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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

I would emphasize misinformed, not uninformed. If Policy X has 30% of people politely supportive, 20% of people politely opposed, and 50% of people incandescently furious about it, you're going to mistakenly think it has majority support.

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This is exactly the reason I used to be almost exclusively an r/all browser back when reddit was worth using. I didn't want a curated feed tailored to my beliefs. I wanted to know what was going on. Then in ~2015 free speech was killed, and it seemed like every new feature added was one that increased censorship. Like post locking wasn't a thing the petty tyrants could do. Now they lock posts and sticky their midwit opinion at the top of the thread, and ban whole communities with racist biases. So I strived to be less of a redditor and quit completely when they killed Apollo & third party apps. No use for the site anymore.

/rant

"free speech is kill"

"no"

I'm not sure there are many causes that have "50% of people incandescently furious about it", except maybe heavily diluted positions like "corruption = bad". Even just based on voter turnouts. If you see this kind of activity, it's most likely representative of the terminally online class and not actual people.

Well, your heavily diluted position is actually a great example. One of the running threads of the current administration has been that they do not think corruption is bad and routinely engage in open bribery. Tim Cook gave the president a gold bar on national TV!

But people who criticize this are almost invariably enraged about it. And so I’ve encountered otherwise informed people with this kind of attitude towards “rage politics” who either don’t know about the issue or assume it must be exaggerated because people are so mad about it.

What makes you think policy positions on Twitter are representative of anything at all..

People absorb politics from our social environment. We judge what's good and bad, what's controversial and uncontroversial, based on our models of the political discussions we've heard among peers and what we imagine they'd say. Every Twitter user I know comes to believe that the political dynamics on Twitter are a reasonable approximation of the political dynamics in the US, no matter how much they repeat the mantra that Twitter isn't real life, and this leads them to repeatedly overestimate how much people support crazy niche positions or care about esoteric issues.

I agree, it's amazing how many Twitter users get their sense of politics warped by the platform, and I think this is a big part of the reason why it's appropriate and important for those of us who realize this to loudly and vocally shun the platform. I've called out friends and acquaintances in person who still use it, and I'll continue to call it out online (for example, any HN post that is a link to Twitter).

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