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Comment by redwood | Hacker News Reader

In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper

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I read this kind of comment all the time on HN, it’s so confusing to me. I only joined twitter 2 years ago because there are a large number of high quality tweet threads on finance, ML, NLP, breaking news etc. A lot of the time I get information earlier on twitter than I do on any other platform. If anything, for me, twitter has strengthened the quality of public discourse.

If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform.

I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem?

If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.

If you don't mind me asking, which accounts are you following for your financial news? Thanks!

Too many, you can start with:

- https://twitter.com/saxomarketcall and their podcast

- https://twitter.com/macroalf

- https://twitter.com/unusual_whales

Then you’ll see their retweets and likes in your feed and thats how you can build a good list.

I would stay away from anyone whose primary focus is crypto, biotech or tech stocks unless you are a critical reader.

I don’t think that’s true. Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium where experts had a voice. During the pandemic doctors and infectious diseases experts were using it to call or government blow hards. Now that’s going to die as well and we may return to complete darkness.

I saw the opposite. "Experts" being totally wrong and fear mongering without evidence. It was rural governments that said "prove it".

Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.

Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.

I see Twitter as possibly working up to the ideal of "crowd sourcing" the truth. If Musk does what he seems to be saying he will do -- and take the training wheels off the moderation, and get the government out of it -- we might be left with a system that really can sort out the truth from fiction. Or, at least, present both sides, and let people decide for themselves, without hiding one side.

I'm sure it will be just as successful as the voat platform was.

Absolutely based. There are more morale virtues than just “prevent harm”.

What you’re witnessing on HN and elsewhere is politics masquerading as objective and ostensibly, a thoughtful discourse.

None of the articles on HN have much of good faith discussion. I just see it as “progressives are pissed because their platform of power is being seized”. A lot of that relied on platform censorship on places like Twitter.

Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked. That doesn’t sit well with progressives.

This isn't some conspiracy theory, we have the current Biden Administration working with Big Tech to censor speech. "Public health" is just a trope under far more insiduous political agenda for power: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

> Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked. That doesn’t sit well with progressives.

And the WH deleted some of those tweets after being fact checked.

White House Deletes Misleading Tweet Giving Biden Credit For Social Security Check Raise:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/11/02/whit...

Isn't White House supposed to keep records? They are not supposed to delete stuff.

The white house press releases have been a total disaster. I thought we had it bad in the previous admin. Lies after lies told to American public. Much of this stuff goes unchallenged on all social media.

If you believe "influenza was new in the 1920's", you have bigger things to worry about than this discussion. I suggest going to check on the paperwork for that bridge you bought.

Maybe we have different definitions for “expert”?

I’ve been following epidemiology experts and no one implied “everyone dying”, nor recommended “24/7” mask wearing (rather cited lowered transmission rates) and yes isolation lowered transmission rates too.

The flak they had to take for inconveniencing the lifestyle of people in the interest of prioritizing health outcomes for all, is insane.

If anything, we learned that the thought of care for others at a small cost to the self is extremely triggering for many Americans and is easily politicized as a wedge issue to influence voting.

Agreed , the experts showed us that a minor lifestyle change can significantly reduce covid transmission. Instead we as a country did all the wrong things and blamed experts when government officials failed by instituting random non evidence based policies

Complete darkness? O no, not the dark ages before 2006, when we had walk uphill to school and uphill to go back home. Or I could try to more direct and say: that's utter crap.

> Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium

And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable and informative news outlets went under.

There were still some newspapers left in 2006. By 2022 they are all basically dead.

Also standards of journalism integrity were bad then but they are abysmal now. Very few journalists actually investigate stories, most just re print press release.

That's just blatantly wrong. There is still great journalism out there and the depth and breath of quality news is now reaching farther than ever before.

But of course you are right: who could have foreseen how much bad news people want to read and how little they want to pay for quality news. Why do people watch Fox or read Murdock media rags?

FB would still be #1 for me on this scale.

The panopticon they’ve build is bigger and wider (sharing data between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don’t know what would be the “Cambridge Analytica of Twitter” but time will tell.

Twitter’s catching up though.

Really?

On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political leaders, and billionaires?

You’re missing the point of their comment. If the medium is the problematic thing being focused on in their comment then who the communicating parties are is not significant.

Checkout Postman and McLuhan.

A lot of people reading this aren't going to understand what you mean by "checkout Postman". I'm guessing you mean "read Neil Postman's books"? If so, I agree - especially Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Technopoly too, for an easy to digest mash-up of McLuhan and Ellul.

that's literally the very mechanism that weakens public discourse because it turns discourse into a 280 word soundbite popularity contest.

Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.

Any idea of significance has subtlety and complexity, both of which are anathema to Twitter.

Rage, on the other hand, can be perfectly encapsulated in a few characters.

Twitter has destroyed public discourse. It has turned conversations into contents to be as short and as edgy as possible.

I’m sorry you don’t see that.

Hey, that sounds like the mainstream press!

Do you even use Twitter?

You can find a lot of very deep, long-form content. I'd recommend following Samo Burja or Doomberg for example.

Is that really Twitter's fault? Please go through this thread right here and see how many of the comments would fit in a tweet. Many of them also match (or exceed) the Twitter standard for lack of basic humanity. The appetite was there. If Twitter hadn't provided the outlet, some essentially identical alternative would have. It's quite likely that some other will do the same after Musk finishes driving Twitter into the ground.

The platform isn't the problem. The people using whatever platform they can find to spread an anti-democratic anti-intellectual anti-humanitarian message are. I'm sorry you don't want to see that.

153 characters, in response to a message 152 characters in length. Did these shorter-than-twitter lengths destroy this discourse?

in the vast majority of cases it's going to be their PR team, not them

Why is it important to directly communicate with or even "listen to unfiltered" the world's dictators and billionaires? As for communicating directly with politicians it's very unlikely that the vast majority of them manage their own social media accounts. You probably have the same level of direct communication as you do sending their office a letter or an email.

Nonsense. This a big beef with me about Twitter. It purports to be an egalitarian platform where you can "directly communicate" with significant people, but the sheer volume and signal-to-noise ratio of popular accounts means that they will never even see your comment, let alone reply, except in extraordinarily rare examples.

I checked out Twitter again after a few months absence. There is good content, for sure, but by crikey, most of what passes for political discourse amounts to a stream of non sequiturs and ipse dixit (assertion without proof).

In Brazil it’s WhatsApp.

That’s just to say everyone is in a bubble and people are the problem.

Gonna be weird when journalists have to start digging up stories rather than just reposting tweets.

Have you not noticed tiktok? People are being trained to have the attention span of a gnat.

Sorry can you repeat that with some 80s music played 20% faster and pitched up a few semitones in the background.

Reddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact.

> Reddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact.

I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of their friends, but you better believe they and all their Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of the other social media.

I think Reddit is more centralized in its younger age range than the other popular social media sites.

I personally feel like the lows of Reddit are just as low as Twitter, but the highs are much higher.

I'll go out on a limb and say it's not entirely the specific medium's fault. It's the people.

It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have seen families torn apart because of this.

I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile at strangers.

Out of all the most heart breaking things that the internet you choose this example? Agenda much?

I deleted that because it colored what I said enough for you to miss my message. I have no agenda, but I think your comment proves my point that there's something off about how we're communicating right now.

Fair but I didn't miss what you wrote, you choose to explicitly choose an example that would get eyes rolling. Which, if I read your comment correctly, you accept the responsibility with "there's something off about how we're communicating right now".

Inflammatory language get's more reaction - well documented and your probably aware of that.

I seriously was not attempting to be inflammatory or get a reaction. I was just expressing how I felt.

During the initial COVID outbreak, it was one of the only decent information sources I could find.

Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety of professionals across different disciplines and regions to parse together some useful info.

You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being misinformed in some way.

I couldn't agree more. An entire series of anti-social tactics have been exclusively invented on the Twitter network, and then normalized.

Twitter is the most interesting on the internet, by far. If the discourse quality sucks, you're following the wrong accounts.

All the nobody asinine replies are noisy. It can definitely do better.

Isn't that the point of the subscription? People that don't pay will be buried and you won't see them.

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