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A big part of in person conversations are about building equity in the relationship. Even from the first encounter, you express what you think about and how you
by 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
A big part of in person conversations are about building equity in the relationship. Even from the first encounter, you express what you think about and how you think about it and look for places that your thoughts intersect with others. Those that have a beneficial intersection you're likely to explore further, invest more and build more equity.
Online, there is little chance that you'll establish a new relationship and build equity with other users. You've got hundreds or thousands of followers, so do they and in many cases, the person you respond to may never see your reply, let alone remember your username for more than a few minutes.
These exchanges can be so fleeting because you're both typically anonymous. Anonymity is antithetical to trust and trust is required for equity. There is little that an anonymous person can do for you, and little you could do for them.
Contrast Twitter and LinkedIn. Both have feeds and allow messaging and conversations. But since you know the people you're interacting with on LinkedIn, many times personally, you are civil, helpful and courteous because one day they may actually be able to do something to benefit you. You invest in them and building equity in your relationship in expectation that if there is something you can do for them, or they can do for you in the future, it's there to leverage.
Twitter just feels like, I dunno, looking for love in all the wrong places?
People have a multitude of purposes for engaging online anonymously. Learning or trolling, ego support or battling boredom, maybe a better solution would be to target those purposes as independent platforms and structure the dialog to support the purpose.
- mirimir 6y agoYeah, friends have occasionally encouraged me to use Twitter, over the years since the mid 00s. But it's never appealed to me, and so I have ~no experience with it, except from following posted links. But anyway, you say: > Anonymity is antithetical to trust and trust is required for equity. There is little that an anonymous person can do for you, and little you could do for them. While that's generally so, I have developed many more-or-less long-term anonymous relationships, over the past couple decades. And some of them have led to interesting collaborations, and even paying work.
- Reelin 6y agoI was with you until you pinned the problems on anonymity. Correlation does not imply causation. In this particular case there are (IMO) many counterexamples regarding anonymity, including HN in particular. A different comment here points out the (effectively unquantifiable) risk that more or less indelible comments can pose in the future if they can be trivially linked back to a permanent identity. Interestingly, your explanation in terms of equity actually holds up without considering anonymity. If you instead frame it in terms of purpose for visiting the site it makes sense that Twitter would have a disproportionate number of users who exhibited little concern for building equity. This is also consistent with the toxic behavior that often occurs on Facebook, where real names and interacting with people local to your area are by far the norm.
- buboard 6y agoThere are a lot of people IRL who blabber on, usually people ignore them/consider them obnoxious. Somehow they haven't developed this ability online