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I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential. They didn't affect me as I keep a low profile, but it

by malsun 11y ago

I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential. They didn't affect me as I keep a low profile, but it was like seeing an omen and noticing friends were buying into their hype. The way Twitter is now pandering to this lot with the recently announced Orwellian-style group, and other odd behaviour suggests that they approve of the current momentum. I'm just glad to no longer have its weight on my shoulders. Life is great without social media, but it must be difficult for public figures who stick with it for the free promotion.

braythwayt 11y ago
If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential. Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions. I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the other” is right or wrong or has it worse than the other, but just making the general observation that Twitter does have a problem, and it seems to provide a terrible experience for all sorts of people with all sorts of social views. We blame it on the people dogpiling, or brigading, or whatever, but that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that Twitter is doing a terrible job of providing an environment for anything except “Interacting with Brands” and sharing low-emotional-content memes.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I don't think Twitter is making things worse than they used to be. Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public. Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability. People being disrespectful or even stalkerish on a social network isn't good news, but it's a long way short of the very bad things that happen regularly offline. If anything Twitter's problem is more that it works well for promoting celebrity vapidity, but less well for providing a mass audience for the stories of ordinary people. You could argue there's not much interest in the latter, but then we're back to society having the problem, and Twitter being a medium for a certain expression of it. I think Quora does a much better job of dealing with real stories and relatively civil debate - but I'd guess it's much less popular than Twitter.
  - braythwayt 11y ago
    > Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public. Every tool, every medium, has some effect on its content. It makes something things easy, others difficult. It amplifies some channels, squelches others. It speeds some things up, slows others down. Society has all sorts of wonderful things and terrible things. But we humans choose which tools to build and which media to promote. We can observe this and criticize choices accordingly.
    - askafriend 11y ago
      So you would prefer to build tools to mask society's problems instead of uncovering them so that we can stare them in the face and have some type of discussion about them? (Just playing devil's advocate here)
      - braythwayt 11y ago
        That's not playing devil's advocate, it's constructing a false dichotomy. As a counter-example, are you saying that the best way to have a discussion about Young Earthers is to give them equal space in every geology textbook? I don't think you're saying that, and I don't think I'm saying that we as a society should mask our problems.
        askafriend 11y ago
        Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different. It's like saying, would you rather design SMS around masking Young Earther's ideas? In the 20s, you would have had these services designed around not conversating about alcohol. Is that right? Is it wrong? I don't know if it's for the communications platform to decide. However the communications platform can provide the user tools to control what/who they hear from so that they can make those decisions themselves.
        braythwayt 11y ago
        > Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different Twitter is a company. Its goals and the way it tries to achieve the are as subject to discussion and criticism as any other company. As for the rest of your comment, you keep talking about “masking” when I never used that word. I conclude that you have a preconceived idea of what I am saying, and are arguing with that. Since it isn’t what I’m saying, I have no obligation to defend it, or even explain why when you put words in my mouth, the difference between your words and my words are. When you begin an argument with “So what you’re saying, is...” I need go no further than to say “No." > However the communications platform can provide the user tools to... And now you are talking about how Twitter could change its offering to improve the lives of its users. Which is what I was talking about. Seems like a good place to break off.
- lhnz 11y ago
  A problem I've noticed is that offensive content seems to float to the top. Outside of Twitter I rarely see the kind of hatred I'm about to refer to. For example, the other day Trump RT'd a tweet by an account with a name like 'White Genocide'. I kid you not. Anybody that clicks this is going to find very unpleasant material about 'the end of the white race' including photos of blood-covered Swedish women, etc. Not very nice. Another day, people were tweeting a Business Insider article on GitHub which directed me towards a series of tweets by some employee ranting about how white people 'cannot be taught empathy' and therefore should not be allowed into positions of power. These are both very extreme political positions which ultimately revolve around hatred and dehumanisation. It's just not a good user experience for this kind of thing to constantly be spotlighted by either Twitter, the 'professionally offended', or the 'professionally offensive'. I'd love to be able to tick a box which just says something like "just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously. This level of hatred doesn't seem to appear on Facebook or on the front page of papers. I don't see why it should be such a big part of my Twitter experience. I believe in freedom of speech and I'm anti-censorship but in advance I'd like a setting which would help me to avoid having to consciously decide not to see this material.
  - blhack 11y ago
    >"just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously. How could twitter determine things that are going to make you lose faith in the human race?
    - lhnz 11y ago
      I am way less sure of how to do that and can only hazard a guess. Do not show me controversial accounts, tweets or tags not 'generally liked by the people one degree of separation away from me'? I'd experiment to see if that helped, but if it doesn't try more things.
  - ksk 11y ago
    Luckily, Twitter is a private company and does not have to offer a platform for anyone to say anything. They are free to limit speech as they see fit. That includes people from the so-called SJW community. Its not even PC vs non-PC, because that itself assumes there is an obvious 'correctness' in the language one must use. The whole "that's offensive/that's X-ist" crowd is annoying as hell.
- colllectorof 11y ago
  The notion of "professionally offended" implies making money off the whole thing. If you don't, than you're merely an amateur offended. Also, saying that Twitter has a problem is like saying that fires can cause property damage. Twitter is a problem. It's designed for propaganda, whether corporate or political. There is very little else to it that an RSS feed can't do. You cannot use it to run a community or have a real discussion. 140 character limit dumbs things down. Retweets encourage mob mentality and echo chambers. Embedded pictures server to spread stupid memes (think 21st century propaganda posters) and also as an ugly workaround for the character limit. You can't even link to stuff properly, because... uh, reasons. (URLs really shouldn't have counted towards message length.) If people thought things through, it wouldn't have taken off in the first place.
  - niccaluim 11y ago
    I prefer "recreationally fragile."
llamataboot 11y ago
By "professionally offended", I assume you mean mostly marginalized people who are the recipients of torrents of abuse/death threats/rape threats/sexual harrassment/etc nearly every day they are active on twitter.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lhnz 11y ago
  The "professionally offended" are actually a much smaller subset of the group of marginalised people - probably 0.1% at most, and many of them holding a lot of privilege. The "professionally offended" are by definition those that make money from others' marginalisation. They benefit from prolonging inequality and maximising the emotional pain of others by spreading grievances as far and wide as possible. They do this as leverage for personal financial gain. The average "marginalised" person doesn't deserve to be tarnished with the same brush. It's extremely bad of you to attempt to use them as a shield.
- nine_k 11y ago
  Three letters: SJW.
- ryanlol 11y ago
  There's a plenty of people turning being offended into a business, see: https://www.patreon.com/zoe https://www.patreon.com/zoe https://www.patreon.com/freebsdgirl https://www.patreon.com/freebsdgirl
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- pyre 11y ago
  Communities of marginalized people also contain toxic people, unless you want to believe that by "virtue" of being marginalized we can assume a lack of toxicity.
reitoei 11y ago
Nuked my 8 year old buckets 'o karma reddit account last week, felt brilliant.
monksy 11y ago
Something that I've seen is that Twitter claims to be interested in cracking down on people who harass.. But when people come and bully in the name of "social progress" .. they tend to look the other way. I've reported a tweet or two that attacked the reputation of an individual and was told "it's been reviewed but we deem it ok."
- eli 11y ago
  I think literally no one is happy with the level of involvement twitter has in preventing bullying. I don't think it has anything to do with what side of a debate you're on.
mschuster91 11y ago
> I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential. Unfortunately, it's not only Twitter where radfems and other (insert favorite swear word here) grab a stranglehold on public conversations. It's mass media too.

by malsun 11y ago

braythwayt 11y ago

If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential. Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions. I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the other” is right or wrong or has it worse than the other, but just making the general observation that Twitter does have a problem, and it seems to provide a terrible experience for all sorts of people with all sorts of social views. We blame it on the people dogpiling, or brigading, or whatever, but that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that Twitter is doing a terrible job of providing an environment for anything except “Interacting with Brands” and sharing low-emotional-content memes.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I don't think Twitter is making things worse than they used to be. Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public. Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability. People being disrespectful or even stalkerish on a social network isn't good news, but it's a long way short of the very bad things that happen regularly offline. If anything Twitter's problem is more that it works well for promoting celebrity vapidity, but less well for providing a mass audience for the stories of ordinary people. You could argue there's not much interest in the latter, but then we're back to society having the problem, and Twitter being a medium for a certain expression of it. I think Quora does a much better job of dealing with real stories and relatively civil debate - but I'd guess it's much less popular than Twitter.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  > Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public. Every tool, every medium, has some effect on its content. It makes something things easy, others difficult. It amplifies some channels, squelches others. It speeds some things up, slows others down. Society has all sorts of wonderful things and terrible things. But we humans choose which tools to build and which media to promote. We can observe this and criticize choices accordingly.
  - askafriend 11y ago
    So you would prefer to build tools to mask society's problems instead of uncovering them so that we can stare them in the face and have some type of discussion about them? (Just playing devil's advocate here)
    - braythwayt 11y ago
      That's not playing devil's advocate, it's constructing a false dichotomy. As a counter-example, are you saying that the best way to have a discussion about Young Earthers is to give them equal space in every geology textbook? I don't think you're saying that, and I don't think I'm saying that we as a society should mask our problems.
      - askafriend 11y ago
        Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different. It's like saying, would you rather design SMS around masking Young Earther's ideas? In the 20s, you would have had these services designed around not conversating about alcohol. Is that right? Is it wrong? I don't know if it's for the communications platform to decide. However the communications platform can provide the user tools to control what/who they hear from so that they can make those decisions themselves.
        braythwayt 11y ago
        > Twitter isn't a textbook though. It's goals as a communications platform are completely different Twitter is a company. Its goals and the way it tries to achieve the are as subject to discussion and criticism as any other company. As for the rest of your comment, you keep talking about “masking” when I never used that word. I conclude that you have a preconceived idea of what I am saying, and are arguing with that. Since it isn’t what I’m saying, I have no obligation to defend it, or even explain why when you put words in my mouth, the difference between your words and my words are. When you begin an argument with “So what you’re saying, is...” I need go no further than to say “No." > However the communications platform can provide the user tools to... And now you are talking about how Twitter could change its offering to improve the lives of its users. Which is what I was talking about. Seems like a good place to break off.
lhnz 11y ago
A problem I've noticed is that offensive content seems to float to the top. Outside of Twitter I rarely see the kind of hatred I'm about to refer to. For example, the other day Trump RT'd a tweet by an account with a name like 'White Genocide'. I kid you not. Anybody that clicks this is going to find very unpleasant material about 'the end of the white race' including photos of blood-covered Swedish women, etc. Not very nice. Another day, people were tweeting a Business Insider article on GitHub which directed me towards a series of tweets by some employee ranting about how white people 'cannot be taught empathy' and therefore should not be allowed into positions of power. These are both very extreme political positions which ultimately revolve around hatred and dehumanisation. It's just not a good user experience for this kind of thing to constantly be spotlighted by either Twitter, the 'professionally offended', or the 'professionally offensive'. I'd love to be able to tick a box which just says something like "just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously. This level of hatred doesn't seem to appear on Facebook or on the front page of papers. I don't see why it should be such a big part of my Twitter experience. I believe in freedom of speech and I'm anti-censorship but in advance I'd like a setting which would help me to avoid having to consciously decide not to see this material.
- blhack 11y ago
  >"just don't show me things that are going to cause me to lose hope in the human race". Seriously. How could twitter determine things that are going to make you lose faith in the human race?
  - lhnz 11y ago
    I am way less sure of how to do that and can only hazard a guess. Do not show me controversial accounts, tweets or tags not 'generally liked by the people one degree of separation away from me'? I'd experiment to see if that helped, but if it doesn't try more things.
- ksk 11y ago
  Luckily, Twitter is a private company and does not have to offer a platform for anyone to say anything. They are free to limit speech as they see fit. That includes people from the so-called SJW community. Its not even PC vs non-PC, because that itself assumes there is an obvious 'correctness' in the language one must use. The whole "that's offensive/that's X-ist" crowd is annoying as hell.
colllectorof 11y ago
The notion of "professionally offended" implies making money off the whole thing. If you don't, than you're merely an amateur offended. Also, saying that Twitter has a problem is like saying that fires can cause property damage. Twitter is a problem. It's designed for propaganda, whether corporate or political. There is very little else to it that an RSS feed can't do. You cannot use it to run a community or have a real discussion. 140 character limit dumbs things down. Retweets encourage mob mentality and echo chambers. Embedded pictures server to spread stupid memes (think 21st century propaganda posters) and also as an ugly workaround for the character limit. You can't even link to stuff properly, because... uh, reasons. (URLs really shouldn't have counted towards message length.) If people thought things through, it wouldn't have taken off in the first place.
- niccaluim 11y ago
  I prefer "recreationally fragile."

llamataboot 11y ago

By "professionally offended", I assume you mean mostly marginalized people who are the recipients of torrents of abuse/death threats/rape threats/sexual harrassment/etc nearly every day they are active on twitter.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lhnz 11y ago
The "professionally offended" are actually a much smaller subset of the group of marginalised people - probably 0.1% at most, and many of them holding a lot of privilege. The "professionally offended" are by definition those that make money from others' marginalisation. They benefit from prolonging inequality and maximising the emotional pain of others by spreading grievances as far and wide as possible. They do this as leverage for personal financial gain. The average "marginalised" person doesn't deserve to be tarnished with the same brush. It's extremely bad of you to attempt to use them as a shield.
nine_k 11y ago
Three letters: SJW.
ryanlol 11y ago
There's a plenty of people turning being offended into a business, see: https://www.patreon.com/zoe https://www.patreon.com/zoe https://www.patreon.com/freebsdgirl https://www.patreon.com/freebsdgirl
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
pyre 11y ago
Communities of marginalized people also contain toxic people, unless you want to believe that by "virtue" of being marginalized we can assume a lack of toxicity.

reitoei 11y ago

Nuked my 8 year old buckets 'o karma reddit account last week, felt brilliant.

monksy 11y ago

Something that I've seen is that Twitter claims to be interested in cracking down on people who harass.. But when people come and bully in the name of "social progress" .. they tend to look the other way. I've reported a tweet or two that attacked the reputation of an individual and was told "it's been reviewed but we deem it ok."

eli 11y ago
I think literally no one is happy with the level of involvement twitter has in preventing bullying. I don't think it has anything to do with what side of a debate you're on.

mschuster91 11y ago

> I left Twitter last year when it looked like the 'professionally offended' were becoming too influential. Unfortunately, it's not only Twitter where radfems and other (insert favorite swear word here) grab a stranglehold on public conversations. It's mass media too.