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Comment by TheCapeGreek | Hacker News Reader

I like yishan's content and his climate focus, but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying - not directly for doing it or its content, but because I can see other thread writers picking this up and we end up the same as Youtube with sponsored sections of content that you can't ad block.

FWIW With YT you can block them with Sponsorblock, which works with user submitted timestamps of sponsored sections in videos. If this tweet technique takes off I'd imagine a similar idea for tweets.

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While many YouTube videos provide very interesting content most twitter „threads“ are just inane ramblings by some blue checkmark. So for yt videos I go the extra steps to install an extension. For twitter though? I just close the tab and never return.

How can people who are not totally dopamine deprived zombies find twitter and this terrible „thread“ format acceptable? Just write a coherent blog post pls.

Dopamine-deprived zombies?

I don’t find threads hard to read. There’s some extra scrolling, but it’s still in linear order.

People post on Twitter because it reaches people, obviously.

> but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying

I found this hilarious. I don't use Twitter and so was unaware that these annoying tangents are common on the platform. As a result, I thought Yishan was using them to illustrate how it's not necessarily the content (his climate initiative) but a specific pattern of behavior (saying the 'right' thing at the wrong time, in this case) that should be the target of moderation.

In real life we say: "it's not what you said, it's just the way you said it!" Perhaps the digital equivalent of that could be: "it's not what you said, it's just when you said it."

And it's funny because if you could "downvote/upvote" individual tweets in that tweet storm, his "off topic" tweets would be downvoted into oblivion.

I think the fundamental problem with the internet today is that by definition almost, ads are unwanted content and have to be forced on the user.

>, but this "we interrupt your tweet thread for sponsored content" style tangent is a bit annoying

It is annoying but it can be seen as part of his argument. How can spam be moderated if even trustworthy creators create spam?

According to him, it's not spam because it doesn't fulfill the typical patterns of spam, which shows that identifying noise does require knowledge of the language.

It could be interesting to turn his argument around. Instead of trying to remove all spam, a platform could offer the tools to handle all forms of spam and let its users come up with clever ways to use those tools.

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