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The same people can behave totally differently depending on circumstances. For example: many people experience road rage, but they'd never behave that way outsi
by ggreer 8y ago
The same people can behave totally differently depending on circumstances. For example: many people experience road rage, but they'd never behave that way outside of their car. Something about being in a car separated by a couple panes of glass causes a lot of people to act insane. It's similar for social media:
- Twitter and Tumblr both have retweet/reblog with commentary, which makes it extremely convenient for people to tell their followers about something they dislike. Just click retweet, type, "Look at this dumbass.", and watch the likes come in.
- Twitter notifies you if someone replied, quote-tweeted, mentioned you, or linked to a tweet of yours. This means that people definitely know when somebody disagrees with or dislikes them. If those same people were mocking them on some other forum, they'd never know and a cycle of hostility wouldn't form.
- Twitter's character limit makes it hard for people to keep nuance in their ideas. Replies to tweets are sorted by time, so whoever replies first (i.e. gives their response the least thought) gets the most eyeballs.
- Lastly, Twitter defaults to only accept direct messages from people you follow, meaning that most people can't criticize in private. They have to broadcast the criticism to the whole world, making it much harder for both parties to keep their egos in check.
These "features" combine to make civil conversation all but impossible.
- majos 8y agoAll good points. One I would add: there is far less assumption of good faith from strangers on Twitter, and most parts of the internet in general. For whatever reason, in-person interactions have a level of charity in them. You'll clarify misconceptions, give people the chance to make and walk back mistakes, and generally assume that your conversational partner is reasonable until proven otherwise. Twitter is not like this. Many people seem to find it very easy to start a conversation with criticism, looking for evidence of stupidity or malice rather than trying to clarify it away. And there is almost no ground-level assumption that the other person is actually "trying" the way you are. Seems easily traced back to Twitter not being a very human medium. As in the car example, it's easier to strongly dislike something when it's not obviously another human. But of course, the existence of trolls on the internet and mostly nonexistence of tolls in everyday life is a factor too. For this reason, I've mostly given up on having any kind of remotely grey-area discussion on Twitter. I just use it to follow a few dozen people whose thoughts I'm interested in. And outside of HN and email/messaging, I don't talk through the internet at all.