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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

The error is thinking that Twitter is a place for discourse.

It's a place where you go see what celebrities (of any field, programming counts) are promoting and maybe follow a few interesting people who use Twitter as a medium for their writing for some reason.

It's not a place where you can change anyone's opinion and if you think that you'll have a bad time.

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I agree. And yet many people in positions of power look at twitter as a kind of real-time polling tool. They look at twitter reactions and think they know what people in general are feeling and doing. Then they make real decisions based on this false belief. And they do this because they are starved for information of this kind, and even though it's terrible, twitter is the only signal they have.

This desire to shape public discourse, and the decisions of the powerful, are the real stakes that drive twitter gladiators. You're right though, it's not discourse - it's "zealous advocacy" as interpreted by a peurile and distracted public.

Sure. That's not really my issue though. I got a few thousand followers, in batches, after random press coverage through the years, but never had much of anything I wanted to share. Trying to communicate anything, to build further following, was stressful, unfruitful and ultimately meaningless.

Exactly this.

Twitter is not all bad. This advice I concur is one of the useful utilities of Twitter.

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