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Comment by Version467 | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, I’m usually not one for drama, but I really want this deal to go through. I don’t use twitter and as such don’t really care if it implodes, but from what I’ve heard twitter has been a cesspool of negativity for a while now and on a slow but steady downtrend in general.

I’m sure Musk will try anything to recoup his investment, so it’ll either go out with a bang, or he somehow manages to pull a rabbit out of his hat and actually turn twitter around. Though I don’t think that’s very likely.

Either way it’ll be a fun pastime to follow the unfolding of it.

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Stock up on the popcorn because once he lets the nutters loose on twitter to say anything and everything they want without limit other than a direct personal threat to someone or directly advocating terrorist actions, it's gonna be a real shit hole. That is if he wants to watch his $44 billion go up in smoke, no sane person will stay there amongst the nuts and Q's

> other than a direct personal threat to someon

twitter limiting direct personal threats would be a welcome change.

It's already a woke echo chamber. Anything he can do to change that will make it less of a shithole.

I'm sure this kind of thing feels emotionally satisfying to say, but if you think about it for a moment, it doesn't make any sense. It's like saying that RSS is a shit hole, that no one will want to use a feed reader "amongst the nuts and Q's".

One is an open protocol, the other a closed ecosystem.

So that example doesn't really hold up.

This comment honestly reads like you reached for the first difference between twitter and RSS you could think of. "No comparison to be made." Really? A lot of people use twitter and RSS for the same purpose, but there's "no comparison to be made"?

The value of your RSS feed comes from the websites you have the feeds from. The value of twitter comes from the tweets on twitter. The more terrible tweets and tweeters, either terrible in their quality or terrible in their offensiveness to the reader, the lower the value. The more terrible tweeters, the more they will inject themselves in to the dialogues that were previously considered non terrible by the reader. At a low enough value, when people are wading through the racist crackpot right wing sludge, they will stop using it.

You're forgetting the value of following people you like on Twitter. As such, you are browsing your own curated feed, without the need to see much sludge. BTW sludge and toxicity can be found in quantities across the political spectrum, in case you're implying otherwise.

People want to control what other people are being exposed to. They don't care that it's entirely opt-in who you follow.

They say the only want to ban Q, Alex Jones, and conspiracy types but then you look at sites like Reddit who have adopted this moderation heavy approach and it's slowly becoming one giant mono-culture where the set of bannable wrongthink only ever grows larger. It's highly selectively enforced and usually does little to stop people from actually having opinions they don't like.

It's based on an ideology that treats people like sheep who can be fooled by selectively showing them information and guide them towards holding the same opinions as they do. And they want unaccountable tech companies to be the ones with this power.

>It's based on an ideology that treats people like sheep who can be fooled by selectively showing them information and guide them towards holding the same opinions as they do.

Well, marketing empirically proves this to be true...

What happens is that the nutters follow and reply to popular threads (see epidemiology Twitter during the pandemic, for example). If there are more of them, Twitter loses value.

Twitter has started to let you control who can reply, but that removes some serendipity, so if everyone worth following does that, Twitter loses value.

I didn't think this really needed explaining, but here goes anyway.

As a user in a closed ecosystem like Twitter, you have no control over what content will be served to you (the same goes for any filtering tools said ecosystem offers it's users). The state of a closed ecosystem today, does not guarantee that there won't be future state changes (and users have no control over those).

With a protocol like RSS you have full control over the content being served up to you. If a source you previously agreed with and enjoyed, starts souring for you then it is as simple as unsubscribing. It will not be pushed on you.

So as said before, the example doesn't really hold.

What concretely is your concern here?

Twitter might some day remove the block button? They might some day push certain people on you, without recourse? Therefore, they have to ban these people now?

There is no concern here, as I do not use Twitter.

Rather it was an attempt at an simple example to explain to you the differences in control that a user of an open protocol has, versus the control a user in a closed ecosystem like Twitter has.

Think it didn't land.

But with RSS, I only see stuff from the people I subscribe to. There can be a billion of nut jobs and one reasonable person in the whole world of RSS, but if I only subscribe to the reasonable person's feed, all the other stuff doesn't affect me at all. With Twitter, I see random stuff suggested by the algorithm and I see comments in tweets from the people I follow. I also see quote tweets and replies made by the people I follow.

Millions of nutters are already loose on there.

This is about not wanting the "other nutters" on there along with "our nutters". Which will make things worse in some ways, so keeping it confined to one set of nutters is not without its merit.

The difference is violence advocating nutters. It’s a whole nother ball game.

Twitter is already home to violence-advocating nutters. If you don't realize this, you are deep in a (dis)information bubble.

Original nutters?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzbdBk6XQ6Y

I like Twitter for all it's spaceflight related stuff from NASA and ESA, DLR and others, where live streams can only occur in form of text and photo updates. I couldn't think of a replacement platform for this use case. Or current news events for which the press is to slow to publish, or where they quote Twitter as the source, like today's "Fuck you" message, which is something which might make it into some history books. Sometimes some IT related posts are interesting, from people who are at the source or generally have a very good understanding of the topic.

I never scroll my "feed" or whatever they call it.

It'd be nice if we all went back to RSS readers, methinks.

I would posit that 98% of the public didn't use RSS tho, and I think that's a conservative number.

If you count podcasts it would be a lot less than that. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine under the right conditions a (micro)blogging equivalent of Apple Podcasts could take off.

You mean Tiktok / Youtube shorts?

Maybe get some first hand information on something before wishing to blow it up because someone told you it's bad? Never understood people taking joy and having fun watching others work get ripped apart.

Huh? Just because I don't use twitter doesn't mean that it's a foreign website to me. It's basically impossible to completely avoid interacting with it. Tweets are embedded everywhere, twitter threads get screenshotted and shared on reddit or in youtube videos and every now and again there's an interesting submission on hn that links directly to twitter.

I really don't need to use it regularly to know that it's filled with endless "hot takes" designed to aggravate instead of inviting meaningful discussion. The way twitter works actively promotes negativity, which is precisely why I don't use it. Also, I didn't never use it, I left the platform because of the above mentioned reasons.

I'm aware that twitter provides plenty of value for plenty of people and that it is very possible to curate your twitter experience in a way that avoids most of the negativity. But if twitter blows up there will be alternatives where the same people can derive the same value from.

And in the meantime I will absolutely enjoy a billionaire megalomaniac getting fleeced because he couldn't control is impulses.

I mean, if you just browse website picking out hot-takes and negativity from twitter, maybe it's not twitter that is the drain, but the websites that you visit that amplify those people.

I use twitter a lot to stay up to date on tech and follower developers. Your feed is what you make it, and if you curate it to only follow decent people you don't have to read all of the arguments and politics that happen on other parts of the site.

Society has been worse off since it got popular, it's a sewer spewing garbage at us in small chunks. I for one wish it implodes and cannot wait for that day. I don't care who built it, who owns it or how much it is worth on paper. It needs to go. And tiktok too, its the twitter for video. Cannot understand how any rational person can defend either one. Probably because attention span got destroyed so cannot remember life without it.

Everyone moans about centralization and screams "The internet is dead / the internet is 5 companies".... well if it implodes, maybe people will start writing proper blogs/arguments/documentation again and not try to make everything digestible in 15 seconds by the dumbest persons.

I wish that twitter will ban all politics/politicians off of it and push science topics instead. Ever since politicians hopped onto twitter, it's been a nightmare to be exposed to their thinking patterns and lies.

I don't/won' get joy from these platforms disappearing...it would be relief.

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