What I would have written | Hacker News Reader

What I would have written

dcurt.is

107 pointsbradgessler73 comments

'and every fucking thing I think about, I also think, “How could I fit that into a tweet that lots of people would favorite or retweet?”'

That, as I see it, is the problem – not twitter or 140char limits or any of the other stuff Dustin raises, it's the desire for external validation (and I can't help but imagine him furiously clicking reload on his own blog post to see how fast his Kudos score is climbing…)

My takeaway/advice is - try to recognise when you're being manipulated by gamification techniques and choose to be aware of them and ignore/resist them when it's in your better interest.

Does anybody _really_ think Picasso would have painted iPad trifles for immediate social media validation, instead of starting and completeing Garçon à la pipe? I _seriously_ doubt that - from Wikipedia: "At the time of his death many of his paintings were in his possession, as he had kept off the art market what he did not need to sell. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse, with whom he had exchanged works."

Picasso _didn't_ paint for the twitterati - he painted for Picasso. Dustin should write for Dustin - not for Twitter. He's allowing himself to become distracted from achieving what he wants at achieve. That's not Twitters fault. Procrastinators gonna procrastinate (he said hypocritically while wasting time on HN…)

Picasso also made quick napkin sketchings for passersby. So yeah, I could imagine him painting "triffles for immediate social media validation"... he probably would've enjoyed the exposure. But that didn't prevent him from undertaking more meaningful / involved endeavors too.

Did he, though? I always took that story as a fictional parable and not an account of something he ever habitually did.

These two appear to have a ring of truth but I've not investigated in depth, just a brief google:

- http://www.mypicassosighting.com/4.html

- http://toshidama.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/on-being-a-picture...

I liked what comedian Louis CK had to say on this subject recently:

http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-phone

My experience is that writing long, insightful pieces of prose is just hard, miserable work. People do it because they feel compelled to, not because it's a fun way to relax. So it's easy to procrastinate or avoid it, especially if there aren't any external demands or deadlines to meet.

I dunno, it's fun for me -- I find writing a long essay to be contemplative, meditative. It requires you to challenge your own thinking, which is both interesting and a little bit scary.

But I'm willing to believe I'm an outlier in this regard.

I dunno its fun. I find writn a long essay to be zen. It req you to challnge ur own thinkn, is both interestn and lil bit scary #ImAnOutlier

140 characters

>My experience is that writing long, insightful pieces of prose is just hard, miserable work. People do it because they feel compelled to, not because it's a fun way to relax. So it's easy to procrastinate or avoid it, especially if there aren't any external demands or deadlines to meet.

Is it a problem if they don't? There are now many, many insightful essays on the internet; one could spend a lifetime reading them and barely scratch the surface. If you were actually writing for the attention it gets you, rather than for the sake of the writing (and the comment about favourite or retweet makes me think that's his real motivation here), and then you find a more efficient way to get that validation, isn't that a good thing? The internet won't miss what you didn't write.

Very true and insightful. The OP writes as if it's a big loss for the world that he tweets instead of blogging, and that Twitter is to blame for this loss.

But

1/ it's not a big loss

2/ he's the only one to blame.

I believe generally if a medium exists to communicate with others creative people will try to maximize how they can succeed with that medium. The unfortunate part of this is Twitter is both very popular thus potentially a way to reach a ton of people and also the bare minimum for any reasonable communication. Doubly unfortunate is that the mainstream media already oversimplifies, so while I suspect many people wish to present an alternative to how the mainstream media communicates we don't yet have a pervasive technical tool well suited for that.

On external validation, I wondered about whether a social network or community with a karma system could fake that validation for each user to motivate content creation or positive sentiment?

e.g., if I actually got 5 upvotes on a HN comment, but HN showed it to me as 54, and then 78 and then 104 on subsequent comments, would I be more likely to contribute more? As a new user, would I be drawn in deeper?

It wouldn't work too well with public validation like Twitter, but it could for something like HN (and /. from memory) where the upvote count is now hidden.

The upvote count for OTHER people's comments in now hidden. you still always see them on your own comments. So it still does have public validation mechanism.

I think you can't see it on other people's comments because this forces you to up vote something only if YOU like it and not based on what other users think. Eg on FB, a lot of people "like" stuff just because it already has a lot of likes (the need to conform)

Yes, aware of all this. But how would that stop HN from misreporting to me the upvote count on my posts? The true value wouldn't necessarily be shown anywhere.

Tricky though, for someone who probably gets paid at least partially because of his social media validation, to not care about it....

There must be a group of people somewhere in the world that actually uses Twitter. I've never met any of them in real life, but occasionally I see things like this online that suggests that however far fetched the idea might be, it's nonetheless true.

Amazing that this author is so upset about what this random website has done to his life. I have no idea how he could have found enough value in it to have integrated it into his life so deeply. Nor can I understand why he would continue using it if it made him unhappy.

In short, seven years later, I still don't get what Twitter is for or why anybody would use it.

If you don't use it, it's probably hard to understand.

But most successful online services are attractive even without knowing much about them. Tweeter doesn't feel attractive at all.

The consequence is that after seven years Tweeter simply ignored by half of the IT population.

Exactly.

I know many people that use Facebook (including myself). It's a website that almost freaking everybody is on; it's used for sharing stuff from daily lives, instant messaging, organizing social events.

I have no idea what Twitter is for.

As a counter point, everyone I know is on Twitter and uses it actively, but very few are on Facebook.

In fact, we sat around a table earlier this year and were chatting about a piece of news that mentioned some exclusive content via Facebook, and realised that none of us had access. And that was fine by us, we don't really get what Facebook is for, and we just went back to talking and continued some of the conversations next day on Twitter.

>we don't really get what Facebook is for, and we just went back to talking and continued some of the conversations next day on Twitter //

I suspect this is just smack talk. Facebook does everything that twitter does and about a million other things too. You can tweet on Facebook, aggregate tweets, re-tweet (they call it share). Just that the eco-system around Twitter, like Twitpic and such, is integrated.

I'm the opposite of what you claim to be. I use Facebook but I can't understand Twitter. I've tried using it and have several accounts but beyond being a newsfeed like Facebook's walls I can't see the attraction (except of course that it happens that your social network use Twitter as opposed to some other medium).

Win me over?

I guess it comes down to: Is more more, or is less more?

Twitter just fits in comfortably with how myself and friends operate and if Facebook does that for you then fabulous - everyone gets what they want. No winning over necessary.

All right.

We probably meet completely different people.

Casual networking with people you would not want or dare to directly communicate with.

I was extremely surprised to hear on the radio yesterday that the Shebab (the group responsible for the mass killing and ostage situation in the kenyan mall) does its public communications through... Twitter, of all things.

A silicon valley webapp used by somalian terrorists. The modern, "connected" world is weird sometimes.

To answer your question, and although I don't use it myself, some of my friends tell me they use it a bit like IRC: when you want to discuss of a particular topic, instead of joining a particular channel you ask your question with a specific hashtag (hey, IRC channel names are hashtags after all!) and it starts a discussion. It's like a more fluid IRC where chatrooms are created, deleted, merge and fork all the time. It sound good in principle, but I like the open and distributed IRC more.

My main passion is Heavy Metal. As a consumer, I use Twitter to keep up to date with tours, releases, news by following bands and music media. I use it to interact with bands.

I also have a band which has a Twitter account which is used to keep people up to date as mentioned above, and I have a music blog twitter account which I use to review gigs etc...

I have a pretty good Metal Twitter list here if anyone is interested: https://twitter.com/ColinHugh/lists/metal-news

Would you say it's fair to describe your usage as akin to a feed aggregator?

Partly, but also for communicating. I haven't ever used a feed aggregatior so I'm not sure if there are any other differences...

I also use the trending topics on Twitter to follow the 'real' news. Can you do that in an aggregator, or do you need to have preselected the websites you want to hear from?

Twitter has changed a lot.

When I started out on it, I was a freelancer. It was a great way to chat about work and trivia to other people doing similar jobs, whether I had met them or not - a sort of online "water-cooler" I guess or a more visible IRC. In fact, I remember describing how to use it as "sign up, follow interesting people, talk to strangers".

But now it's much less about the conversations (I only really converse with the people I know in real-life, so it becomes a sort of public text-messaging). Instead, it's become a broadcast medium - communication is much more one-way and because of that, the number of retweets you get for your "pithy insight" becomes all the more important.

> I still don't get what Twitter is for or why anybody would use it.

Targeted ephemeral public communication and sharing.

Effectively, nothing else does this and keeps it concise. Brevity is the soul of wit.

Much like television, smoking, or facebook, it's pretty easy for me to look at these products, look at what the users get out of them, and make the conscious decision not to use them. That isn't to say it's easy to quit smoking, but it's been pretty easy for me to never start smoking because I know what sort of personality I have.

(When writing comments like these I always think of this article: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention... . Sorry if I've done that.)

"And yet I see no solution to this problem."

Dustin's problem is similar in some respects to an addiction (which he alludes to), so perhaps the solution is treating it as such; forcing moderation on himself, or even complete detachment (the cold turkey approach). Of course, being involved in technology means Dustin is essentially an alcoholic working at a brewery, so disengagement may be especially difficult. But to throw up your hands and claim there's no way out strikes me as a bit defeatist. If you feel a technology is negatively impacting your thought patterns, perhaps you could find a way to use that technology less.

>*"Dustin's problem is similar in some respects to an addiction (which he alludes to), so perhaps the solution is treating it as such;"

The issue I see with this is that it takes the way we use technology for granted. It's just like saying "that stuff is here to stay, learn to deal with it".

Which it is true in practice, but doesn't have to be true necessarily.

We could have opted as a society to not tolerate those kind of addictive (and mind-crushing) applications of technology, instead of celebrating them.

(The same way we have done with smoking, not just the banning in public places, but the whole attitude towards it).

While I agree that naive technological utopianism is worrisome and we need to be discussing the social/psychological impact of our inventions, I can't say I would draw an equivalence between Twitter and something like cigarettes... if used in moderation, I think services like Twitter can be very useful to some people. We do need to weigh the costs vs. the benefits, but just as blind acceptance is bad, so is blind rejection... having this discussion is a good start though.

Placing the emphasis on society, I believe, dilutes the great importance of the decisions of the individual. In life you should take responsibility for your own actions first. The question is more "Is twitter a social problem?" or "Is my twitter use a problem?".

>Placing the emphasis on society, I believe, dilutes the great importance of the decisions of the individual. In life you should take responsibility for your own actions first.

I guess that's also a difference between different country's philosophies.

For me, taking "responsibility for your own actions" is a bad advice when there's stuff that needs to change at the societal level. We wouldn't say that about an issue we deem important, like racism.

We understand there that it's not just what some person believes or not, but also certain general norms, distractions, laws etc that effect this, and we strive to change those.

What I say is that technological change should be seen with the same critical eyes, not just as a inevitable constant each one should put up with or shut up, but as in "do we, as a society want to progress in this or that way? What world would we rather live in?".

There's something very Chinese about banning social media with the ostensible goal of encouraging people to focus on their work.

(Also, where do you stop with your "addictive and mind crushing" barrier? Other forums, like HN? Video games? Fiction books? Theatre? "Thought-negating" music?)

I like the "where does it stop" part, but i withhold my upvote because of the chinese reference. Because I feel that's a bit racist (despite the great firewall of china). Besides, don't they have their own Facebook, google equivalents? So i think the idea isn't to stop people from using such services but to stop them from using such AMERICAN services (after the PRISM incident, it looks like they were the smart ones after all)

Dealing with addictions has little to do with leaving them, and everything to do with finding something better. Many addicts are addicts cause they are lacking something in life.

There was a time I played video games 12 or more hours a day for months. Now, I spend the same time reading papers and programming and helping people learn programming and hanging out with friends and so on. Trying to stop never worked; filling my life with something more meaningful made it easy.

I've stopped cooking for myself because TV dinners are so easy. But most TV dinners aren't great. But because they're so convenient, they have killed my desire to cook. And yet I see no solution to this problem."

Keep looking.

John Mayer speaking at Berklee College of Music had this to say on the subject:

> “The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”

http://www.berklee-blogs.com/2011/07/john-mayer-2011-clinic-...

> And yet I see no solution to this problem.

How hard can it be not to tweet?? I came here just to say this, and saw that many others had just said the same thing, and yet I felt the urge to say it again, myself! O, irony!

Seriously though, Twitter isn't like TV or smoking. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substance there is; TV isn't really addictive, in a medical/chemical sense, but it's so easy -- you sit on the couch and you get distracted by funny/mildly interesting things with sound and images.

But Twitter? You have to make a conscious decision to tweet, it's not a default like TV... Reading tweets is boring, writing tweets is work... How can it be difficult to not do it?

I guess I just don't get it.

Since when are TVs "a default"? I don't think I've watched TV in a big while, I don't even remember TVs being generally on around me.

Well, they appear to be. I don't have a TV myself, but in many homes when there's a TV, it seems to be on all the time. Sometimes people mute it to eat lunch or dinner, without even turning it off...

Hm, I see. That's not the case where I come from, so I'm wondering if it's a US thing.

I'd argue that if one has an active social circle on Twitter, the social aspect of it might be addictive.

"And yet I see no solution to this problem."

The solution is to not solely crave affirmation from others. Be comfortable with yourself, and try to live a life that enriches yourself, and those around you. If the parts of that that you share happen to enrich those you come in contact with, great ... but the internet-celebrity that Twitter and other social-platforms encourages (how many followers, how many retweets, how many favorites, how many likes, etc.) is fleeting at-best.

"And yet I see no solution to this problem. I will forever be a slave to 140-characters..."

I'm having a hard time sympathizing with this.

It's not Twitter that "instantly takes complex ideas out of my brain, over-simplifies them, and ships them off to random people." It's ME. Twitter is just a medium — the solution is to care about those complex thoughts enough to see them through.

Not to say that the instant gratification of tweeting does not exist, or is easy to fight — it's a struggle, and something to be mindful of. But the battle is already lost when, as this article does, you shift all the blame to the service instead of looking inward.

I just came here after reading this (highly relevant) ZenPencils of Marc Maron's "Social Media Generation".

Very impactful one-two punch seeing both of these back to back.

http://zenpencils.com/comic/129-marc-maron-the-social-media-...

I see a solution to the problem. Delete your twitter account, now. It's hard to sustain willpower indefinitely but easy to use it in a burst long enough to delete an account.

Twitter has a 30 day waiting period on account deletion to subvert this. What you need to do is set your password to something really obvious and disable two-factor.

Or randomise your password so you can't get into it.

I don't do twitter, but I have wondered what it would be to write or read a longer work composed within the limits of 140 character chunks - parceled out over time. It is not so much the size limitation on tweets as it is the disconnect between them that causes the dissolution of bigger ideas.

It's not exactly 140 character chunks spread out over time, but perhaps this comes close: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein's_Mistress

Check out http://twitter-fiction-reader.bugsplat.info. I've collected a few twitter-based fiction stories and arranged them in chronological order for easier reading. DadBoner in particular mostly reads like short paragraphs in daily diary entries.

Jennifer Egan did a New Yorker story called "Black Box"[1] that was intentionally composed as sub-140 character chunks. It was released on Twitter tweet-by-tweet and collected in a New Yorker science fiction special last year.

She is an impressive and experimental writer (check out her "Visit from the Goon Squad") who does a great job with this form. The thought-sized chunks give the story a lot of space and cleverly invites the reader to imagine a lot of context.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Box_(Jennifer_Egan_story)

Jennifer Egan's short story Black Box was written in 140-character chunks and published via both the New Yorker's twitter account and the print magazine. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/coming-s...

Trasnmedia writer Jay Bushman did a story via tweets called "The Good Captain", a sci fi take on a Melville story.

He rebroadcast it last year, but the original was in 2007 when Twitter was new and no one knew what it was going to be good for. So he experimented.

I followed it at the time and had the tweets sent to my phone as they came in. It was an interesting way to experience a story. Because it was spread out over time, I found myself keeping the context in my head as a low level background process.

There's probably a very interesting way or two to use that phenomenon.

https://twitter.com/goodcaptain

@samuelpepys is steadily posting the diary of Samuel Pepys - a famous diarist from the 17th century.

Woe is me...Twitter has stunted my creativity. Give me a break.

Post is too long, can someone please summarize? Ideally in <140 chars. Ta.

140 chars not enough for complex thoughts - emphasis on applause buttons over reasoned discussion. But, it's addictive - social validation.

I tend to agree with this. So much so that I made a more in-depth version of the same argument on my own blog earlier this year: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter/

I think the biggest contributor to the feelings Dustin is talking about is the way Twitter's design puts scorekeeping mechanisms front and center. Follower count is a scorekeeping mechanism -- if I have more followers than you, I'm "better" at Twitter than you are. Retweets are a scorekeeping mechanism -- if I get retweeted a lot, I'm better than you are. And so forth. Scorekeeping mechanisms are problematic because when you make them public, put them right up in the user's face, they turn the application into a video game. People see a connection between some actions and an increase in their "score," and that drives them to repeat the same behaviors.

Which is sort of what Dustin's getting at with the comparison to addiction, I think; Twitter is addictive in the same way that, say, Farmville is addictive. It's a Skinner box (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber) rather than a medium designed to facilitate discussion.

Is he seriously comparing himself with Picasso? I knew Mr Curtis thinks quite highly of himself, but this surprises me.

Just get off Twitter if you really feel this way, Mr. Curtis. It's not that hard.

Tweets provide a lot of efficiency. "Tweets aren't great because the compress otherwise complex ideas". A decent summary of your essay and tweet-able. Point made in 5 seconds of reading. Yes you don't get the full emersion but thats exactly why both mediums still exist. The tweet saves time and consequently gets a wider audience.

It often takes multiple restatements of an argument to get it to sink in, because different readers are affected differently by any given set of words.

It often takes an essay (or a book, or a series of books, or a body of literature) to fully map out the consequences of what initially seems simple.

It can be difficult to truly impress the emotional texture of a concept in 140 characters without relying on cheap appeals -- which obscure the actual concept.

Here's the tweetable problem with trying to convey deep concepts on twitter:

    Easy come, easy go.

One perfect idea, distilled to it's essence can be easy shared in less than 140 characters. No all idea's but some. It's just a matter of finding the right idea and taking the time to express it correctly.

Having said that, I'm really not a fan of twitter, but that's for completely different and unrelated reasons

My experience has not been the same. I've written complete blog posts based on Twitter and Facebook status updates.

Are we really still talking about 140 characters these days? Why can't we just let it go, let it be?

you'll get over the addiction to twitter, and retweets, and likes, and favorites...

you'll realize it's a game, a _stupid_ one, and you'll taper off, and then quit totally, or close enough that you'll feel human again.

before that, you'll ramp up, and ramp up again, chasing dragons, hoping to get the feeling back, -- "smoking more, but enjoying it less?" is how it was put in a classic advertising campaign -- but it won't work, and you'll get sick and tired of the whole thing, and walk away, with a mix of tremendous relief plus an overwhelming sadness.

but walk away you will, and recover you will, and you'll end up older, smarter, and wiser next time.

your first revelation -- i am telling you this so you'll recognize it -- is that addiction made you far too preoccupied with yourself, what you "would" have done, or "could" have, or "should" have, and you'll recognize first that you should just _do_, and second (and more importantly) that you need to pay some attention to the other people around you, who you love, and not dwell so much on yourself...

-bowerbird

This is spot-on.

I feel like I have emerged from a long dream, and now I'm walking around, waiting for everyone else to wake up.

"I sit on the couch watching whatever is on TV. It's not very entertaining but it's something to do, and after a while you get used to it. And yet I see no solution to this problem."

What are we, automatons? Farm animals?

This isn't rocket science, if you want to stop being a hack then stop being a hack. You have a brain, you have a developed intellect, if you have sufficient introspection to realize you're doing something you don't want to be doing then maybe try not doing that thing. I have a hard time believing that twitter is more addictive than alcohol or heroin or even television.

Nothing's forcing you to be a hack other than your own vanity. And there's nothing intrinsically superior to being addicted to seeking bite-sized chunks of personal validation through twitter than there is in seeking feelings of comfort, camaraderie, and friendship through television viewership. Yet if someone wrote about the perils of being a couch potato and the difficulty of stopping we'd just laugh at them and move on.

I think dcurtis should not be vilified for "seeking external validation". He is building up Internet capital, turning google juice into a brand. No one claims Warren Buffet is seeking external validation for building up his capital?

A while back I realised I was emailing myself ideas (for essays, just random interesting connections) with the hope I would one day go back and turn them into articles and put them up. guess what?

so I now have a wordpress app on my phone and I force myself to take an extra minute to turn a two sentence thought into a two paragraph idea. so I have actually published ideas - and I will pull actual longer, researched, articles from there.

what I think twitter does not provide, and is I think the next evolution of twitter use, is 140 characters as a pull-quote. You cannot fit a thought into 140 characters but you often can fit a headline.

someone notes on here that there are already a lifetime of insightful essays available - bit where are they? how do I find them and especially find them at the right time ?

Discovery as a search function is still in its infancy - I probably do want google to know what I am thinking so it can give me the essays that will most help expand those thoughts.

tl;dr

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