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> You can call me oversensitive, but the truth is I got far better than any human being should be at absorbing astonishing cruelty and feeling nothing. > Well,

> You can call me oversensitive, but the truth is I got far better than any human being should be at absorbing astonishing cruelty and feeling nothing. > Well, here’s what my new life is like: I don’t wake up with a pit in my stomach every day, dreading what horrors accrued in my phone overnight. I don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys about whether poor people deserve medical care, or whether putting nice guys in the friend zone is a hate crime. > I’m better equipped to fight for global culture change now that I’m not locked in eternal whack-a-mole with a sea of angry boy-men, an unknown percentage of which are probably robots. It's amazing to me how a person can complain about toxic behavior and and then respond with their own belittling counterpunch. There are plenty of people who manage to be civil on Twitter despite all of the bile. If you choose to be caustic yourself, then you are just like the people you criticize, you're just doing it from a different political viewpoint (excepting the people who make actual threats of course, which is a different thing entirely).

specialp 9y ago
If you are going to post constantly about political and social issues, and be a NYT columnist about such issues, you are going to get counter points of varying quality. Some may be offensive. Twitter is a 2 way platform. Qualifying opposition viewpoints as bots, teenage boys, and angry man-boys doesn't help, and shows in a way that the writer is as hard headed as them. I am sure some of them are in that category, but Twitter bans people for outright threatening actions. I use Twitter to follow people that are in the software field or that I am otherwise interested in. I don't post non stop about social or political issues, and I don't follow anyone that does. I agree that it is a stressful and caustic environment, but you can't expect to be in it and not get the side effects. She can go back to speaking to sympathetic people and disconnect from real feedback. That is just going to put her in a silo. Facebook does that to people by only offering "likes", calling your followers your "friends" and presenting all news you like. Twitter is the real world albeit more caustic as people are pseudo-anonymous.

specialp 9y ago

If you are going to post constantly about political and social issues, and be a NYT columnist about such issues, you are going to get counter points of varying quality. Some may be offensive. Twitter is a 2 way platform. Qualifying opposition viewpoints as bots, teenage boys, and angry man-boys doesn't help, and shows in a way that the writer is as hard headed as them. I am sure some of them are in that category, but Twitter bans people for outright threatening actions. I use Twitter to follow people that are in the software field or that I am otherwise interested in. I don't post non stop about social or political issues, and I don't follow anyone that does. I agree that it is a stressful and caustic environment, but you can't expect to be in it and not get the side effects. She can go back to speaking to sympathetic people and disconnect from real feedback. That is just going to put her in a silo. Facebook does that to people by only offering "likes", calling your followers your "friends" and presenting all news you like. Twitter is the real world albeit more caustic as people are pseudo-anonymous.