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I have a different perspective: Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. "Controversy" is just another name for clashes of opini
by md224 9y ago
I have a different perspective: Twitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. "Controversy" is just another name for clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind and will likely continue to occur until the extinction of our species. These clashes occur within discursive spaces, and Twitter is one such space.
This is why I'm bullish on Twitter. It's a space for conversation, and people want to converse. (Also, it occupies a unique middle ground between message boards and real-time chat.) The other two spaces I can think of are Reddit and Facebook, and there's enough differentiation to allow all 3 platforms to peacefully co-exist.
- jmfayard 9y agoThe parent comment was not about Twitter Reddit Facebook coexisting or not peacefully, but about the logic of all of them competing against our public health. IMHO we should regulate the hell out of them each time a significant harm on society can be proved, like we did for any other things that humans ever invented. But tech evangelists will say that time is different because 0 and 1 are being exchanged
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nerfhammer 9y agoregulating speech is a practically and legally thorny issue not just because tech bros are dumb and lazy
- iamdave 9y agoI'm not immediately seeing the connection between legal arguments of curtailing speech and "tech bros" and their intellect or work ethic. Can you clarify what you mean?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- malvosenior 9y agoTech evangelists will say that not because "it's different" but because we never agreed with regulation so we've built tools and platforms that embrace free speech. That's the entire point of something like Twitter. Or at least it used to be until the politics of the employees shifted to be more mainstream. The end-goal for a lot of us is a fully decentralized internet that is technologically impossible to regulate.
- jmfayard 9y agoFully decentralized internet lol. The internet economy is much more centralized that the old world ever was There is no problem at all identifying the big players that have too much power
- malvosenior 9y agoThere's more to tech than companies, examples: Linux: open, distributed development, massive success Bittorrent: p2p, massive success Bitcoin: fully distributed, massive success (pending) There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.
- jmfayard 9y agoLook, everywhere there is power, there is abuse of power, it does not matter what source of power it comes from. The only thing that helps is having another power that checks it.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoCentralization isn't bad; often, it's welcome, as by its nature it's more efficient. Bitcoin is a good example of how not to do tech. Beyond that, you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized. The reality is, governments and markets are two sides of the same coin. They both strive centralize control.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoTwitter is a digital Public Sphere, and Public Spheres are always noisy. When in human history have public spheres like Twitter existed? The public sphere up until about 50 years ago for most people was strictly local. You could not broadcast dumb narcissistic ignorance for free to millions of people. It wasn't possible. Twitter is not good at what it does. It does not elevate public discourse. It's the equivalent of all the newsteams beating the hell out of each other at the end of Anchorman 2. If you're bullish about Twitter, maybe we should be bearish about our chances as societies and as a species, because Twitter is full of examples of some or our worst behaviors. It's no surprise Trump loves it. Just as an example, check out this tweet and its thread: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/961253168968622086 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/96125316896862208... It's 32,000 tweets of people shouting at each other.
- the-dude 9y agoThe tweet is in fact excellent, and the phenomenon predates Trump : stock markets will go down on good macro news in fear of interest rate hikes. This has been going on for at least 5 yrs, if not 10. This fact has nothing to do with Trump.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoWas meaning to link to this one: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/961270833569202176 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/96127083356920217... I figured the tens of thousands of tweets of people saying hateful things to each other was evidence enough. That thread will do, too.
- the-dude 9y agoTouche, and I did not mean to deny your evidence of thousands of hateful tweets. I was just pointing out Trump said nothing controversial in the aforementioned tweet.
- untog 9y agoI'm not sure that's relevant to the OP's point - it's the arguing beneath the tweet they were referring to, nothing to do with the content of the tweet itself.
- throwawaysecops 9y ago> clashes of opinions that have occurred since the beginning of humankind > This is why I'm bullish on Twitter. Fuck Twitter. Its roles and permissions structure is a disaster to effective and FAIR communications and there is little reason by Twitter to disallow the more viral concepts circulating within its web. Time to deploy active measures to give humanity some means by which education on these concepts can occur.
- AgentME 9y agoYeah, controversies are natural, but they're not the only reason for discourse, and if controversies crowd out everything else because they're addictive or because they're encouraged to keep activity high, then that's a problem.