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I think that world was already there. Twitter just made it apparent.

• _qulr 6y ago
  People were always like that, yes. In fact sites like Twitter exploit our worst human instincts. The point of the article is that the way in which we organize people into communities makes a big difference as to whether the outcome is largely positive or largely negative. Throwing tens of millions of people all together into one big boiling pot with a strict character limit is not a particularly great way to organize.
• coffeefirst 6y ago
  Not at all. Twitter gave everyone access to bigger microphones, and one of the main benefits of this went to asshats who would have ordinarily been booed off the stage. The fact that these people exist isn’t new. They’re ability to do what they do at scale and to such a large audience is.
  • netsharc 6y ago
    The instant nature and character limit of Twitter is what made it so toxic, I think. So now anyone can broadcast any dumb thought they have. If you were a blogger, you'd think about your thought more before sitting down and writing a long-ish essay about it (maybe you even learn as you write that your thought is wrong, incendieary, etc), but with Twitter... In theory Facebook also offers this instant thing, but the idea with Facebook was, it would be limited to your friends/network...
    • coffeefirst 6y ago
      Agreed. Those little bits of friction, whether it's needing to put the time into a blog and build an audience for it, or having some natural limits on reach, really matter.