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Comment by A_COMPUTER | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is an optimal conduit for narcissism, trolling, harassment, mobbing, astroturfing, demagoguery, and manufacturing consent. The medium shapes the discourse, and Twitter encourages and amplifies bad behavior while inhibiting intelligent and thoughtful conversation. Even if it didn't architecturally push you toward this behavior the scale alone enables every bad behavior you would expect if you scaled a single IRC channel up to a billion people. There is no way to "fix" this. It is its nature.

It is a technology that exists because it makes a few people a ton of money and gives regular people a dopamine tweak along with heaps of suffering. It is the online equivalent of a crackhouse.

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Based on my experiences with Twitter, this is totally correct, but you forgot one key part: echo chamber.

In addition to doing all that you describe, Twitter also encourages you to ignore anyone claiming otherwise - somebody has a difference of opinion? Block and unfollow!

I'm pretty anti-social-media in general, but Twitter is definitely among the worst.

Hacker News is as much, if not more, of an echo chamber as any Twitter newsfeed is. At least on Twitter you can choose your echo chamber, and if you desire, even fill it with opinions from diametrically opposite sides of an issue. You can simultaneously follow @GoldmanSachs and #OccupyWallStreet, for instance. You have no choice on Hacker News, except to subscribe to an echo chamber generated by some nebulous algorithm subject to in determinant cognitive trickery.

The reason Hacker News and Twitter enjoy such high engagement rates is precisely because they are echo chambers. Groups tend to share opinions and tastes, so naturally enjoy the same clusters of reading material. I enjoy the echo chamber at HN, because the opinions of the group that composes it are important to me. I haven't been able to hook myself on Twitter, but I imagine it's because I haven't found the right echo chamber yet.

Twitter and Facebook have been pretty effective for Yes campaigners in the Scottish Independence referendum. It's taken the No Thanks folks by surprise by how effectively it's being used.

Social media can be a force for good under certain circumstances.

I had the same impression.

Many people tell me they don't use Facebook because it's just for show-offs who want to populate their opinions.

And then their Twitter account is all about this.

There seem to be very few people who just use it to broadcast some informations about their projects and ask simple questions.

I wonder how it would have developed if they had not displayed the numbers of followers/following.

"Twitter encourages and amplifies bad behavior while inhibiting intelligent and thoughtful conversation."

Ok. So, how is Twitter unique here? How often do you read an intelligent and thoughtful article in your local newspaper? Doesn't your local cable news channel choose to focus on the 'bad' instead of the 'good'? Or are you living in some alternate universe?

The 140 character limit and general focus on brevity encourages people to drop specificity and shift to bold proclamations and absolutes.[1] This is guaranteed to cause miscommunication and hurt feelings. The resulting arguments are impossible to effectively reason out at 140 characters. And even if you do work it out in another medium (email, phone call, etc) - the re-tweeting spreads the old arguments like wildfire.

[1] When the concept "some people in Philadelphia suck" hits a character limit, what gets removed? Exactly. Now someone who's just had a bad experience with a particular person is shouting to the world "people in Philadelphia suck". And having said that, in that way, the larger scope is re-inforced into the writer's brain and tied to their ego and pride. Cue screamfest.

Except that "people in Philadelphia suck" isn't a shorter way of saying "some people in Philadelphia suck". It's an entirely different statement.

Why not shorten it to "some Philadelphians suck"? It's shorter and, arguably, more accurate.

>The 140 character limit and general focus on brevity encourages people to drop specificity and shift to bold proclamations and absolutes.

I disagree that the limit encourages vagueness, bold proclamations, and absolutes. Those are side effects of not stopping to think about how to effectively convey a greater-than-140-characters thought in less than 140 characters (without changing its meaning.)

> "It's an entirely different statement."

Which is the point. The character limit creates miscommunication because people wind up submitting something other than what they set out to communicate.

> "Those are side effects of not stopping to think about how to effectively convey a greater-than-140-characters thought in less than 140 characters (without changing its meaning.)"

So you're agreeing that Twitter, as a medium, presents a unique challenge to how most humans communicate in most other media and requires special consideration and effort?

That doesn't actually sound like a disagreement.

This is a really good point. An interesting psychology experiment could measure the susceptibility of subjects to stereotype threat after they read a given newsfeed. I hypothesize that because of the "priming" effects of each newsfeed, subjects who read the same set of tweets would score similarly on the stereotype test. This would be in like with the results of the famous John Bargh study where subjects subconsciously decreased their walking speed, for instance, after reading words related to the elderly.

It's a scary thought that the opinions of society can be clustered by similarity of Twitter newsfeeds. That sounds ripe for manipulation and propaganda dissemination.

Beyond good and evil, the problem is actually the noise.

The simple Follow/Unfollow button is not enough since Twitter got mainstream. You have to do a lot of manual maintenance to keep your stream relevant and interesting.

I would argue that you are correct, but I wouldn't limit it to Twitter. There are many crackhouses -- even hacker news can be one (though thankfully, our junkies remain civil and politely die in a corner where no one sees them). It is never as easy to be inhuman to someone as when hiding behind the veil of apparent anonymity.

Hacker News got big as well, judging by what's popular here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252323

I wonder what would result out of the opposite concept - enforce a minimum of characters per post. Of course, no longer being a quick release for vapidity, such a social network would be doomed to fail, but the outcome might be interesting nonetheless.

This bad behavior can be fixed. Take a look at http://sublevel.net

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