4 ms·

> All Elon had to do was keep his head down and not pick twitter fights.... You know what, this could be said about a lot of people, including the freaking Pre

> All Elon had to do was keep his head down and not pick twitter fights.... You know what, this could be said about a lot of people, including the freaking President. I'm beginning to wonder if the real problem is Twitter. Specifically the most fundamental aspect of its design -- the ability to blast off brief messages to thousands of people any time, anywhere. Maybe we're learning that that this design leads people, even smart, well-meaning people, to publish crap. No one is crafting well thought out, quality content in 280 characters on their phone. The vast majority of Tweets and RTs are going to be total junk, lizard brain stuff. Sure enough Twitter has become the abuse hub of the Internet. Sure, people love to use it. They love to use cocaine too once they get a taste. And drinking socially is fine, but booze too hard and the nicest person can turn into a monster. Maybe we just shouldn't have what Twitter provides.

citrablue 8y ago
Really? You want to blame cocaine and hard booze? 1 to many communications is useful. Many to many communications (email) is useful. Push comms are useful. People are responsible for what they do, and what they say. Be it drugs or (I can't believe I'm saying this), Twitter. The most interesting thing is that many would blame Trump more for his Twitter mis-use than people who mis-use substances. And, conversely, many blame drug abusers but excuse Trump. In the end, we are either responsible for our actions or we are not. I believe the former is a crucial piece for functioning society; it needs to be tempered with a non-judgemental attitude and treated as a public health issue if it spreads too far.
JoshCole 8y ago
I completely agree with you that Twitter is playing a casual role in the degradation of discourse within our society. Go to the popular Twitter feeds and there are very obvious bot posts trying to scam and manipulate people. Twitter has not managed to stop them. Elon Musk's twitter feed is a great example of this. It even has the bots pretending to be him. Here, if you want to appear popular and have greater ability to manipulate people, you can buy some followers: https://devumi.com/twitter-followers/ https://devumi.com/twitter-followers/ Now regardless of your worthiness you have social proof! Advocate for the lack of existence of a round earth to your hearts content, now with greater effectiveness. The spread property of news on Twitter favors falsehood over truth: https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-study-fake-news-spreads-6-times-faster-on-twitter-than-truth-2018-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-study-fake-news-spreads-... This fact when combined with medium as message https://www.litcharts.com/lit/amusing-ourselves-to-death/chapter-1-the-medium-is-the-metaphor https://www.litcharts.com/lit/amusing-ourselves-to-death/cha... leads to a system which actively promotes the wrong sort of content. Clickbait is a reality, because clickbait gets clicks, so people write clickbait titles. The existence of the rules like those Hacker News has are a fight against these forces. This community was built in part with an understanding that these forces are real and harmful to discourse. Twitter meanwhile has better engagement metrics by not solving these problems. So don't expect them to change, without any effort on their part. Fighting your own incentives is very hard. Twitter is basically addicted to harming discourse. Obviously, no ill will on its part, since this stuff wasn't obvious early on. It has benefits too though. Like getting to hear the perspective of the people in question, without intermediary.
te_chris 8y ago
Wut. The problem isn't twitter (well, not in this case, not that twitter haven't destroyed their product with the non-chronological feed...), it's infants who can't control themselves on it. Addicts and occasional users exist for most things (the possible exception being strong opiates).
forgottenpass 8y ago
>Specifically the most fundamental aspect of its design One of my favorite hacker news comments is: >Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don't mean "people post hateful things on Twitter." I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501385

citrablue 8y ago

Really? You want to blame cocaine and hard booze? 1 to many communications is useful. Many to many communications (email) is useful. Push comms are useful. People are responsible for what they do, and what they say. Be it drugs or (I can't believe I'm saying this), Twitter. The most interesting thing is that many would blame Trump more for his Twitter mis-use than people who mis-use substances. And, conversely, many blame drug abusers but excuse Trump. In the end, we are either responsible for our actions or we are not. I believe the former is a crucial piece for functioning society; it needs to be tempered with a non-judgemental attitude and treated as a public health issue if it spreads too far.

JoshCole 8y ago

I completely agree with you that Twitter is playing a casual role in the degradation of discourse within our society. Go to the popular Twitter feeds and there are very obvious bot posts trying to scam and manipulate people. Twitter has not managed to stop them. Elon Musk's twitter feed is a great example of this. It even has the bots pretending to be him. Here, if you want to appear popular and have greater ability to manipulate people, you can buy some followers: https://devumi.com/twitter-followers/ https://devumi.com/twitter-followers/ Now regardless of your worthiness you have social proof! Advocate for the lack of existence of a round earth to your hearts content, now with greater effectiveness. The spread property of news on Twitter favors falsehood over truth: https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-study-fake-news-spreads-6-times-faster-on-twitter-than-truth-2018-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-study-fake-news-spreads-... This fact when combined with medium as message https://www.litcharts.com/lit/amusing-ourselves-to-death/chapter-1-the-medium-is-the-metaphor https://www.litcharts.com/lit/amusing-ourselves-to-death/cha... leads to a system which actively promotes the wrong sort of content. Clickbait is a reality, because clickbait gets clicks, so people write clickbait titles. The existence of the rules like those Hacker News has are a fight against these forces. This community was built in part with an understanding that these forces are real and harmful to discourse. Twitter meanwhile has better engagement metrics by not solving these problems. So don't expect them to change, without any effort on their part. Fighting your own incentives is very hard. Twitter is basically addicted to harming discourse. Obviously, no ill will on its part, since this stuff wasn't obvious early on. It has benefits too though. Like getting to hear the perspective of the people in question, without intermediary.

te_chris 8y ago

Wut. The problem isn't twitter (well, not in this case, not that twitter haven't destroyed their product with the non-chronological feed...), it's infants who can't control themselves on it. Addicts and occasional users exist for most things (the possible exception being strong opiates).

forgottenpass 8y ago

>Specifically the most fundamental aspect of its design One of my favorite hacker news comments is: >Twitter is a planetary-scale hate machine. By which I don't mean "people post hateful things on Twitter." I mean literally generates hate, as in, put a bunch of people with diverse perspectives on Twitter and by the end of the day they hate each other more than when they started. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501385