internet).
But Twitter is a different animal. So are Reddit and 4Chan. Sarcastic copypasta is par for the course.
Looking from the outside, this is an accurate description of 99,99% of all messages ever written on twitter. Arguably, the copy pasted text can at least bring a bit of joy which other tweets also fail at.
Yes, there are far worse things. But let us hold ourselves to our own high standards and be proud.
Note that I'm not saying that I'm a fan of low-quality posts like this, just that I feel that the lion's share of Twitter is low-quality posts, so it seems odd to single out a copy-pasta meme as being unworthy while allowing... well, the rest of Twitter.
It sounds like you're saying that even if the messages were relevant, such as "you tagged the wrong account", that would be unsolicited?
A single burst of tweets is very solidly solicited when you tag someone, even if it was by mistake.
> Don't get emotionally invested in this.
What in the world do you mean by "emotionally invested"? That reads like a weird way of being unwarrantedly dismissive.
As for the response, it would be unsolicited by the fact the original tweeter did not ask/want a response from the Meme-ster. They tagged the wrong account.
Take this example:
John says to the person he thinks is Brad: I can't believe the weather today!
Emily says to John: What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals.... etc....
John's reaction to Emily: WTF who the hell is this? Why is she saying these things to me?
Now imagine this happens to be a common mistake that multiple make and Emily responds in this way every time...
That's an example of a reply that is "unsolicited" and "also irrelevant", by your criteria.
I'm not trying to defend that combo here. You said such a screed is "also irrelevant", right?
That means even if a reply wasn't irrelevant, even if it was a useful response, it would still be unsolicited. Right?
Is that what you intended to say? Am I misreading something?
If you send someone an invite to a discussion, they're invited, whether you meant to or not. At least long enough to send a single reply (which may be multiple tweets).
Whether their response is a polite "you tagged the wrong person" or some awful screed does not change whether a solicitation happened. Especially because tagging someone is not a request for any specific sort of reply.
Relatedly, if someone is eavesdropping in public and steps into a conversation to make the most wonderful helpful and loved comment in the world, doing that was still unsolicited.
Also tagging does not necessarily request a reply at all.
This is silly and will go in circles so I will finish by just saying.. What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? ....
And that's what twitter is, brief conversations.
Fucking killjoys.
If twitter is moderating for people who can't even figure out not to take that copypasta seriously[1], then they're showing their hand. There's no end state. No goal. There is no cultural equilibrium point that even perfect moderation could ever achieve.
Therefore, visible attrition is the end state. Twitter has to satisfy the normies who want to be on the internet but don't understand the internet. The moderation is a con because it can't be anything else. Lying "we're working on it, see?" to the monied/powerful normies who's continued use keep Twitter's stock price out of the dumpster.
[1]: It's not that people should recognize copypasta, it's that people should recognize the words of an idiot. This meme became a meme because how well everyone recognized the earnest original author of that post couldn't be taken seriously.
There should be something as close as possible to an objective standard of what is and isn't allowed.
That's backwards.
Everything should be seen as profoundly not-serious, for precisely the same reason.
At least you got banned for doing something to annoy The Twitter.
[0] I appealed and was told I had evaded a previous ban! Obviously…no, no I didn't.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xKlehf_4rRg
It's not only a death threat, it appears to be said by a committed terrorist. ;)
On a more serious note: humor, satire and sarcasm are typically super hard to categorize, especially at scale. It's an unsolved problem.
It overwhelmingly emphasizes the following, from my experience:
1. If you are not famous, you don't matter. 2. Front-end engineers are invariably the most important and skillful, and backend engineers really aren't valuable. 3. If you hold any position that's even accidentally politically incorrect, you will be publicly shamed for it, and some people are quite relentless at bringing up tiny past mistakes.
Overall, it seems like a fairly useless space unless you can take advantage of the above 3, or if you want to have the lowest self-esteem possible as rapidly as possible.
A friend got disinvited from speaking at an NLP convention, not because of something he said or did, but because his employer was tangentially related to national security contracts. Of course, the person that organized the dis-invite also used it as an opportunity to get themselves ahead.
As mainly a back end developer, I find this statement the opposite of reality. :) Good thing I don't post on Twitter.
In comparison, forums like hacker news and reddit don't focus on the person writing, but focuses on the conversation. People can respond in a mean way (unfortunately) to a comment, but not "to the person", it doesn't have the same dynamic. The potential for huge reach of any single tweet is a big factor in giving twitter this bad dynamic.
That we feel relatively safe to have conversations, to try arguments and to sometimes be wrong about stuff is healthy. Maybe I'm confused and wrong about what I'm writing in this comment. Someone will tell me, but I'll live. :)
the conversational semantics of twitter and hn/reddit are completely different; the underlying models can be seen as formally -and sharply- distinct.
Heh, that's interesting. I didn't see a whole lot of that on Twitter (though I kinda see what you mean), but I did know a senior engineer that referred to front-end engineers as "finger-painters".
I think both camps probably kinda looks down on the other a bit. (But I guess the frontend camp is louder on Twitter?)
A little rabbit trail though: Looking at the graph in the article, I'm wondering if US isn't ripe for a party system change. It's not _always_ been Republican vs Democrat in our history. Both sides are incentivized away from supporting a 3rd party out of fear it will help the "other side" and primary systems etc. have entrenched the current 2 party system. But with such great and growing discontent, I wonder if a switch like from Whigs or the handful of other parties won't eventually happen.
The Left (voters) have two main platforms: economic and cultural.
The Right (voters) have two main platforms: economic and cultural.
The Left votes for the Democratic Party. The Right votes for the Republican Party. Independents mostly vote one way or another, and a small percentage vote for whoever seems most moderate that particular election.
When governing, the Democratic Party works with the Republican Party to implement:
1. The cultural platform of the Left.
2. The economic platform of the Right.
The cultural platform of the Right and the economic platform of the Left are not implemented.
The Left calls the Democratic-Republican Establishment the "corporate" party and believes the country has moved strongly to the Right over the last 40 years. (They are focusing on the fact that the economic platform of the Right is being implemented.)
The Right calls the Democratic-Republican Establishment the "uniparty" and believes the country has moved strongly to the Left over the last 40 years. (They are focusing on the fact that the cultural platform of the Left is being implemented.)
This is a stable political system because neither a Left voter nor a Right voter wants to vote for the other party, because then they wouldn't even be getting half of what they want! The Democratic-Republican Establishment doesn't care who people vote for, because it wins either way. The important thing is for voters to believe their vote matters—even though it actually doesn't.
The key result is that neither the Left's economic platform nor the Right's cultural platform are ever implemented. (A few legacy cultural issues on the Right, e.g. 2nd Amendment gun rights, still exist. Same with pre-WW2 economic issues on the Left.)
Hope this helps!
I don't think there are any, but a lot of "independents" are fundamentally moderate and Democrats typically have a lower party-id than Republicans, so they need more independents to break their way to win a national election, hence "distancing" from far-Left/woke positions at election time.
Biden, for instance, made "equity" his priority literally Day 1 in office, and that's a "woke" position. It has only hurt him with voters on the Right, who don't like the Left's cultural platform anyway and can be ignored.
Both the Right and Left frequently talks about 3rd parties because literally half of what they want is never implemented. The Left is far more active in politics, so they tend to actually do something about it (DSA, Green Party, etc.). Republicans mostly just occasionally vote Libertarian, but there's also the occasional Tea Party if the Left gets anything that even looks like a win on economics.
Unless you are referring to the Democratic neoliberal center-right, which has been and remains Biden’s main base of support (and I don’t think you are), Biden didn’t have any support on the Right to start with.
> Both the Right and Left frequently talks about 3rd parties because literally half of what they want is never implemented. The Left is far more active in politics, so they tend to actually do something about it (DSA, Green Party, etc.).
That’s why the strongest minor party in the US is…the right-libertarian (with candidates frequently ex- and/or future-Republican candidates) Libertarian Party. The DSA isn’t a third party, and the Green Party is smaller (in both membership and, at 0, elected state-level or higher representation, than the Libertarian Party (also the Independence Party of New York, and the Independent Party of Oregon, and on at least one and possibly both than the Vermont Progressive Party; it is also recognized in fewer states than the Libertarian Party.
The Right is more active in politics in general in the US, more active in major party politics in the US, and more active outside of major party politics in the US.
What was the one before that? Free crack pipes for racial equity, I think.
And that criticism of the supreme court thing depends on the belief that ability can be narrowed down to a single quantity and he isn't picking out of a bunch of basically equally qualified candidates. I'd disagree with that.
Can you let the New York Times know?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/us/politics/biden-harm-re...
> the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, said glass pipes were “never a part of the kit,”
Seems like they know. And that doesn't even get into the ridiculous "for racial equity" part of that sentence.
"Under-resourced populations can be defined by the following factors:
• By race
• By ethnicity
• By gender (including transgender populations)
• By sexual orientation (including lesbian, gay and bisexual populations)"[0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220207225346/https:/www.samhsa...
Is that a real single quote from somewhere, or is that quoting things from entirely different sections? I see safe smoking kits in the big list of harm reduction equipment. But that list of under-resourced populations is over in the "Addressing Behavioral Health Disparities" section, and is next to the list of social determinants of health:
• Economic Stability
• Education Access and Quality
• Health Care Access and Quality
• Neighborhood and Built Environment
• Social and Community Context
Tracking those sets of data seem like a good way to make sure no subgroups are getting missed, including "groups of people who have systematically experienced greater obstacles to health".
Singling out one of those nine separate factors and acting like the "equity" goal is focused on bad behavior, and possibly even encouraging it, rather than "ensuring that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible", is a pretty misleading way to talk about this program.
Also "A safe smoking kit may contain alcohol swabs, lip balm, other materials to promote hygiene and reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis"
> Some harm reduction programs do include sterile pipes — which are used for smoking methamphetamine and fentanyl as well as crack cocaine — in such kits, with the intent of preventing infectious disease or injury in drug users who might otherwise rely on contaminated paraphernalia.
For most of my life, I identified and voted largely democrat. Over the last 5-10 years I've found myself far more independent aligned due in part to the issues mentioned of the parent poster. Some of the points of conflict include affirmative action. I am fully supportive of helping underprivileged groups, dedicated funding and corrective policy changes to remove things keeping them down, but do not think explicit affirmative action is the right way to go about that, and in fact feel it weakens ones position and seems clearly hypocritical from one ostensibly seeking equality.
I also take a broad issue with the sheer amount of effort the democrats have focused on issues of identity as opposed to class. Not that one should ignore the former, but I find the latter to be a far more central, immediate, and critical issue that needs addressing, and that the way the democrats are implementing their approach to the former, like their position on affirmative action, is instead driving a wedge and fighting against their best intentions.
From my European perspective, I've always considered the Democrats to be a right wing party. Things implemented in other advanced economies decades ago, the very basics of progressive policy, are just nowhere to be seen: a livable minimum wage, universal healthcare, affordable schooling, employment protection, the like.
In other countries, this isn't even called progressive, just "basics". Not even right wing parties try to abolish or undo this foundation.
We do see that media is far more left than the actual population, which is typically center to center-right. The way I see it, the population of almost any developed country is center-right. It makes sense when you think about it. Due to the population pyramid, most people are middle-aged or older. They're already planning for the exit so they want to protect whatever they got. No funny stuff.
The young want to change everything but that's easy when you have no responsibilities or stake in the game. As soon as they acquire the basics of life, they'll join the rest, and try to protect it.
That is the gigantic failure of the left, the inability to connect with the vast majority of the population. Here in Europe, the left has abandoned the (white) working class somewhere in the late nineties, and they've been failing ever since.
Change the voting system across a super majority of elections and we will likely get additional parties. But until then third party votes are wasted, and the Republican and Democratic parties are against changing the system
> In Gallup's 2021 polling, 29% of Americans identified as Democrats ... 27% as Republicans ... and 42% as independents.
Politics is a dirty but necessary business, and for many of us it's far better to keep parties at arm's length. Of course you can still donate to your favorite candidates regardless. In open-primary states like texas it isn't even necessary to join up, should you feel a need to contribute to certain lesser evils.
Studies of voting behavior pretty consistently show that self-identified independents are, on average, either equally or very nearly equally reliably partisan in voting as those who identify with one major party or the other.
In short, people who want to have readers want a platform that makes reading easy. Twitter is no longer that platform.
It was embarrassing for me to admit this, but I've found it to be a running thread throughout my educational and work career. I suspect it dominates my brain more because of early childhood experiences more, but I'm unsure because it seems taboo to admit to craving acceptance or acknowledgement.
Once I began admitting it to myself, it became a big part of what drives my growth. I now know the impact that accountability has on my success. I'd rather feel slightly embarrassed for wanting people to see my toy projects than limit my personal trajectory out of fear. I am mindful of depending on others for validation, and I try to strike a healthy balance between wanting to impress others and wanting to impress myself.
Apropos to the topic at hand, I'm using Twitter and Observable to "learn in public". I don't expect or intend to become an influencer. I just know that I can leverage the dopamine hits of upvotes and likes and retweets for my personal growth. I'm a social animal that needs to have his efforts directed through shared structures of meaning. So far, I've leveraged that in multiple areas to great effect.
I think the vital part is the aspect of accountability. Even just committing to updating a friend on progress and asking them to keep you to your word helps. I've found it hard to get people to do that work because it sometimes requires shifting from "friend" to "boss" mode. I don't really think it's fair to put my loved ones in that position lol
I realized that interesting tweets (or rather, Twitter threads) have a way of finding me through other means. That's the only time I visit Twitter.
I'm ok on missing out on ideas that do not find me through other means. The vomit to caviar ratio on Twitter is way too high.
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media...
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
And, of course, sometimes I accidently click on a link on HN that points to Twitter without realizing it, and I have to NOPE back out as fast as possible.
Most people I know who use twitter use it to stay up to date with creators they care about.
You can't even try to start a conversation anymore. It's just person makes grand sweeping statment. You cheer them on, ignore them, or get blocked. It's not a healthy environment. It's just grandstanding.
It used to feel really democratizing, anyone could comment on anything. Now between people only allowing people they follow to reply and the percentage of harmless to innate comments that get hidden behind "Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content" it really doesn't feel like it once was.
In their attempts to make it more "friendly", they both made it less friendly and killed the value proposition. It's just a place to build a cult of personality these days.
I am using twitter since 2008, and I have like 5 interactions per year. I unfollow noisy people. 3 tweets a day? You are too noisy. I also do not hit the like or retweet buttons a lot.
Around events I follow some extra accounts (Ukraine) that are noisy. Then unfollow at some point.
If someone agrees with a post, they “like” it. If someone disagrees, they tweet in response. This was the ONLY option until a few weeks ago with the rollout of the downvote button, so we will see if downvoting changes this dynamic.
Suppose a tweet gets 90 likes, and 10 negative responses. That’s 90% positive response. But if someone clicks on the tweet, they’ll see the one original tweet followed by 10 disagreeable posts, which can make it seem like fringe ideas are actually much more mainstream.
I follow a bunch of tech type stuff I'm interested in, but honestly, it's become more of a place to vent and whine about this or that.
When I step back and look at it from afar, it's kinda what Facebook was when I left it a decade or so ago; people whining, and any subject worth commenting on is too controversial to do on the likes of Twitter where nuance is easily lost in so few characters.
I see no real need for me to be on Twitter anymore. I'm not on any other social networks aside from linkedin, which also seems to have lost its professional focus.
Edit: and to explain why z's, it's exactly above the comma "," on my Android phone (Gboard), and it's easy to miss when you can't see!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
The big question is...what side do you want to be on?
I've seen this ratio at Google+[1] and again on a recently-shuttered Diaspora instance (520 MUAs of 350k total profiles).
There's a very strong power law between the number of presentations of content and the number of accounts reaching that level.
Facebook sees ~5 billion-with-a-b "pieces" of content (I'm presuming these are posts, comments, images, or videos, though given other engagement-inflation, might and quite possibly do also include likes or reshares), per day. The top daily shares ... are typically in the millions-to-tens-of-millions range.[2] This is also typical of any winner-takes-all metric and follows from the inherent limits of population attention and time. Social media seems to occupy ~45 minutes/day for many people, and if you start dividing out 2,700 seconds among messages, there are only so many messages a typical person can read or view in a day: 10 is 270s (4.5 minutes) each, 100 is 27 seconds, 1,000 is 2.7 seconds. I suspect for most people, the number is in the 10--50 range.
It's not so much whether or not you want to be a producer or consumer. It's whether or not the channel is providing relevant, useful, accurate, and actionable information. For the most part, social media probably doesn't.
________________________________
Notes:
1. See: https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the... That's based on a 500k+ true random sample of profiles, and is based on my own earlier work based on 50k+ randomly-sampled profiles.
2. There are a few "most popular on Facebook" sites which track the top shares for a given day. I'm not aware of specific systematic tracking over time, though that of course all but certainly exists.
> 75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.
The above is also a link in the article, which if you follow it, it states
> roughly seven-in-ten Americans say they ever use any kind of social media site
How many people over 12 in the US actually even have a Twitter account? I doubt it's even 15%. According to the source the article linked to, about 70% use NO social media. I know twitter is popular with the HN crowd, but only 2 people I know actually use it and they only use it for business accounts. In my family, there are 7 younger people between 15-30. 0 use Twitter. They use instagram and snapchat mostly.
...
> According to the source the article linked to, about 70% use NO social media.
I think you misread. It says "ever use," not "never use." So 70% do use social media.
Except the social status journos have make this like of inquiry uncouth. It is someone both one of the most pressing issues of our media landscape, yet seen as a simple-minded and undignified perspective that sophisticated media won't touch.
I think it's also kind of strange how much variance there is in the content on the site. Something about the fact that stupid jokes take up the same space and appear in the same way as very serious news feels harmful to me.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/02/10-facts-ab...
I don't really think about twitter as a social network. For me it's more like complete shitfest which is sometimes informative and/or funny.
Twitter is specially annoying because it constantly probes you, be it with irrelevant posts to see if you like them, and asking you to confirm what topics you like or dislike. At least it includes a disclaimer when it's doing that.
Twitter is a social media platform with it's own character and culture, and it is a tool for being informed on niche topics in realtime, similar to subreddits. It's not for everyone.
Does Twitter just hold on to the character limit for nostalgia purposes? I mean if they really wanted to keep that limit, at the least why not create a separate Twitter without a character limit as an experiment, and see what the demand is?
As a sidenote back in the days I worked for a university and we did research in public policy making. How social media would make a difference as it empowers the underprivileged. In my opinion almost none of that came true. Those which make an effect are the ones in power. The rest is cats video and advertisement disguised as influencers.
Twitter has a reputation as one of the most toxic of social networks. Stories of Tweets that exposed someone to tremendous harassment or embarrassment are rife. I make quite a variety of posts and comments online, occassionally publishing article in blog and so-forth. But I avoid Twitter in particular "like the plague", which it seems resemble.
Yet it also seems to be true that Twitter is taken as the standard of "being public" by much of the press. And it seems like this standard comes from both journalists operating by the instant-answer, instant-gratification standard of Twitter and an overall, "you have to be willing to take the heat to be credible" attitude of those in high government, private industry, bureaucracies and so-forth. And this expresses a toxicity to not just Twitter but our entire society.
That said, the vast majority of those people just use Twitter to announce their various public events, professional accomplishments, media releases, etc.
IMO this is the way to go, unless you enjoy and get something out of the rough-and-tumble of direct Twitter engagement. I used to for a little while, but got over it. It definitely made me a more contentious person, for better and worse.
Before anybody asks:
- twitter is trash
- you just can't have proper conversations (let alone, discussion) with such limits (140 and now 280 characters)
- there are basically two types of people on twitter
- one is: people doing self-promotion / self-marketing (this includes engineers tweeting about tech stuff and journalists forced to entertain readers)
- the other is: toxic people that have an empty life and need to fill it by having arguments with other people and are going to attack anyone on anything (and make no mistake: these people can be anywhere from the far right to the far left).
- most people's opinion don't matter anyway
- I realized years ago that my life just isn't enriched by social media
How many times have a seen TV hosts just basically read Twitter.
Twitter is an easy way for journalists/TV personalities to generate stories.
This is news to me.
I'm not saying your claim is wrong, just that this isn't sufficient. There is other evidence that shows that city living is healthier with longer lifespans and reduced obesity.
People in the city tend to be younger and higher income - both skew the numbers. Access to health services - advantage city vs rural. But the stress level is off the charts higher in a city. This is terrible for you.
There is some evidence that suburban or exurban might be the sweet spot, where you get the benefit of access to care and less daily stress.
Walking and movement is important too, so if you can combine income with small town living (community) in an active way you may be way ahead of the game.
Is there a citation for this? First time I've heard this said.
If that were true wouldn't all the ultra wealthy avoid living in cities at all?
I have no doubt there are vigorous academic arguments happening whether there are ways to mitigate the stress of population density and be healthier than would be expected. I'm open to that concept and ideas.
Yet the research on urban living and mental health is overwhelming - your chances of schizophrenia, mood disorders and anxiety skyrocket in cities. I was born in a large metro and lived on both coasts in huge urban areas, and I wish this weren't true because I like the energy of a city.
But you get a couple of whiskeys in me at dinner and I'll flat out say there's almost zero way to make a city healthy. People on top of each other, tremendous noise, light pollution and bad air quality leads to poor health for many people, as well as conflict.
(Although I rarely had a stress-free morning on the DC Metro)
Driving in rural areas or across the western US - piece of cake and even relaxing.
There are two groups who I think need to learn this lesson:
1. Jouralists. I constantly see statements like "People are <X emotion> about <Y>" based on a handful of sassy tweets. That's not journalism.
2. Product Managers. If you get 10 tweets asking for a feature you'll hear the PM say "our users really want <X>" which is not true. 10 extremely online users want <X>. I am convinced that this is how so many apps get dark mode but don't get actual new features.
The traditional news will never report on things that are going fine, they hyper focus on the (usually) bad exception. This incentive is to strong and perverse that they gladly misrepresent facts, dramatize them or even just make up stories.
When I discuss the day with my girlfriend, she won't tell me how the day largely went fine, the conversation is about that one colleague doing something wrong.
It's in all of us, we direct attention to deviations. Twitter exploits this to the very maximum on a scale not possible in the physical world.
The issue is not that people say outrageous things, they'll always do that. The real issue is that those views spread far and wide at breakneck speed, and thereby become popular or even culturally dominant.
Which is made possible by simple things like a retweet button and inflated follower counts. When you see somebody having 100K followers, you may think this is due to 100K people somehow searching for a person, browsing through lists of experts or having a connection with them in real life. Something you might call organic followers. That's not how it works at all. Based on engagement, after a particular threshold, it's a recommended account shown in front of many people, after that it snowballs and escalates.
And this is how you can have somebody "verified" and with 200K followers, that in real life is unemployed, has no particular useful expertise or insight, zero accomplishments, and absolutely thrive on the platform.
And it gets worse. These mid-tier influencers find each other. And if they align politically, they become an unstoppable force able to plaster the entire network with the dumbest of takes.
As this works so well, they become addicted to it. There can't be a quiet day, fresh outrage has to be constantly invented.
How is it that there is nothing that can be done to alleviate this type of obvious voter suppression and electoral corruption on a national scale?
I understand this is tertiary to the title, but makes up a large part of the article, so I thought I'd bring it up.
The only solution against this problem is violence. Despite what a lot of completely delusional and clueless morons believe, voting solves nothing as long as all parties are basically run by rich people and or paid career politicians.
And I'm not even going to dive into the details. They're not necessary. You have not just the politicians against you, you also have the media against you, which means that you have most people against you.
Unless you manage to get people to realize what's going on, things will only change when those in charge want things to change.
Then it'll happen on their terms, they will provide solutions to problems they created and we all are going to pay for it.
If you trust your government, no matter where you live, then you're a fool.
Period.
The fact that there's assholes out there who abuse this fact for an attempt to make things even worse isn't my problem. The fact that there's people like you, who draw a connection, is just as bad.
I'm not from the US. This horrendously broken logic, where you associate people with each other based on their thoughts, thus basically destroying ideas, isn't mine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_deb....
That's when it changed from 2% to 5%, and on and on. It was the Perot incidents that make me lean towards a "rigged" system, more than anything, really.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/few-americans-who-ident...
They just want to avoid the label of being one or the other.
Are they allowed to have any opinions about political parties?
At a federal level, based on how strongly everyone toes the line, voting is basically just picking a party. So even if 100% of the way you choose is based on the individual candidate's actions, and your vote varies widely in more local elections, at a federal level the end result is probably the same party over and over for many years.
42% may identify as "independent," but only 9% are independent without leaning Republican or Democrat. Not registering officially with the party, but still always voting for them, is quite a bit different from actually not having a preference or wanting a third party.
These people [one random, average person passionate about something they know little about] are saying these things[taken out of context by reporter or site] about you[random attribute you will identify with].
Media demographics are killing harmony. These people feed our brains. They are our eyes beyond what our real eyes can see. Which is not very far. That's how people come to hate people they've never met. Or how wars are started.
I think it’s a bubble that should not have any political power, because it’s a cesspool!
Stop following people who post political things or opinions about social issues and the toxicity is much, much less.
But this all seems like a fantastic feature, just ignore it all! There are so many better things to do with your time. The people you most want nothing to do with are being most consumed by it, leaving the beaches, parks, campgrounds, trails, etc. more available for your enjoyment.
Let the twits have at it, good riddance.
I sincerely believe we, humans as a species, do not handle scale well at all. There's just a limit to what we can fathom or process. And social media has scaled beyond our ability to comprehend how to socially interact with it.
Twitter's community is the entire world. (as far as I know)
In my case, it's to have a conversation. Before I moved to the United States, I could have all sorts of conversations with people at work, no matter how controversial or stupid or weird. But in the US, the culture is different. There are things that you can't discuss with your coworkers, for various reasons.
When the pandemic hit and I stopped going to the office, that made the problem even worse. Sure, I didn't have any real friends here, but at least there was more randomness and diversity in my social life. I love my family, but it's an extremely limited pool of people to talk to.
So I found myself participating more and more on Twitter, on Imgur, and on certain game forums. Which, in turn, had the same impact on me as Facebook used to before I closed my account.
My own, very personal conclusion, is that the society in the United States suffers from a "disease" of alienating people from each other and isolating them, making them turn to social networks to fill the void left by the absence of what used to be normal, every day way to socialize.
Then again, I'm just a sample of one, so my conclusion is almost certain to be wrong.
Is that unique to the US? It feels like something broadly true if I believe what I see in the news and online forums, but in my personal life it does not feel true at all.
On the other hand, I've talked to a lot of other immigrants who lived in different states before this, and the general consensus (in that admittedly small sample) is that the US is definitely different from South America or Europe in that sense.
For context, I lived in Chile before I moved to the US, and Chile is the country in South America that tries the hardest to be like the US. Even in Chile, it's easier to have a richer social life than here, despite longer working hours and longer commutes, which both result in having much less free time. My own theory is because you get to socialize more at work and, if you have a kid that goes to kindergarten or school, with other parents. Here? "Not so much" would be an understatement.
Aren't these the people who have always been, and the “new”, is the small majority on Twitter thinking they represent the vast majority of society?
Thinking about it further, my government appears to listen to a lot of what Twitter has to say.
I wonder if it's easy to control a country using a high number of well-placed Twitter commentators designed to usher in whatever those in power actually wanted.
> 75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.
[0] Check it: https://www.google.com/search?q=user+hostile+twitter+site:ne...
So 'most people don't tweet' isn't really that much of a stretch.
I'm annoyed by how this story seems to be jamming together unrelated things to paint a picture. Are people under the impression that twitter users are big political donors, or that twitter users don't mostly self-identify as independents? Are [capital-I]ndependents "somewhere in the middle," or is that just editorial trying to turn 42% of people into centrist charity-givers?
The two-party system keeps dominating all the news cycles, so it’s got to be pretty difficult for all of the marketing analytics companies to keep up with the noise.
> Stanford University political scientist David D. Laitin described it as "a magisterial book." But he said there were flaws in the methodology of the book, saying the book "is a product of undisciplined history. For one, Scott’s evidence is selective and eclectic, with only minimal attempts to weigh disconfirming evidence... It is all too easy to select confirming evidence if the author can choose from the entire historical record and use material from all countries of the world."
That criticism is akin to critiquing water for being wet.
The question is whether or not the book provides useful insights. And to that extent, I believe James C. Scott accomplishes his task. He needn't be correct in all his diagnoses or prescriptions for this to be true.
Appropriate consideration of disconfirming evidence is a valid concern, though I'd have to see what Laitin is proposing in that regard to see if that critque has merits.
What's all the more amusing is that the criticism is fundamentally grounded in the same fundamental paradox that states face, per Scott: that a complex domain cannot be accurately modeled or understood, that all attempts to do so are at best compromises and in error, and that any model will prove insufficient and unequal to the task.
Ahh, interesting. I believe that most modern scientists would reject that proposition, a priori. Millennia of scientific advancements have shown that complex systems can indeed be modeled. Recent advancements in mathematics have shown that self-correcting simulations are certainly possible (deep learning, for example). Science itself could be simply described as a “self-correcting model with built-in error checking”.
I've only managed about 3 chapters of the book so far. It has proved quite illuminating.
There are examples of systems that do model well and those that don't. Depending on your physics, the 3, 2, 1, or null-body problems. The double pendulum. Etc.
And those are only at the very simplest level.
The fact that some systems can be effectively modelled doesn't mean that all can be. And in the case of complex systems (e.g., the German "rational forestry" method described early in Scott's book), initial success may preceed subsequent catastrophe.
Based on my understanding, the leading-edge of scientific research shows that “if the human mind can comprehend it, then there is a mathematical function for it”
Are you positing, then, that there simply are limits to what humans can understand? Or, rather, that some systems are just too complex to document properly?
2. Yes, yes.
2. I don't follow your point.
I do appreciate the examples/links.
I now understand why you consider it amusing; thanks for your insights on this topic.
The do. The article is incredibly misleading. The drop in party affiliation does not mean that people are not partisan, are less partisan, or that someone who is not affiliated with party is open to voting for a candidate from either party.
One of the major strategic breakthroughs of the Bush campaign on '04 and the Obama campaign in '08 was the ability to identity partisans who were not registered with one party or the other. Most people who are independents consistently will still vote for the same party regularly from one election to the next. Since at least 2000, most swings in voting patterns from one election to the next have more to do with turnout among various groups than with individuals voting differently than they had in the past.
In 2010 for example, the Democrats suffered one of the worst midterm defeats in modern history. It was portrayed in the media as voters turning against Obama and the Democratic party. In fact, it was about turnout. Had turnout in 2010 looked like it had just two years earlier, the Democrats would not have suffered that kind of midterm "shellacking", as Obama called it. The real, and far less click-baity, story was that Obama was an incredibly charismatic and effective campaigner. When he wasn't on the ballet, a lot of democratic-leaning voters stayed home.
I’m reading a lot of talk from you about the Democrats and Republicans, but what are the Independents thinking?
My broader point is that contrary to what the article implies, "Unaffiliated Voter != A voter who is open to voting for either party"
That sounds pretty clearly in contradiction with the Declaration of Independence and the subsequent United States Constitution and the subsequent United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Editor: "Erica, Mike, I need that story right now."
Erica&Mike: "Sorry boss, it isn't written yet, all we have are notes with topics, bullet points and numbered lists."
Editor: "Time's up. Publish the notes."The majority of people were always just content consumers not producers. The short form content platforms are probably reducing this gap but producing even just low quality content takes more effort than consuming.
Yes! I love this stat, I hope it holds in other polling.
All your friends (that you haven't blocked) are lying to you!
Anyway, so the bottom line, is the squeaky wheel gets the grease?
> It turns out, you're right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent.
then follow it up with a couple disjointed statistics and then ends with
> The bottom line: Every current trend suggests politics will get more toxic before it normalizes. But the silent majority gives us hope beyond the nuttiness.
What?
The entire premise around how often people _send_ tweets also doesn't seem like a good foundation. Misinformation (to pick only one relevant thing about social) comes from _consuming_ media. The median user story is probably people skimming endless content (memes, news, etc.) not tweeting everything out.
Not being on Twitter is being called "silent"? Is that the yardstick for not being silent?
I'd rather communicate outside of giant echo chambers and text length limitations and engagement optimized (a)social spying media, with real people and speak out there. With family, friends, the neighbors or the neighborhood, for example. Outrage about whatever on Twitter will not help anyone much, except Twitter.
I would also guess, that more than 25% of people in the US vote in elections. Surely that is not "being silent".
What I couldn't imagine back then is that Twitter is going to be the main platform (I was using a nascent FB and early 00's bulletin boards as the examples of the system). And Twitter is absolutely bonkers in terms of how it polarizes opinion. If I didn't know any better, I would think that it was specifically designed to achieve this purpose. If I needed to design a system that polarizes opinion more than Twitter, I would be hard pressed to do it better.
1. The 160/240 character limit forces you to reduce topics to their most impactful tenets - which strips out all of the nuance and grounds you into an extreme position. For the one expressing the opinion - it will always look more benign than for the one reading it, because the writer can't fully strip it's perception through bias of known context. 2. The users have "gotten around that" by starting threads - and Twitter has started optimising the feed to show threaded views - but threads are not generated "at once" (there are tools for that, but most users don't use them). They are generated post by post - and in a fairly complex topic (such as, oh I don't know, the war in Ukraine) - this will mean >10 tweets as part of the thread. Each of those tweets is replyable and because you can like parts rather than the whole thread - it will show in people's feeds piecewise -> which will create discussions on parts of the point, not the full context. 3. In turn - these piecewise reactions are forming a base for someone else's reaction, where you've gone even further into the rabbit hole. By this point - an argument has already started - and because the 240 char limit doesn't allow for nuance - the argument looks like a black and white argument - as there are no points that are in the "grey zone" that a reader from the side could connect between the opposing sides and perceive any hope of consensus. 4. Users from the outside see it as B&W - so they enter with B&W assumptions in - and assume an aggressive tone - completely derailing any hope to avoid creation of opposing echo chambers.
I can see how they got there - and I can see the choices they made - 160 characters was a good choice for user engagement and revenue - as the flywheel will allow for more ad insertions - and if you optimise for quick reactions - your algorithm is going to take you into a zone where people don't read entire threads - because the algo isn't rewarded for people idling about and not reacting/answering. In terms of what it's doing to public opinion - it should be a textbook example of how growth-oriented product design - when not evaluated hollistically, can create unwanted social effects.
EDIT: Forgot to link to original point of the article /facepalm. The reason why it's never going to achieve higher penetration - in my view - is that a lot of people get adverse emotional reactions from how the algorithm works - so you end up having people who have to be there (media) - and people who are quite comfortable with emotionally loaded engagement on social networks - which amplifies all of the functions stated above. And those people are, fortunately, in a minority. However, the fact that people don't tweet, doesn't mean that people don't read the tweets - as twitter is public without an account and major news outlets usually link to twitter threads. This drastically amplifies the reach of the distorted echo-chamber battles - which makes the overall effect on public opinion even worse.
I mean it's perfect in how horrible it is.
I already have me, I am myself, I don't need others to validate those things as they do it worse or for the wrong reasons, except for fundamental beliefs, an example of this is comparing fundamentals with music, because if we believe that "murder is wrong", and "don't steal" we can get along much better, avoid serious violations... with music on the flip side i don't care if you like something different, or play something different. If you are creating it I will listen, if you are listening to it on the radio I will plug my ears and we with both be happy.
These are two good examples as they demonstrate something I believe is the answer for a much happier way of life. Simply being, I am willing to hear something i don't like, because I choose how valuable it is. If you are an idiot I may tell you, if I think it will help you; if i don't think it will help, I won't say anything, and i will try my best to forget the conversation. Your words only matter because I allow it to matter to me; regardless of the actual implications of your words on reality. If you say something like; "the sky is red and you are a retard for disagreeing with me, I will hear no argument" (this is exaggerated for the point), how would I respond? I used to get offended, because "I'm not retarded, ur the idiot"; now I try to respond (and i'm far from perfect, getting better) with something along the lines of, "good conversation, I disagree, lol bye" and laugh about it later. It's not valuable to continue, and the worst thing that happened is I no longer respect them, if I ever did before. One less loser in my life, overall better outlook, less stress, nice.
Nothing you say or do will matter to anyone else but by those who respect you. Another thing, I don't respect you, you don't respect me. In the online world you have formed an opinion on me based on only my presence, if this is the first time you have read anything I have written, your whole view of me is being built only from the few paragraphs here. You don't respect me, you insult me when you do that; making me not who i am, but a simplified cartoon which is only my shadow. Of course I'm speaking generally, i have met a few exceptions and I know there are more out there who just don't assume who i am by a few hundred words, but it's gonna take a long time to find you.
I've went on too long about this, so I'll wrap it up. The only concession I make to actually caring is with people i have known for a long time, who have proven they really care, and those that really want to grow as people. I choose, at a detriment to myself usually, to value their words, no matter how hard it is to understand, or how much it hurts. Simply speaking, only give people the power they deserve, and some random on twitter doesn't matter (to you). :)
This seems factually wrong? Maybe most independents are in between the two parties, but not all. Look at Bernie Sanders for example, I would say he's to the left of the Democratic party.
I thought maybe the Gallup poll they are referencing had a weird definition of an independent requiring it to be between the two parties, but I'm not seeing that either.
Is there any evidence for this, or even definition of this? I'd define it as swing voters who tend to mix up their ballot between the two parties, and I'd be surprised if the percentage of people who did that broke double digits.
do you not want to engage in the world? are you not curious about other people, interested in heearing them think? does having direct access to incredibly high grade people not excite you for some reason? do you not want to grow and get better, do you value being safe & secure so much as to pass up exchanging & interacting with so many? where else do you go to engage in cereberal, vast conversations? do you have world class thinkers, developers, journalists & researchers that you pow-wow with regularly? are you entirely uninterested in seeing some of their lives, participating together with them?
getting to join the global consciousness has been an incredible privilege. having a place for my thoughts in public, being open to reflection, getting to share & hear others open streams of communication, getting to engage in all manners of debate & discovery... this is 100% the cyberspace i signed up for. when twitter comes up as a topic tbis grousing & moaning about it, how everything that happens there is all shit &, from only bad edgy people... do you not look in the mirror when you cast such bitter hateful negative accusations at all? do you not see yourself enacting the bad acts you decry? this is such enormous slanted bias, rules out, out of hand, the possibility of positive use & engagement.
is anyone at all interested in the absurdly high value, in the incredible all connectedness, in the ability to throw wide your doors of perception here? this moaning & whining about this incredible global public shared hypermedium, this Fear Uncertainty & Doubt about putting yourself into the world, none of it makes sense to me. opt in, go online, share, grow!
as for thr topic at hand, well. i do think a lot of people, frankly, dont have much to contribute. honing a sense of insight & perspective & exploration, or engaging deeply in some worldly endeavor; these are not totally common attributes, and you need something to bother to be tweeting about, something that has value. im not surprised so many opt for quiet. i want to think of how to make valuable so many's participation, how to refine & grow intellects in this online social program, but i havent come.up with a lot of strong ideas for it.
and sure here's definitely plenty of pointless blathering about, from people who would do better to go offline & become someone first, absolutely. personally i stayed in generally smaller circles where i was not as subject to the endless peanut gallery, and was able to use the tool effectively to understand who was adjacent to my circles & interesting & who was wasting everyonecs time. part of the whole experience of twitter is establishing better internal filters, getting quick & fast at finding value, honing in on the interesting, the gems, the things with hooks or shininess, amid a lot of kind of ambient/experiential bits of background information about your contaxts, a connectivity maybe not valuable very often but which does kind of stitch us a bit closer to those we come to regard as in our circles.
Everything seems the same. Everyone is complaining about the same 10 things over and over.
1. fire in a crowded theater
2. freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences
3. correlation != causation
4. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
5. your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins
6. private companies can do what they want
7. success and health imply either rich parents or pure luck
8. Paul Graham is the worst, writes terrible essays, 1-hit-wonder got lucky with viaweb
9. blackball ex-FBers
10. whataboutism, whataboutism, whataboutism, whataboutism, and ... hold up ... yep, whataboutism
11. outlaw proof-of-work
12 (bonus track). FSD == AGI and will take 100 years / never happen
13 (baker's dozen). we live in a society (as a justification for any prohibition du jure)
Think about it, if you have a great job, a great partner and a great life, are you on Twitter arguing 20 to 30 hours a week.
The type of person to argue with strangers all day has none of the above.
It's also a matter of recognizing how insignificant we all are. No one cares what I think.
Hopefully no one ever will. I do want to create games and music for people to enjoy, but if I then start mouthing off about how taxes are evil I hope I'm ignored.
Exactly! The vast majority of content on social media is produced by a vanishingly small slice of the world's population. The views expressed should not be understood as representative.
It all depends on your definition of "engaging on Twitter". People reading their compiled follow lists and occasionally posting a thing or two are one thing, and that's definitely doable without "lacking in real life". But I struggle to imagine how one can spend 20-30 hours a week engaging in wild debates on twitter and not "lack in real life".
I've noticed similar tendencies in myself recently, but with Discord instead of Twitter. After doing some prolonged soul-searching, I found that to be one of the main reasons.
Twitter is a very dangerous social media. I consider myself a wordly and experienced person, but I admit I tend to over-value what is shared on Twitter (momentarily, because I look back occasionally at bookmarks and I have very little or no memories of those tweets or I cannot understand why I bookmarked them). I over-value (and not properly value) because I have no clue who is the person who's tweeting (case 1, why should I listen to them? Who are they? Would the same observation "hold" is a face to face conversation?) or I know them/they are public figures (case 2), and they are playing a game of popularity or relevance in which I am, as part of the audience, the sucker.
Just to make an example, the other day someone wrote that "the US should ramp up oil production now". I read it and I told myself "Ok". A reply-guy replied "what are you talking about, this is not like software, when you can "easily" scale up the number of servers". And I thought, man, I was really not thinking, my first reaction when reading a twitter should be "this is bs, who is this person, where is the competence coming from, what it the game they are playing now", but it was not my first reaction, which was instead of passive acceptance. Dangerous game.
I think the character limit creates a blunt form of communication that leads to this toxic environment. It is practically designed to create misunderstandings and dismissive short responses to those misunderstandings.
The aren't generally arguing though.
Are you and I lacking in real life for engaging with each other here?
I sometimes see posts that I like and want to retweet but I don't because it means I'm endorsing everything the author has ever said or ever will say. It's not worth the risk.
People in my demographic face significant exposure to "cancelling" or ambushing for wrongthink. So it's best for me to avoid it entirely.
I don't use Twitter or pretty much say anything publicly for the same reason, but note that this is definitely a risk for people of all demographics.
If you have a minority viewpoint, you get attacked far more easily.
Right now or at any point in the future. People have been canceled for things they said many years and opinion changes ago.
We have gone from silencing the minority to silencing the majority, this is terrible, but silver lining is that now maybe more people are invested in solving the problem.
I was lightly burned by a tweet (of my own authoring) once, and I thought "I make $XYZ per year, twitter pays me nothing, this joke tweet caused me a lot of stress, the odds that being on twitter will get me cancelled will cost me $XYZ are non-zero and I don't control them"
Then I deleted all my tweets and my twitter account (8 years ago) and life has been really nice without it!
Case in point: James Gunn ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gunn#Firing_from_Disney_... )
This is why I rarely interact on Twitter and I have a script that deletes all my tweets that are over X days old. If I say something truely insightful, I'll just make a blog post out of it.
Yep, he's super cancelled. Great example.
A good person who doesn't use Twitter (someone who might fix cars, or works on a fishing vessel for example) who is having this little discussion about what is "good" and "ok" might very easily use the wrong words and offend someone.
That’s the real problem: the standards of “good” and “decent” shift from time to time. What is fine today may get you canceled tomorrow.
Thus, it is not safe to put your opinions out there in any form that could come back to bite you. If you want to take that risk, fine. But do not pretend that it is safe.
It's not easy as "hurt" is not objective, is relative to others and no longer connected to intention.
But you might not care about that. You might say that I'm arguing in bad faith, or that your words couldn't possibly have offended me. But you don't get to redefine it.
Obviously, you might just not care that you've just offended me. That's what bad people do. You aren't a bad person, right? Could you please apologize?
This is an unfair question, not because it's not a reasonable one given your argument, but because if you say 'yes' I can't take you seriously.
Of course, that's not really the issue. The issue is what the response is when people are offended. I can certainly modify my language and behavior to reduce the chances of offending someone. I can even apologize when I've accidentally put my foot in my mouth.
Twitter lacks the tolerance and nuance for either of those scenarios, though. If something 'not ok' is said, what was intended or meant doesn't matter (and any nuanced is typically ignored). An apology isn't seen as an apology for a mistake, but as an admission of guilt of being a terrible person who doesn't deserve oxygen.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/soap/
> Though the show’s ratings were still good in season four, ABC cancelled the series because of continued pressure from the so-called “moral majority.” By the end of the series, Vlasic pickles was the only advertiser interested in advertising on the series. In They’ll Never Put That on the Air, executive producer Paul Junger Witt said, “We weren’t killed by a fearful network. The network had been incredibly supportive. We had been doing this long enough to understand that they were in a business, and they sat down and showed us — dollar for dollar — why they couldn’t afford to do it anymore.”
The people who are part of cancel culture now are literally using the same scare tactics that were used to suppress and oppress homosexuals and other minority groups.
More like people who complain about being victim of the cancel culture are the ones who were oblivious to it until they became the victim. Currently the cancel culture is being associated as some kind of PC culture outcome but it originated way before. The push back or critisim against it seems to be only happening now.
In many scenarios canceling is completely arbitrary, based on misquotes, lack of context, or total fabrication simply because someone, somewhere was offended and can get other people to act on their behalf.
In the best case scenario, the person being canceled is actually a shitty human being. I know such a person. He said some really stupid stuff online, was called out on it, doubled down on it, was doxxed and canceled. He's not the type of person who considers the consequences of his actions in any scenario. He's also actually stupid and not a friend of mine. I think he's as close to hot garbage as a human being can get without actually abusing or murdering other people.
However, this person still did not deserve death threats for the words he wrote. This person did not deserve people calling his employer threatening to burn down their building. The employer certainly didn't deserve that. His coworkers didn't deserve it. This person did not deserve his house to be vandalized; nor did the actual owner of the house. His roommates didn't deserve to live in fear and to have to deal with angry people maybe thinking they were him.
These behaviors are not justifiable. They are, in fact, less justifiable than someone saying awful things online. Writing them off as "consequences" is simply twisted.
Choose to believe it or not, that's your business, but this is exactly what happened.
(I do believe you. By comment was in response to your original one, which lacked a lot of the context you just provided.)
There's enough pile-on mobs on Twitter now with enough disagreement on what's acceptable that you can trip over any of them.
"You just used 'OK' in your comment, only white supremacists use 'OK'."
"He has a racist smirk"
I remember(maybe mis-) some reddit comments at the time about the kid's smirk. There was also a buch of comments about "punchable face"
https://medium.com/@RevolutionaryId/twitter-democratizing-mo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_...
>In the wake of the publication of the longer video, CNN Business reporter Donie O'Sullivan described the twitter video uploaded by "2020fight" as the one that "helped frame the news cycle" of the previous days, and characterized the video as a "deliberate attempt" to mislead and "manipulate the public conversation on Twitter"—a violation of Twitter rules.[76] According to Molly McKew, an information warfare researcher, the tweet had been boosted by a network of anonymous Twitter accounts to amplify the story.
To add to my point of 'OK': On January 22, shortly after tweeting it, comedian Kathy Griffin deleted a Twitter message in which she accused Covington basketball players making an OK gesture of "throwing up the new nazi sign".
heres one link. search term is covington kid.
basically just another case of left aligned news stations casually labelling everyone they don't like as 'racist'
Someone edited down a video of what happened and shared it. It was boosted either by bots or by unsuspecting people but it set off what can only be described as a witch hunt. This is of course not the first time this has happened, we have had things like Donglegate(https://arstechnica.com/staff/2013/03/donglegate-is-classic-...) and Shirtgate(https://time.com/3589392/comet-shirt-storm/). But the events seem to be getting bigger in magnitude, i.e. drawing in international media(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46935701) and more numerous(sorry no stats, only my attention).
You can not run a society on mobs. I am not sure if it is Twitters design, the speed of information, the need to feel like part of the in group and/or a combination of all and more that is leading to the formation of mobs but it is not healthy.
I also think there is some cultural values at play as well, where the number of Twitter followers, being an influencer, or just being self centered is seen as a positive thing.
Part of me thinks that it might be related to the gamification of everything, if I post more more(of the right thing) I get more likes, followers, retweets by celebrity. Rather than if I post clear concise or well thought out things. Quality over quantity as it were.
Just like you're getting downvotes and a lot of blowback for your opinion on this matter here, it's way worse on twitter.
I've heard someone say that twitter is a game where the goal is not to be the main character of the day. And that kind of holds. Twitter is a bit geared for outrage. Small snippets with no context. Say you don't like The Batman and you could find yourself under a barrage of hate and vitriol. It's not a left thing or a right thing, they both have their mobs on twitter, in addition to all the other random mobs floating about. Hell, say something shitty about the wrong product will have that mob after you.
if you say internet communities have an issue with pile on mobs and harassment, id agree but i think that's different then canceling, which i don't think happens to the average person or they even need to worry about
Is banning cancelling? What about HN's rate limiting? Being harrassed off of a platform?
All these things have been called "cancelling" by someone. And fair play by others. I think, in this context, we do have to consider the mobs as a part of "cancelling" because this is a thread about an article about people who don't engage in social media. Partly due to the fear of the amount of negative engagement.
I think you've really highlighted here why there's so much backlash against the latest wave of political correctness.
To many people, myself included, a "good person" is someone who can be counted on to help a friend in need, goes out of their way to make the day of the people they interact with that little bit more special (this is something I need to work on), and works hard to provide for their family in whatever way they can.
In my experience at least, a lot of the people who say the right words and hold the right opinions will flake on a friend in their hour of need, or avoid speaking with certain kinds of people lest they say the wrong thing. On the contrary, I can name several people who have dark senses of humour or right-wing beliefs, but will always go above and beyond to help out their community and the people they care about (yes, LGBT people and ethnic minorities too!).
I'm not saying that PC people are worse than non-PC people (if anything, it's probably uncorrelated), but the fact that you've binned people into "good" and "bad" based on how PC their opinions are is just, at least in my opinion, completely out of step with the view of general society.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30602611
I would reiterate my comment on that thread, verbatim:
Very few people spoke there, and very little of what they said was distributed beyond Hyde Park or recorded for posterity. I'm lucky enough to have seen a couple of people speak there, and they were both rather... eccentric. And even they didn't stand there all day, every day giving their opinions on everything that happened.
I don’t believe in living in fear of how people might react.
Of course I choose my battles; and I don’t walk up to strangers and tell them their baby is ugly. But that’s not being suppressed, IMHO.
And I don’t keep narrow-minded people among my close friends.
This is very common on Twitter. It's not a place I can haphazardly navigate. I can't stay up to date on the latest outrage or who has fallen from glory.
It doesn't matter what their views are. If someone decides they don't like them and that person have enough followers, they will find something.
That's an insane premise, but even if we presume it to be true, it still doesn't cover the case of _future_ cancellation when someone finds your tweets 10 years later and decides they aged like milk.
There are many comments I would have made 5-10 years ago, that I wouldn't make today. Sure, that's mostly due to maturity, but I've also adjusted my self-filter to account for a changing environment and audience.
At this point, I write all political comments under pseudonyms. It's not because I'm scared of getting cancelled — on the contrary, I wish I could argue my positions from my real name. But there is a lot of risk, for little benefit – I'm not a "journalist" or blogger or anyone with a career that depends on my political viewpoints. So why bother?
In general, online political comments gain me nothing, and there is no way to predict how those comments might look in a week, month, or even years from now. I do still write plenty of them, under pseudonyms (like this one), but it's more of a hobby to practice my writing. But I'm also not ashamed of anything I've written under any of the accounts – I would gladly defend all my opinions in person (to those close to me, who already know my feelings, and – btw, because they're sane – have never "cancelled" me).
Who knows, maybe one day I'll even tweet my pseudonym usernames so I can show everyone how right I was five years ago.
I can’t even risk having people see who I follow, and on Twitter who you follow is public.
Turns out, there's a lot of stuff people just probably shouldn't broadcast.
To illustrate this: imagine your ideal day. It could be on vacation, or hanging out at home, anywhere really. The key: imagine you are happy, or at least content. Now, do your imaginings ever have you reading angry tweets by people you hardly know for longer than you'd like?
I'd guess not.
Not sure how you could do that job without Twitter.
Why would you do this to yourself? I mean if you are a balanced adult who knows what they want in life and are not affected by massive mood swings and insecurities for whatever reason.
It is of course not black and white, it seems that ie right now Ukrainian defenders have a very good platform to inform whole world, no need to have BBC/CNN guys embedded in the heart of bombed city. That's cool and all. I just really don't like the rest of the whole society evolved around it.
Twitter feeds directly into the modern impulse to define oneself. It becomes sticky by coupling that with social validation. Say the right thing and you get a few Internet Points. Do it enough and people may follow you, which gives you a different type of Internet Points. Get enough of those, and you might get a blue checkmark, denoting you as a Very Important Person.
It is much easier to lean on externally mediated processes of identity formation (like Twitter) than it is to go at it alone. I almost don't blame people, except for the fact that I don't believe this outsourcing of identity even works on an individual level. It's as if everyone present is playing along with a game that they don't fully believe in, but the game goes on despite that.
It's quite modern and tragicomic in a way.
Just evict such absolutist moral nonsense people from your life and don’t allow them to control you. When you see them do it to others, block them.
It’s exactly the same thing as when it was a certain sort of church people controlling much of society with fear of “canceling” which was just done by different people with different means in the past, fundamentally nothing changed when people left religion because they thought religion was the source of this kind of toxicity.
It seems in their effort to ban people for wrong think, they banned the wrong group. They should have been banning the cancellers. "I don't engage on Twitter out of fear," is not a good sign for retention or growth numbers. Twitter seems to be killing itself by allowing this cancer to grow.
Have you ever been on a pretty great message board / forum and a bunch of spittle people join and makes the board suck to converse on? Eventually that board is nothing but spittle people, then the board dies. Twitters seems like it is going this way.
FWIW, I cancelled all my social media accounts after the Snowden revelations in 2013. I'm just an outside observer, but I'm certainly glad I'm not inside.
> it means I'm endorsing everything the author has ever said or ever will say.
> People in my demographic face significant exposure to "cancelling" or ambushing for wrongthink.
I totally get that this is the zeitgeist now (and I'm starting to behave this way now on HN since I don't really do other social media), but this is a horrible place we've worked ourselves into.
People taking pop shots and then getting algorithmically amplified has reduced the surface area for having safe dialogue and has led to increasing tensions and polarization.
In an ideal world, people talk about and discuss things they disagree about frequently and are at least respectful in dealing with those they don't see eye to eye with. We all have a different frame of reference, and that's not something to fight against.
I think the pandemic increased stresses for a lot of people (myself included), but these trends really took hold with algorithmic amplification. It isn't just a passing fad, sadly. And it isn't just rooted in just the technology. There are real needs and causes for social angst that need to be met.
Imagine if we also amplified inspiring and hopeful things. Nourished ourselves with stories of hope and overcoming difficulties. Science and technology, opportunity, a look to the future. (Especially for kids!) I know life isn't all sunshine and roses, but this would give us balance and perspective and wouldn't chip away at a person's inner drive and passion by replacing it with skepticism and dissatisfaction.
I think we can swing back. People are noticing this and feeling displeasure.
Good decision.
To win the social media game it is to not play it at all.
If these networks are here to stay we very clearly need to at least train people from a young age how to mentally handle social networks.
wtf - way to pick a political side in an article. So "normal, nice" people are people who never question the government, especially not if Democrats are in power?
These people were picking fights about the government transitioning their kids. Or rather, I guess from their perspective, the government picked the fight.