There Is No Moral Argument for Staying on Twitter/X | Hacker News Reader

There Is No Moral Argument for Staying on Twitter/X

joanwestenberg.medium.com

27 pointsjhunter101626 comments

Good job! How does Farcaster/Mastodon solve any of the problems inherent to a global public square like Twitter?

Do you prefer the guarded sandbox run by the political elite du jour, or the chaos of equal opportunity shitposting?

RE: The ADL. AFAIK, they were pushing advertisers to "deplatform" Democrat party opponents, many of whom aren't anti-semites.

I mean god forbid we should tell people they're morally obliged to stay on the platform formerly known as Twitter, but what this post truly seems to be looking for is a moral argument to leave.

And well, that part is a bit weak. The main point seems to be that the bad people are staying. And while that is a good argument to leave, I'm not sure it is a moral one. The more moral arguments all boil down to idea that the platform is not conductive to healthy communication, which is a good point, but it's not as if that's a new thing.

The best argument I can come up with is that leaving is the ethical thing to do because it's better for your own mental health. Depending on what theory of ethics you subscribe though this is the ethical thing to do either because it hastens twitters decline (the utilitarian argument), or because one should act by those maxims they want to be universal (the categorical argument).

> Depending on what theory of ethics you subscribe though this is the ethical thing to do either because it hastens twitters decline (the utilitarian argument), or because one should act by those maxims they want to be universal (the categorical argument).

Or because you actually care about your own mental health. That should be a valid argument in any sane moral system.

Yeah that's fair, being kind to yourself is often somewhat forgotten, even if it is just as important as being kind to everyone else.

A lot of bold claims, that somehow float in the air without any proof.

Twitter has no effect on the real world. The only people who care about anything on Twitter are other Twitter users.

I've never understood why people convince themselves otherwise. Ask 100 people on the street if they have heard anything about [current twitter drama of the week], it will be 0 or close to it.

Every article by this writer is negative about how whatever they are writing about is bad. And I’m not sure there’s any solutions offered except for platitudes about things “ought to be”.

Twitter is fine. Use the “Following Tab” if you want to avoid the algo. I think some people are starting to find their ideas aren’t dominate and selected for like they were under previous management. Hence why we’ve seen backtracking in other spaces so quickly this week. The righteous mob doesn’t have their global safe space anymore.

> Use the “Following Tab” if you want to avoid the algo

This only works if all of the people you follow are also avoiding the algo; otherwise you will see its works in their retweets.

I can see that I guess. But I’ll say I think it has improved, at least for me, the last year. It felt very 1-sided and thought cleansed before. And now I see a far wider spectrum of opinion. You could argue this just tries to generate engagement through outrage or w/e but I think it’s healthy. A certain slice of the population probably got too comfortable seeing their side automatically promoted and their opposition silenced.

This is why I use Following but put Retweets in their own tab (which I rarely look at), all I get is what people I follow are actually saying. It makes Twitter "boring" - which is a good thing.

Twitter is Weird Internet. It’s insane that it is still taken seriously, though the mask is slipping. I think there’s a slow realization that the conversation is mostly crazy people with disordered lives yelling at each other.

Remember all the thought leader tropes circa 2014 when everyone kept fawning over social media? There is no wisdom of crowds after all.

I’ll also undermine my own point and express reticence here. I’d like to be more involved in the indie bootstrapping scene, but a lot happens on Twitter, which I hate.

One argument is musk published the algorithm and its history. I think transparency is the main next step in regulation of social media. Frances Haugen agrees that transparency is the important next step in the regulation of social media. I've been following her lead

Is there a moral argument for using any social media site?

I still like Twitter and I see no reason to change. At least with the current algorithm, I'm not seeing any of the questionable content people keep talking about. I actually see more low quality content being pushed to me on Youtube than on Twitter.

This must be a filter bubble thing. My perception of Twitter is similar in that I see far more of the open source content I want to see now than I did in the past.

Translation: "There is no moral argument for being addicted to this brand of digital alcohol. So why not take a different brand of alcohol and all the issues will go away."

The proper solution to the problems that the author is complaining about is to delete all of their social media accounts, everywhere rather than sign up to yet another one.

It’s just a website.

Twitter/X is better than ever.

Pretty much all social networks/newspapers are like this and reward controversy

How does Mastodon, the suggested alternative in TFA, reward controversy?

People post really extreme controversial things on social media, and those are the things that everyone comments about that draws all the attention on both sides. It's the nature of social media.

Mastodon is too impractical. It's like Matrix messenger. Who wants to roll their own server? Mastadon's like Truth Social and destined to be an echo chamber of people who believe in it's technical excellence or really don't like Elon, but average people or companies don't have Mastadon accounts and that isn't going to change anytime soon.

You don't have to "roll your own server" to use Mastodon, you can literally go to any instance's website and get an account and start using it.

But which instance should I choose?

I'm not being sarcastic. It's just really easy to use most other social networks. I go to twitter.com or facebook.com or whatsapp, and I make an account.

Mastadon is not user friendly. It's like which instance do I choose, does that instance align with my values, does that instance interconnect with all the servers I want to interconnect with, does that instance interconnect with servers that I don't want to interconnect with, will that instance be available in 20 years and I will lose all my connections if it doesn't?

My perception of signing up for mastadon is that it's a giant research project in how to sign up for mastadon that I don't have time for. I could be totally wrong and incorrect in my list of questions, but that's my perception and why I think it's unlikely that mastadon can achieve widespread adoption. If I can't easily figure out how I should sign up for it, what's going to be the catalyst for adoption?

Whichever you want. You can even pick more than one.

I don't know why you're overthinking things so much. Why are you worried about whether every instance and individual aligns with your values, or whether a server will be there in 20 years? How would Mastodon be a "giant research project for how to sign up to Mastodon?" What does that even mean?

If you don't want to join Mastodon, fair enough, but you (along with a lot of people on HN) seem to be falling over yourself making it out to be much more difficult than it is.

Almost everything in this post is wrong. That's quite impressive.

Human nature rewards controversy, so there is no getting away from it. The reward is attention, and whether that comes in the form of likes or shares or comments doesn’t matter.

As long as there is some way of determining attention, people will use controversy to get it.

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