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Comment by isaacfrond | Hacker News Reader

I've admittedly only scanned the article. But apart from a lot of statistics, where is the headline question answered? Neither tyranny nor supertweeter occur anywhere in the article. Is this the tyranny of needing a clickbaity title otherwise no one will read it?

I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are journalist or a politician. And then concludes with the non-sequitor that it is not like real life after all.

I'm left a bit confused.

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I think the main takeaway is that twitter over represents people who tweet a lot, because those people are responsible for a larger percentage of the tweets. The author argues that this makes twitter more negative than real life, because negative tweeters post more tweets. They also point out that journalists and politicians, who consider twitter to be very important, are affected by the twitter atmosphere. For example, during the black lives matter protest the #DefundThePolice hashtag got a lot of circulation on twitter and reverberated with mainstream media and politicians. Despite it being a relatively fringe slogan, the way it's worded (taken literally, it sounds like abolishing the police altogether).

You could also say your attention span in real life overrepresents people who talk your ear off about Joe Biden at the checkout line or protest on the road. Maybe it's not really so different.

Protesting on the road takes time and effort.

Tweeting merely requires a toilet break at work.

Once I started viewing all online media as the equivalent of the graffiti on toilet stalls the world started making sense again.

Except that it doesn't, at least not on the same scale.

If people start talking all the time in real life people will first start ignoring them, and then isolate them.

The entire article is an extended definition of the headline term mixed with discussion of the implications of presentation bias. It's also quite concise. To the point that I almost can't believe this isn't trolling.

The article section "The Point"[0] seems to have your answer.

It is a giant echo chamber of very few, where the media buys in to the echo as "everyone" and reverberate outside of the chamber as the truth.

[0] https://omnibudsman.substack.com/i/73890656/the-point

I also take issue with the headline. "Tyranny" is when you have no choice. That is not the case with Twitter. First of all, there is the choice of using Twitter. Secondly, there is the choice of who to follow on Twitter. I would hazard a guess that "tyranny" is not a thing that most Twitter users experience on Twitter.

It's a common usage, not meant to be taken quite so literally. Try something that will autocomplete search for you and start with "the tyranny of..." and see what happens.

I get:

- The tyranny of structurelessness

- ... of merit

- ... of tears

- ... of the dark

- ... of metrics

- ... of weakness

and I'm sure they'd just keep going if it could display more entries at once. While typing, it brought up an article complaining about Millennial design aesthetics containing the phrase, "the tyranny of terrazzo".

It's like "goto considered harmful" but with a longer history, and way more popular—familiar to a much wider set of readers than "... considered harmful", that is.

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