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In mid October I deleted almost all my tweets and likes (but Twitter being so shit they are still showing my likes except it’s not liked anymore lol) and have n

In mid October I deleted almost all my tweets and likes (but Twitter being so shit they are still showing my likes except it’s not liked anymore lol) and have not been tweeting anything anymore. I found Twitter too toxic, it made me angry with people for no reason, so I deleted all my tweets and the app. No more notifications, no more “just checking Twitter quickly”. I now go to Twitter like once a day just to have a look what is going and and oh my god, the more I am absent the more I see how rotten Twitter is and all of its users. Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention. Everyone just posting negative stuff to make other people feel bad, down or guilty about something. I was part of the problem too. Lots of this: > “When I was a kid, I once had to work at my uncle’s shop. Let me tell you about <insert bullshit here>. A thread...” I don’t know what Parler is, but Twitter is THE WORST of social media and if Parler is an alternative then it’s going to be equally bad!

alkonaut 6y ago
I think it’s down to who you follow. First, never ever read “trends” or random tweets. Never trust Twitters official app to show you anything useful. Using third party apps also saves you from ads. Second and most importantly, follow a set of users that are interesting, friendly, and who don’t engage publicly with trolls. It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology. Just unfollow or block the negative people and trolls.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Block early, block often. Think twice before following someone.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    People seem to get furious about being blocked. I’ve seen people post publicly the name of the person who blocked them demanding an explanation. It seems to escalate things rather than calm them down.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Thankfully with blocking you don't get to see these people ever again...
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        Out of sight out of mind I guess... but meanwhile they're out there trying to shame you in front of your peers.
        garmaine 6y ago
        And you should care because...? This isn’t high school.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        > And you should care because...? Because your peers will only get their side of the story while they're criticising you. > This isn’t high school. Sorry not sure what you mean here. What does school have to do with it?
    - sct202 6y ago
      Alternatively you can mute them which is more discreet.
    - FroshKiller 6y ago
      I published all my blocks with rationales to whyiblockedyou.com for a while. Then I decided to get serious about just banning networks of white nationalists en masse instead of blocking one user at a time.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        Do you block people just for using promoted Tweets in any way?
        6y ago
  - raffraffraff 6y ago
    Doesn't that just reinforce the echo chamber? I don't actually use Twitter or Facebook, and I deleted my Reddit, so I'm not the one to talk. But my wife uses Twitter a lot and has managed to get into conversations that are very hard to keep civil. She has found several approaches that work without blocking. 1. Only enable notifications and DMs from mutual follows. People who get into pile ons don't tend to follow their "arch enemies" to do so (because their followers would not like them to follow "the wrong people"). You have full control over who can pester you. 2. Walk away from conversations if your get harrassed, bored or annoyed, but be clear that you are doing it. "This is going nowhere and it's getting late. I'm muting this thread". Again, you have control. If you imagine getting into a heated debate in the pub, this is the equivalent of leaving the table to talk to another group. It gives you the ability to peacefully walk away, and deny someone the opportunity to keep arguing with you against your will. 3. Realise that people don't change their minds during an argument. Always give them room to back down. A cornered animal will always lash out, and we are just animals. 4. Always be clear and civil. Be generous. Don't assume that people are acting out of malice. 5. In sometime is a toxic person who causes pile ons, quote tweets you, intentionally misrepresents you by cherry picking your comments out of context, doxes etc, block the fuck out of them.
    - alkonaut 6y ago
      > Doesn't that just reinforce the echo chamber? Yes. Twitter is fantastic only if you accept that you can’t have arguments on it. It’s just not a good idea. But not all conversation requires disagreement. Also: I use Twitter as a news feed. I don’t tweet, just read. For me it’s the successor of rss.
      - iso1210 6y ago
        Twitter is the kind of place to tell you SHUT YOUR FESTERING GOB, YOU TIT! YOUR TYPE MAKES ME PUKE! YOU VACUOUS TOFFEE-NOSED MALODOROUS PERVERT!!! I'm not sure where John Cleese would be, but I don't think it would help
        DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    And disable retweets.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      What’s the point of that? You must use Twitter quite differently than I do. Retweets are most of the commentary I consume and produce.
- simion314 6y ago
  >I think it’s down to who you follow. Isn't there the problem where your favorite "celebrity" you follow posts nice stuff but when election or some other event is happening they start posting a ton of "off-topic" stuff ?
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
    If you don't like the stuff they post, don't follow them. This includes things that you don't think they should post - you know, the "off-topic" stuff. Them posting that stuff isn't a "problem" just because you do not appreciate some of the content.
    - wolco2 6y ago
      You also get posts that they may have favourited or friend a they follow. That's when things get toxic.
      - macintux 6y ago
        Twitter was just starting to share favorites when I stopped using it. What a terrible decision that was.
      - alkonaut 6y ago
        No. That’s not what Twitter does. That’s something some clients do , unfortunately including the official Twitter clients. I just see tweets from those I follow, in chronological order, with no ads. If I saw ads, “recommended” or “trending” etc., I’d get off that client in a hurry.
        bronson 6y ago
        Twitter indeed works like that. You’ve used the star menu to set your feed to chronological, which is not the default.
        alkonaut 6y ago
- whyoh 6y ago
  >It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology. A blog/website with an RSS feed is even better, IMO. And for in-depth discussions traditional forums (or even subreddits) beat Twitter easily. Twitter is the king of low-effort posting.
- leephillips 6y ago
  The trick is not to read the tweets of the people you follow, and not to follow the people you read, necessarily: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/ https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Huh I might sign up and give this a try again.
  - bmcahren 6y ago
    Twitter does a good job of highlighting the important posts someone makes rather than requiring I curate for myself. It also has brought to my attention the important people in the network of those I follow introducing me to insightful people I might not have otherwise known. I prefer twitter's method to RSS feeds. I need curation with the amount of content that my list publishes.
- herdcall 6y ago
  Actually, if your goal is to stay up-to-date on specific topics, tools like Discord and Slack are much better IMO because of the way they work to allow two-way communication. Even Reddit is offering a similar setup now. If you do want to continue in Twitter, change your location. I used to follow key topics (like Go and Flutter) on Twitter, but couldn't avoid the nasty "trends" Twitter throws at you that (IMO) are very biased. So, I set my location as Iceland (I live in the US), and after that life has been good. :)
pjc50 6y ago
Via Twitter, ironically: > "Wonder if shaping discourse via a site where performativity is rewarded, single lines can be taken out of context from qualifying threads and piled on, pithy takes are amplified over nuance, and everyone is either Good or Bad, was overall a positive or negative development"
_Microft 6y ago
I'm a longtime lurker on Twitter, the list of people I follow is well-curated. If someone looks like they cause me more trouble than insights, I unfollow or even block them with little hesitation. In this form, Twitter is working great for me. Needless to say that I stay away from politics (and related topics) as much as possible.
- viraptor 6y ago
  I tried that hard for quite some time but never managed to get a purely on-topic timeline. Follow 10 experts who post mostly about topic X and you'll constantly find at least one of them posting something different at any point. For example you can't subscribe to grugq for political-infosec content without some IRA memes. And I don't mean that other people shouldn't post stuff they want, just that I'd like to see a filtered view of their posts most of the time. After a few iterations I gave up Twitter almost completely.
  - dgudkov 6y ago
    That's the problem with Twitter, you can't follow only a subset of tweets of a person that is related to a particular interest of that person. You only can follow everything the person tweets, likes, and retweets (albeit randomly filtered by Twitter's AI logic). Which makes it hard to exclude various nonsense from the feed. I wish Twitter allowed people to tweet into different personal channels, and I could only subscribe to the personal channels I'm interested in. Social networks badly need to evolve. What they are currently is quickly eroding the social fabrics.
- matwood 6y ago
  On Twitter I also mainly lurk. I've found it to be the best place to get the detailed news I want (for example, Wasserman or Cohn for election result), but know to avoid comments unless I'm looking for pure entertainment. But, I have all Twitter alerts turned off, and only check every few days. I rarely look at my own Twitter timeline and instead go directly to people's timeline who I have found will have the news I'm interested in.
  - 6y ago
hooande 6y ago
if twitter is so bad, why do you keep using it?
- eptcyka 6y ago
  Ever tried smoking?
- dustinmoris 6y ago
  > if twitter is so bad, why do you keep using it? Did you read what I said? I have stopped using Twitter. I don't tweet, I don't have the app, I don't engage in anything what happens there now. I just occasionally peek in to see if I'm missing out on anything and surprisingly I don't. As a result I see myself (unconsciously) check Twitter less and less.
  - sagichmal 6y ago
    > I have stopped using Twitter. > I just occasionally [use Twitter] to see if . . . Hm.
    - dustinmoris 6y ago
      When I switch TV programs I might view a program for 1 minute before I decide that I don’t like the content. The next day when I look for something to watch I might tune into the same TV station again for a minute before moving on. I am not a “user” (viewer) of that TV station despite checking it out for approximately a minute each. My current Twitter “usage” is the same concept. You decide if you call this a Twitter user or not.
- XorNot 6y ago
  To be fair, we're all "using" Twitter somehow now. It became impossible to ignore when mainstream news would now lead based on what people have tweeted. That's the thing: it's become extremely deeply embedded in our society, since it's damn catnip to 24-hour news (which, IMO, was the originator of this problem - they need content, now, and anything which provides is thrown up there).
- 6y ago
cblconfederate 6y ago
It s still a good way to follow current events by following specific people or journalists. Switching to chronological mode, aggressively unfollowing the rude people who think that their technical knowledge allows them to plaster their opinions on your face, and changing my location to burundi did it for me.
- alborzb 6y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what is up with changing location to Burundi? Does that change targeted political ads or something?
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    No more trending topic suggestions. Apparently nothing happens in burundi which is great. It also stopped suggesting me local politicians but i m not sure it's related
- jb775 6y ago
  >It's still a good way to follow current events This is where the major problem lies and you don't even realize you're complicit in it. The "current events" blasted out on Twitter are curated by Twitter admins to only show what they want to show. They place heavy over-weighting on events and discussion that they want everyone to see. They hide hashtags they don't want trending. They don't show a pure list of what's actually trending. They shadow-ban users that talk about topics they don't want talked about. They give priority to media outlets that are also involved in heavy censorship, therefore adding extra fake credibility to false narratives. And the latest is the whole "Fact check" thing, where they only fact check the discussion that they want discredited (even if it's 100% true). You are an example how censorship is so powerful. When people believe they've found a "good way to follow current events", and refuse to question the accuracy of the medium, they quickly become prone to believing false narratives. Currently, the elites who own the media are doing everything in their power to further the left's agenda. (The active campaign is their attempt to cover up and discredit any discussion of election fraud. Also, you probably didn't hear that Zuckerberg donated half a billion dollars towards democrat vote-counting strategies) Many people want to bury their head in the sand because it aligns with their political beliefs. Hopefully this is a wake up call to some.
f00zz 6y ago
And people get addicted to that thing. I remember when Twitter used to have a tweet counter on people's profiles, and for some people it was running into the tens of thousands.
tosser0001 6y ago
Twitter can feel like YouTube without the videos, just the comments. I especially despise the “trends” sections. It ignores any keywords and sites that you’ve blocked and seems designed to inflame. Dorsey at one point made a big statement about trying to change the tone but I’ve seen little evidence of it. I have a small list of people that I actually follow who tend to keep things civil
victorbstan 6y ago
The best parts for me are speed of news dissemination, like a news headline aggregate. And professional / hobby interests. Those are wholesome.
biztos 6y ago
I had a similar experience with Facebook: I was pretty good at not feeding trolls, but I'd get involved in these long discussions on political topics with apparently well-meaning people and inevitably, someone in the thread would start arguing from either bad faith or an "alternative facts" perspective -- and I'd end up angry and exhausted and having convinced nobody. Now I haven't used Facebook for six weeks (I still use Instagram and Messenger). I don't miss it at all. If I'm bored or tired, every once in a while I'll reflexively start to open it in a browser tab but so far I have always caught myself and not gone into the Zuckerworld. I'm not active on Twitter but I imagine it's more of the same. I doubt if some Alternabook that lets conspiracy theorists go nuts in their own little bubble will make the world a better place, but I'm not convinced it'll be any worse than what Facebook and Twitter have been doing.
- chris_wot 6y ago
  I am beginning to wonder if social media may have had its heyday. Specifically I’m curious as to whether Facebook and Twitter will start to be used less and less by people, but who won’t abandon it completely. I do wonder if this might make them less useful for advertisers.
cmsefton 6y ago
I've long held the opinion that Twitter and Facebook are just content in the medium, a bit like complaining about Sky, CNN or Fox on TV without looking at television itself and the impact it had on communication. The internet has brought communication to everyone that travels at incredible speed. This has the effect of causing emotive responses, rather than reasoned. Requires no effort at all to respond, and encourages the toxicity you describe. What gains most traction are those posts that are the most emotive. It used to be "if it bleeds, it leads", but I suspect these days it's more akin to "emotion deserves promotion". Speed carries a number of other implications. For example, it allows a cheap, steady stream of constant information that can be completely irrelevant at best to you, plus it's information about which you often can do nothing about, except hit the reply button. This can only make things worse, because people feel powerless except in this superficial way. The other effect is the quantity of information, and it's impossible now for a user of the internet to wade through it, or even validate it without incredible effort. Our current techniques for filtering that information is essentially populist individualism: we rely on what other people have liked, linked to, or shared, but at the same time, read what is presented to us based on our previous interactions. I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I perhaps pessimistically feel that these things are fundamentally baked into the medium, in much the same way that Neil Postman felt entertainment was intrinsically baked into television. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there are solutions to these things. Not sure what they are myself.
- datalus 6y ago
  The medium is the message :) [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
  - lordgrenville 6y ago
    Well Neil Postman was a friend of McLuhan, and said "I can’t think of a book that I’ve written that I could have written if not for McLuhan". https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/neil-postman-on-technologys-faustian-bargain/ https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/neil-postman-...
- 6y ago
victorbstan 6y ago
To some extent the top voted post at the moment displays an inherent issue with a lot of people of these platforms. If the message is not pleasant to the reader, either they will engage with it in a reactionary way, or seek to further isolate themselves in information bubbles. (Notwithstanding abusive behaviour, which should not be tolerated)
imgabe 6y ago
You can unfollow people you know. I make it a point to unfollow or mute anyone who's too negative. There's some value in Twitter, but it requires curation.
Nimitz14 6y ago
The only thing you've actually told us with this comment is you follow people who post a lot of drama. Presumably because you like reading it. I have no sympathy.
Kye 6y ago
I had to accept recently that anything trying to emulate Twitter will suffer from the same problems. I wrote about it: https://kyefox.com/2020/09/17/mastodon-shows-its-stripes/ https://kyefox.com/2020/09/17/mastodon-shows-its-stripes/ Since then, my favorite instance was killed by a bunch of irony-poisoned instances ganging up on it to convince others it was a toxic hell (projection!) and defederate from it. The instance was basically dead within a week as people migrated off to avoid losing contact with friends on the fediverse. https://twitter.com/DamienGranz/status/1314710715635204103 https://twitter.com/DamienGranz/status/1314710715635204103 It's not much different from people ganging up on someone on Twitter to report them into an automated suspension.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Wait, I thought that post length was NOT limited on Mastodon ? (That's why I never used Twitter - 140 characters is just too short - I'm not a poet !)
  - Kye 6y ago
    The default is 500 characters. Some compatible implementations of ActivityPub have longer limits. Mastodon hides longer posts from those instances behind a link to open the toot[1] and show the whole thing. [1] Instances choose how to render things delivered over ActivityPub. So (for example) Mastodon would render a write.as post as a toot, while write.as might render replies to that toot as comments on a blog post.
- golemotron 6y ago
  You might like this. Same problem identified before big social: https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
elorant 6y ago
The way I see it, the problem with social media is that you surround yourself with like-minded people, which diminishes your tolerance to different views. People become self righteous and can't take criticism lightly. Compare this to how things were 15 years ago, or how they are in here, where everyone and their dog can challenge your opinion. You become more open minded long term, and can handle criticism in a more mature way.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Except for the people who simply downvote and never explain their position. Plenty of them on here.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    I'd say that has more to do with the HN platform and its rules. Imho this is one thing that Slashdot does better: it let's you indicate the reason for your vote.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      "I'd say that has more to do with the HN platform and its rules" Isn't that what we are discussing - platforms, their rules, and how that influences discussions? I'm just saying that there are plenty of people, in my experience on here, that would rather downvote an opposing opinion rather than start a discussion about it or answer a question about their own position. I routinely even get downvoted when asking why the previous comment was downvoted. To me, these behaviors are akin to mob-driven censorship of minority opinions - downvote it so it moves down and greys out.
      - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
        Sorry, it looks like I misunderstood your original comment.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    It's so interesting...there is this well known phenomenon where ~everyone has at least some bias the vast majority of the time, and in a forum thread where this phenomenon is the specific topic of discussion (say, a psychology paper discussing subconscious bias, and the associated psychological/neurological phenomena that enable it), any significant disagreement (including whether each one of us suffers from it) with this general notion is typically very rare. But then switch over to a different thread where the topic of discussion is not some abstract idea like this, but rather an object level idea, say just for example a news story about conservative leaning people switching to a new social media platform to escape what they consider to be censorship, and something very curious occurs. In such threads, it is rare to encounter much talk about this phenomenon of psychological bias, and if it does come up, it is ~always only about the obvious bias suffered by those who are in the ~"general outgroup" of the forum community. In those cases, it is common to read numerous anecdotal observations of how people in the outgroup(s) are cognitively flawed in that they exhibit signs of "living in a bubble", and "just(!) won't listen to reason or consider ideas that are contrary to their worldview". But then if one is to initiate a conversation with a person in one of these threads, and make a reference to the formerly non-controversial abstract idea (from the psychology thread) that ~all people suffer from some bias, at ~all times, it seems as if all knowledge of that phenomenon has somehow become cognitively inaccessible, that the individual has no knowledge whatsoever of the phenomenon. Conversely, if one is to mention (say, in a different subthread in the same overall thread) this exact same phenomenon, except switching the object of reference away from the person (who was making a biased comment about their outgroup), over to members of the outgroup, this formerly inaccessible knowledge then becomes accessible once again. Just for the sake of discussion (a mental experiment of sorts), let us imagine that there is some significant truth to this theory - let's (temporarily) assume(!) it to be True, at least to a significant degree. In this purely hypothetical scenario, might this phenomenon offer some logical explanation for the amount of extreme polarization of opinion that can be witnessed in the world, this "crisis of epistemology" we talk about where different tribes seem to live in completely different realities from each other, with each reality having significantly different sets of facts? To me, this seems not only reasonable, but quite consistent with objectively observable reality.
SmokeyHamster 6y ago
Yeah, I agree. I still occassionaly read some people I follow on Twitter, but I rarely comment and never read notifications. I also entirely stopped using Reddit for the same reason. IMHO it's even more toxic than Twitter. And don't get me started about Facebook. What is it about politics that takes relatively sane friendly people who you've known for years and transforms them into raging psychopaths? When my own sister found out I didn't think Trump was a literal Nazi, she then proceeded to call me a racist, with all her douchebag "online friends" cheering her on. And before Facebook, we used to get along really well. But now it's like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
- Spare_account 6y ago
  Every occurrence of "twitter" in the top level comment could have any other social media site substituted and it would read the same and still be entirely accurate (HN is one of the rare exceptions obv.) I've ditched the lot, deleted my reddit and twitter accounts, configured my pihole to block the domains for the occasions that my willpower fails me and my life has improved dramatically.
christophilus 6y ago
I’m only a very light Twitter user, but I cull and curate my feed. It’s mostly funny, positive people in fintwit now, and it’s a good experience. I almost always learn something while flicking through. But yes, I’ve found that without careful curation, it quickly turns into a depressing cesspit. Then again, that’s not unique to Twitter. I culled my contacts in the real world when in high-school and college for the same reasons and to the same effect.
- hpcjoe 6y ago
  I find that some of my professional colleagues are some of the most toxic posters. I've got many active filters in place, but in some cases, I've simply muted/blocked some of them. Done the same on Facebook, which I use mostly for family communication and posting dad jokes. But again, as hard as I try to separate work / family life, colleagues want to connect and they spew the same tired BS I see elsewhere. So, on FB, I can permanently mute them. Which, I do. If twitter's business model was to be a toxic stew of partisan talk and censorship of "incorrect views", yeah, they nailed it.
- croh 6y ago
  I noticed same thing some years back. Don't let the social medias work ON you, push trends on you. Ignore all suggestions. Keep it minimal and use only for your personal goals. Importantly stop notifications on cell phone. Facebook I stopped using a while back. It gives me the feeling of universal garbage bag where everyone in a race to impress others. On twitter I follow top people from my domain and ignore everything. No political BS. In LinkedIn, I literally removed all HR connections and started to follow people whom I really adore and take direction from their career path.
theodric 6y ago
You need to get you some better Twitter follows, oof
rangoon626 6y ago
I had the same experience that leads me to delete my account entirely. You have to see it for what it is: An online digital slot machine. The stakes are, well your time and your life. And just like in real life, the house always wins.
epistasis 6y ago
Wow, that's rather shocking to me. I find Twitter to be a fantastic news source, with higher concentration of good links than HN, and often see stuff there far before it shows up ok HN. The thing about Twitter is that it is entirely about who you follow, and what those people talk about and retweet. So if somebody is a source of toxicity, unfollow them. I have a very low threshold for both following and unfollowing. This part, curating your feed, is not trivial, but it is what determines 100% of your experience. I don't blame you at all for having a bad experience and not wanting to use Twitter again! But also realize that it's not the only experience to be had there, and I think that for many, and hopefully most people, it's a positive experience.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  Leaving curation to the user means certain users will have good feeds and others will have horrible feeds, with the default being horrible feeds. Thus, Twitter is horrible, no matter the fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    The default Twitter lets you select from lists of topics, none of which are very toxic unless you ease into confrontational politics. If this default is "horrible" can you say more about that? > fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience What do you mean by this? What is the emotional output and what is fake? Are you talking about my single user's experience, or that of the person I replied to?
smallnamespace 6y ago
> Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention. > I was part of the problem too. Not to be overly personal here, but doesn't this post veer close to describing itself?
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  Oversharing is a thing with modern media. But, does the emotional response really feel different than in person interactions?
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Very close? That’s precisely what this post is!
laser 6y ago
Learn to get the Twitter algorithm on your side! https://ibb.co/3BFQZhb https://ibb.co/3BFQZhb Look at how many negative words are in this post of yours and hopefully see the irony of what you’re saying. Twitter isn’t magic, it can only give you what it thinks you want from what you give it!
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  Until censorship.
greggman3 6y ago
I am not a twitter user really. I check it maybe once every 2-3 weeks at most. But,.... It really depends on who you follow. I follow a few indie game dev friends and unfollow if one of them starts posting political stuff. My feed is mostly cool info about indie games in unity, unreal, pico-8, some graphics info. Very little bad stuff except for twitter itself with it inserting ads and trying to get me to follow "popular" people I have zero interest in or posting "trending" crap. Some of that I've managed to ublock origin away though of course it's extremely frustrating that both twitter and facebook obfuscate their css
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Strongly agree. If you’re seeing Tweets that make you angry, unfollow that person. It’s really as simple as that. If someone doesn’t have the willpower to avoid anger-inducing follows and tweets, deleting Twitter entirely is a good option. For everyone else, it’s really not difficult to curate your feed to be more reasonable. Use the unfollow button liberally.
Natsu 6y ago
It took me a while to realize what Twitter was. At first, it was described as "micro blogging" and it sorta looked like people just text messaging to the world with shades of IRC. But I eventually realized what it really is: a gossip site. With all the mean gossip anyone could ever want. I pretty much just ignore it now.
roland35 6y ago
I look at twitter discussions and it honestly like like a lot of people are just shouting past each other. I don't think anyone is out to win hearts and minds out there...
- fullshark 6y ago
  They are shouting past each other, because they aren't talking to each other, they are talking for a hypothetical audience, cheering them on.
karaterobot 6y ago
I haven't used Twitter or Facebook since about 2007. People say they need to use these platforms to stay on top of what's happening in the world, but I have not found that to be true at all. If something is important, I hear about it about an hour after everyone else, and then read up on it if I want to. What gets thrown out by that filter is all the inconsequential news, and gossip, and speculation, and learning people's knee-jerk reactions before you've had a chance to make up your own mind. You can still seek out all that stuff if you have the impulse, but you aren't being fed it intravenously all the time. This is all by way of saying that the cost of just cutting these platforms out of your life altogether is pretty low, and there are some benefits.
whatever_dude 6y ago
Twitter is a hellfire, but it still has value if well controlled. I use a third-party client and added dozens of muted word (eg anything political or covid related) and it's amazing; it's a bit of a escape even. Once I realized I don't have any obligation to mind the Latest Piece of Shitty News 24/7, I'm a much better online social media user. I still read the news every day (Feedly) and know what's going on, but it's compartmentalized.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
I long for the old IRC days...when you can open a room on DalNet and talk to a small group of like minded people about what you are interested in and curious about..invite/kick those who get obnoxious. It was cozy and I’d give anything to get an online community where we all get along and where it’s ok to be open to new ideas. Most of the BBS and IRC rooms I frequented had little to no moderation. Flamewars occurred, but everyone eventually calmed the fuck down..you just have to let it burn out almost like how you’d allow a child to have his tantrum and then it’s back to life as usual. I think moderation and rules are making communication worse. Anyone who has been in a marriage or a relationship can maybe attest to the fact that in the fiery instances where we don’t sit down and ‘figure out rules of engagement’ burn out fast. When there are rules for the emotional pressure valves to be released, arguments and disagreements become nested and multi layered. In today’s world..we are all toddlers and/or married to each other on social media and Twitter, FB et al have become our nannies creating and putting out meltdowns and tantrums at the same time. Having said that, IG is still my favourite. Except that they are allergic to images of certain parts of the human anatomy and sometimes even onions can be too sexy for their nipple detection algorithms..but otherwise it’s brimming with joy and positivity.
- holler 6y ago
  I miss those days too! I used to spend a lot of time in #efnet and #dalnet, speaking to strangers about things like #skateboarding and other random topics. It was kind of cool because back then most people didn't know what irc was, nor did they have the prowess to download, install, and configure a client. Mirc was the jam. I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im, and hoping to recapture some of that essence. Particularly the simplicity, and lack of overly strict moderation like you describe. Irc never hit mainstream because the majority of users would never download and install a client, but it's neat that with modern web technology we can finally build these experiences in a way that general users can enjoy.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    Checked it out. I like the simplicity of the design. The font/size is a little odd for my eyes but I can get used to it.(maybe because I am seeing it on my phone) I am unsure tho how to navigate to get to the chat rooms. ETA: ahhh! I got it! Will there be some form of indexing? Eta2: can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?
john_moscow 6y ago
You are not alone in this. There are actually tens of alternative social media sites started by people who are fed up with the status quo. For starters, here's a good maintained list: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...
trentnix 6y ago
I've aggressively sanitized my Twitter and Instagram to make sure it's little more than an easy way to see posts about computing, video games, vinyl records, or whatever nerdity I'm into at the moment. The moment one of those accounts posts something related to the outrage du jour, it's an almost immediate unfollow. It doesn't matter whether I agree with the content of the post or not. I'm sure I miss a few from time to time, but you get the point. I've unfollowed lots of tech luminaries I admire, lots of musicians whose music I love, lots of brands that make good products. And I still buy some of the books and albums and products they produce. I might even miss the occasional awesome announcement from one of those outlets. But the resulting sanity and focus of my social media feeds is worth it.
- mmm_grayons 6y ago
  That's the frustrating thing. I was convinced to try using a twitter account by a friend who talked about how great it is to follow interesting tech people. For some cases, I guess it could be. But the problem is, everyone seems to also tweet about current political stuff, and I have no interest in seeing that at every turn. I know "stop talking about politics everywhere" is trite, but stop talking about politics everywhere.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    It shouldn’t be seen as trite to want rest and reprieve from the psychologically exhaustive nature of “always on” political engagement[1]-especially in times such as these, but I completely understand what you’re getting at, and to my own individual extents: I agree with you. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-too-much-political-news-bad-happiness/616651/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-t...
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I did that years ago. Twitter is an even bigger cesspool than youtube comments and facebook. I use facebook but only for the messenger.
nullsense 6y ago
>Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous Welcome to planet earth. We hope you enjoy your stay.
swyx 6y ago
great job pivoting to posting negative stuff on Hacker news then
leobakerhytch 6y ago
Just to bring to levity to this discussion, your quote very much brings to mind the hilarious and ever-relevant Four Yorkshiremen[0] sketch from Monty Python. Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.' [0]: https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE
bmcahren 6y ago
You seem to have engaged with this content and followed networks of people who also engage. My twitter is a very engineering-forward happy place. Sorry you got the you know what end of the algorithm stick. I feel in some way this was self-fulfilling?

alkonaut 6y ago

I think it’s down to who you follow. First, never ever read “trends” or random tweets. Never trust Twitters official app to show you anything useful. Using third party apps also saves you from ads. Second and most importantly, follow a set of users that are interesting, friendly, and who don’t engage publicly with trolls. It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology. Just unfollow or block the negative people and trolls.

garmaine 6y ago
Block early, block often. Think twice before following someone.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  People seem to get furious about being blocked. I’ve seen people post publicly the name of the person who blocked them demanding an explanation. It seems to escalate things rather than calm them down.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Thankfully with blocking you don't get to see these people ever again...
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      Out of sight out of mind I guess... but meanwhile they're out there trying to shame you in front of your peers.
      - garmaine 6y ago
        And you should care because...? This isn’t high school.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        > And you should care because...? Because your peers will only get their side of the story while they're criticising you. > This isn’t high school. Sorry not sure what you mean here. What does school have to do with it?
  - sct202 6y ago
    Alternatively you can mute them which is more discreet.
  - FroshKiller 6y ago
    I published all my blocks with rationales to whyiblockedyou.com for a while. Then I decided to get serious about just banning networks of white nationalists en masse instead of blocking one user at a time.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      Do you block people just for using promoted Tweets in any way?
      - 6y ago
- raffraffraff 6y ago
  Doesn't that just reinforce the echo chamber? I don't actually use Twitter or Facebook, and I deleted my Reddit, so I'm not the one to talk. But my wife uses Twitter a lot and has managed to get into conversations that are very hard to keep civil. She has found several approaches that work without blocking. 1. Only enable notifications and DMs from mutual follows. People who get into pile ons don't tend to follow their "arch enemies" to do so (because their followers would not like them to follow "the wrong people"). You have full control over who can pester you. 2. Walk away from conversations if your get harrassed, bored or annoyed, but be clear that you are doing it. "This is going nowhere and it's getting late. I'm muting this thread". Again, you have control. If you imagine getting into a heated debate in the pub, this is the equivalent of leaving the table to talk to another group. It gives you the ability to peacefully walk away, and deny someone the opportunity to keep arguing with you against your will. 3. Realise that people don't change their minds during an argument. Always give them room to back down. A cornered animal will always lash out, and we are just animals. 4. Always be clear and civil. Be generous. Don't assume that people are acting out of malice. 5. In sometime is a toxic person who causes pile ons, quote tweets you, intentionally misrepresents you by cherry picking your comments out of context, doxes etc, block the fuck out of them.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    > Doesn't that just reinforce the echo chamber? Yes. Twitter is fantastic only if you accept that you can’t have arguments on it. It’s just not a good idea. But not all conversation requires disagreement. Also: I use Twitter as a news feed. I don’t tweet, just read. For me it’s the successor of rss.
    - iso1210 6y ago
      Twitter is the kind of place to tell you SHUT YOUR FESTERING GOB, YOU TIT! YOUR TYPE MAKES ME PUKE! YOU VACUOUS TOFFEE-NOSED MALODOROUS PERVERT!!! I'm not sure where John Cleese would be, but I don't think it would help
      - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  And disable retweets.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    What’s the point of that? You must use Twitter quite differently than I do. Retweets are most of the commentary I consume and produce.
simion314 6y ago
>I think it’s down to who you follow. Isn't there the problem where your favorite "celebrity" you follow posts nice stuff but when election or some other event is happening they start posting a ton of "off-topic" stuff ?
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  If you don't like the stuff they post, don't follow them. This includes things that you don't think they should post - you know, the "off-topic" stuff. Them posting that stuff isn't a "problem" just because you do not appreciate some of the content.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    You also get posts that they may have favourited or friend a they follow. That's when things get toxic.
    - macintux 6y ago
      Twitter was just starting to share favorites when I stopped using it. What a terrible decision that was.
    - alkonaut 6y ago
      No. That’s not what Twitter does. That’s something some clients do , unfortunately including the official Twitter clients. I just see tweets from those I follow, in chronological order, with no ads. If I saw ads, “recommended” or “trending” etc., I’d get off that client in a hurry.
      - bronson 6y ago
        Twitter indeed works like that. You’ve used the star menu to set your feed to chronological, which is not the default.
        alkonaut 6y ago
whyoh 6y ago
>It’s a magnificent tool for staying up to date with a narrow topic like a niche technology. A blog/website with an RSS feed is even better, IMO. And for in-depth discussions traditional forums (or even subreddits) beat Twitter easily. Twitter is the king of low-effort posting.
leephillips 6y ago
The trick is not to read the tweets of the people you follow, and not to follow the people you read, necessarily: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/ https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Huh I might sign up and give this a try again.
- bmcahren 6y ago
  Twitter does a good job of highlighting the important posts someone makes rather than requiring I curate for myself. It also has brought to my attention the important people in the network of those I follow introducing me to insightful people I might not have otherwise known. I prefer twitter's method to RSS feeds. I need curation with the amount of content that my list publishes.
herdcall 6y ago
Actually, if your goal is to stay up-to-date on specific topics, tools like Discord and Slack are much better IMO because of the way they work to allow two-way communication. Even Reddit is offering a similar setup now. If you do want to continue in Twitter, change your location. I used to follow key topics (like Go and Flutter) on Twitter, but couldn't avoid the nasty "trends" Twitter throws at you that (IMO) are very biased. So, I set my location as Iceland (I live in the US), and after that life has been good. :)

pjc50 6y ago

Via Twitter, ironically: > "Wonder if shaping discourse via a site where performativity is rewarded, single lines can be taken out of context from qualifying threads and piled on, pithy takes are amplified over nuance, and everyone is either Good or Bad, was overall a positive or negative development"

_Microft 6y ago

I'm a longtime lurker on Twitter, the list of people I follow is well-curated. If someone looks like they cause me more trouble than insights, I unfollow or even block them with little hesitation. In this form, Twitter is working great for me. Needless to say that I stay away from politics (and related topics) as much as possible.

viraptor 6y ago
I tried that hard for quite some time but never managed to get a purely on-topic timeline. Follow 10 experts who post mostly about topic X and you'll constantly find at least one of them posting something different at any point. For example you can't subscribe to grugq for political-infosec content without some IRA memes. And I don't mean that other people shouldn't post stuff they want, just that I'd like to see a filtered view of their posts most of the time. After a few iterations I gave up Twitter almost completely.
- dgudkov 6y ago
  That's the problem with Twitter, you can't follow only a subset of tweets of a person that is related to a particular interest of that person. You only can follow everything the person tweets, likes, and retweets (albeit randomly filtered by Twitter's AI logic). Which makes it hard to exclude various nonsense from the feed. I wish Twitter allowed people to tweet into different personal channels, and I could only subscribe to the personal channels I'm interested in. Social networks badly need to evolve. What they are currently is quickly eroding the social fabrics.
matwood 6y ago
On Twitter I also mainly lurk. I've found it to be the best place to get the detailed news I want (for example, Wasserman or Cohn for election result), but know to avoid comments unless I'm looking for pure entertainment. But, I have all Twitter alerts turned off, and only check every few days. I rarely look at my own Twitter timeline and instead go directly to people's timeline who I have found will have the news I'm interested in.
- 6y ago

hooande 6y ago

if twitter is so bad, why do you keep using it?

eptcyka 6y ago
Ever tried smoking?
dustinmoris 6y ago
> if twitter is so bad, why do you keep using it? Did you read what I said? I have stopped using Twitter. I don't tweet, I don't have the app, I don't engage in anything what happens there now. I just occasionally peek in to see if I'm missing out on anything and surprisingly I don't. As a result I see myself (unconsciously) check Twitter less and less.
- sagichmal 6y ago
  > I have stopped using Twitter. > I just occasionally [use Twitter] to see if . . . Hm.
  - dustinmoris 6y ago
    When I switch TV programs I might view a program for 1 minute before I decide that I don’t like the content. The next day when I look for something to watch I might tune into the same TV station again for a minute before moving on. I am not a “user” (viewer) of that TV station despite checking it out for approximately a minute each. My current Twitter “usage” is the same concept. You decide if you call this a Twitter user or not.
XorNot 6y ago
To be fair, we're all "using" Twitter somehow now. It became impossible to ignore when mainstream news would now lead based on what people have tweeted. That's the thing: it's become extremely deeply embedded in our society, since it's damn catnip to 24-hour news (which, IMO, was the originator of this problem - they need content, now, and anything which provides is thrown up there).
6y ago

cblconfederate 6y ago

It s still a good way to follow current events by following specific people or journalists. Switching to chronological mode, aggressively unfollowing the rude people who think that their technical knowledge allows them to plaster their opinions on your face, and changing my location to burundi did it for me.

alborzb 6y ago
Just out of curiosity, what is up with changing location to Burundi? Does that change targeted political ads or something?
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  No more trending topic suggestions. Apparently nothing happens in burundi which is great. It also stopped suggesting me local politicians but i m not sure it's related
jb775 6y ago
>It's still a good way to follow current events This is where the major problem lies and you don't even realize you're complicit in it. The "current events" blasted out on Twitter are curated by Twitter admins to only show what they want to show. They place heavy over-weighting on events and discussion that they want everyone to see. They hide hashtags they don't want trending. They don't show a pure list of what's actually trending. They shadow-ban users that talk about topics they don't want talked about. They give priority to media outlets that are also involved in heavy censorship, therefore adding extra fake credibility to false narratives. And the latest is the whole "Fact check" thing, where they only fact check the discussion that they want discredited (even if it's 100% true). You are an example how censorship is so powerful. When people believe they've found a "good way to follow current events", and refuse to question the accuracy of the medium, they quickly become prone to believing false narratives. Currently, the elites who own the media are doing everything in their power to further the left's agenda. (The active campaign is their attempt to cover up and discredit any discussion of election fraud. Also, you probably didn't hear that Zuckerberg donated half a billion dollars towards democrat vote-counting strategies) Many people want to bury their head in the sand because it aligns with their political beliefs. Hopefully this is a wake up call to some.

f00zz 6y ago

And people get addicted to that thing. I remember when Twitter used to have a tweet counter on people's profiles, and for some people it was running into the tens of thousands.

tosser0001 6y ago

Twitter can feel like YouTube without the videos, just the comments. I especially despise the “trends” sections. It ignores any keywords and sites that you’ve blocked and seems designed to inflame. Dorsey at one point made a big statement about trying to change the tone but I’ve seen little evidence of it. I have a small list of people that I actually follow who tend to keep things civil

victorbstan 6y ago

The best parts for me are speed of news dissemination, like a news headline aggregate. And professional / hobby interests. Those are wholesome.

biztos 6y ago

I had a similar experience with Facebook: I was pretty good at not feeding trolls, but I'd get involved in these long discussions on political topics with apparently well-meaning people and inevitably, someone in the thread would start arguing from either bad faith or an "alternative facts" perspective -- and I'd end up angry and exhausted and having convinced nobody. Now I haven't used Facebook for six weeks (I still use Instagram and Messenger). I don't miss it at all. If I'm bored or tired, every once in a while I'll reflexively start to open it in a browser tab but so far I have always caught myself and not gone into the Zuckerworld. I'm not active on Twitter but I imagine it's more of the same. I doubt if some Alternabook that lets conspiracy theorists go nuts in their own little bubble will make the world a better place, but I'm not convinced it'll be any worse than what Facebook and Twitter have been doing.

chris_wot 6y ago
I am beginning to wonder if social media may have had its heyday. Specifically I’m curious as to whether Facebook and Twitter will start to be used less and less by people, but who won’t abandon it completely. I do wonder if this might make them less useful for advertisers.

cmsefton 6y ago

I've long held the opinion that Twitter and Facebook are just content in the medium, a bit like complaining about Sky, CNN or Fox on TV without looking at television itself and the impact it had on communication. The internet has brought communication to everyone that travels at incredible speed. This has the effect of causing emotive responses, rather than reasoned. Requires no effort at all to respond, and encourages the toxicity you describe. What gains most traction are those posts that are the most emotive. It used to be "if it bleeds, it leads", but I suspect these days it's more akin to "emotion deserves promotion". Speed carries a number of other implications. For example, it allows a cheap, steady stream of constant information that can be completely irrelevant at best to you, plus it's information about which you often can do nothing about, except hit the reply button. This can only make things worse, because people feel powerless except in this superficial way. The other effect is the quantity of information, and it's impossible now for a user of the internet to wade through it, or even validate it without incredible effort. Our current techniques for filtering that information is essentially populist individualism: we rely on what other people have liked, linked to, or shared, but at the same time, read what is presented to us based on our previous interactions. I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that I perhaps pessimistically feel that these things are fundamentally baked into the medium, in much the same way that Neil Postman felt entertainment was intrinsically baked into television. Hopefully I'm wrong, and there are solutions to these things. Not sure what they are myself.

datalus 6y ago
The medium is the message :) [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
- lordgrenville 6y ago
  Well Neil Postman was a friend of McLuhan, and said "I can’t think of a book that I’ve written that I could have written if not for McLuhan". https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/neil-postman-on-technologys-faustian-bargain/ https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/neil-postman-...
6y ago

victorbstan 6y ago

To some extent the top voted post at the moment displays an inherent issue with a lot of people of these platforms. If the message is not pleasant to the reader, either they will engage with it in a reactionary way, or seek to further isolate themselves in information bubbles. (Notwithstanding abusive behaviour, which should not be tolerated)

imgabe 6y ago

You can unfollow people you know. I make it a point to unfollow or mute anyone who's too negative. There's some value in Twitter, but it requires curation.

Nimitz14 6y ago

The only thing you've actually told us with this comment is you follow people who post a lot of drama. Presumably because you like reading it. I have no sympathy.

Kye 6y ago

I had to accept recently that anything trying to emulate Twitter will suffer from the same problems. I wrote about it: https://kyefox.com/2020/09/17/mastodon-shows-its-stripes/ https://kyefox.com/2020/09/17/mastodon-shows-its-stripes/ Since then, my favorite instance was killed by a bunch of irony-poisoned instances ganging up on it to convince others it was a toxic hell (projection!) and defederate from it. The instance was basically dead within a week as people migrated off to avoid losing contact with friends on the fediverse. https://twitter.com/DamienGranz/status/1314710715635204103 https://twitter.com/DamienGranz/status/1314710715635204103 It's not much different from people ganging up on someone on Twitter to report them into an automated suspension.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Wait, I thought that post length was NOT limited on Mastodon ? (That's why I never used Twitter - 140 characters is just too short - I'm not a poet !)
- Kye 6y ago
  The default is 500 characters. Some compatible implementations of ActivityPub have longer limits. Mastodon hides longer posts from those instances behind a link to open the toot[1] and show the whole thing. [1] Instances choose how to render things delivered over ActivityPub. So (for example) Mastodon would render a write.as post as a toot, while write.as might render replies to that toot as comments on a blog post.
golemotron 6y ago
You might like this. Same problem identified before big social: https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

elorant 6y ago

The way I see it, the problem with social media is that you surround yourself with like-minded people, which diminishes your tolerance to different views. People become self righteous and can't take criticism lightly. Compare this to how things were 15 years ago, or how they are in here, where everyone and their dog can challenge your opinion. You become more open minded long term, and can handle criticism in a more mature way.

giantg2 6y ago
Except for the people who simply downvote and never explain their position. Plenty of them on here.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  I'd say that has more to do with the HN platform and its rules. Imho this is one thing that Slashdot does better: it let's you indicate the reason for your vote.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    "I'd say that has more to do with the HN platform and its rules" Isn't that what we are discussing - platforms, their rules, and how that influences discussions? I'm just saying that there are plenty of people, in my experience on here, that would rather downvote an opposing opinion rather than start a discussion about it or answer a question about their own position. I routinely even get downvoted when asking why the previous comment was downvoted. To me, these behaviors are akin to mob-driven censorship of minority opinions - downvote it so it moves down and greys out.
    - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
      Sorry, it looks like I misunderstood your original comment.
- mistermann 6y ago
  It's so interesting...there is this well known phenomenon where ~everyone has at least some bias the vast majority of the time, and in a forum thread where this phenomenon is the specific topic of discussion (say, a psychology paper discussing subconscious bias, and the associated psychological/neurological phenomena that enable it), any significant disagreement (including whether each one of us suffers from it) with this general notion is typically very rare. But then switch over to a different thread where the topic of discussion is not some abstract idea like this, but rather an object level idea, say just for example a news story about conservative leaning people switching to a new social media platform to escape what they consider to be censorship, and something very curious occurs. In such threads, it is rare to encounter much talk about this phenomenon of psychological bias, and if it does come up, it is ~always only about the obvious bias suffered by those who are in the ~"general outgroup" of the forum community. In those cases, it is common to read numerous anecdotal observations of how people in the outgroup(s) are cognitively flawed in that they exhibit signs of "living in a bubble", and "just(!) won't listen to reason or consider ideas that are contrary to their worldview". But then if one is to initiate a conversation with a person in one of these threads, and make a reference to the formerly non-controversial abstract idea (from the psychology thread) that ~all people suffer from some bias, at ~all times, it seems as if all knowledge of that phenomenon has somehow become cognitively inaccessible, that the individual has no knowledge whatsoever of the phenomenon. Conversely, if one is to mention (say, in a different subthread in the same overall thread) this exact same phenomenon, except switching the object of reference away from the person (who was making a biased comment about their outgroup), over to members of the outgroup, this formerly inaccessible knowledge then becomes accessible once again. Just for the sake of discussion (a mental experiment of sorts), let us imagine that there is some significant truth to this theory - let's (temporarily) assume(!) it to be True, at least to a significant degree. In this purely hypothetical scenario, might this phenomenon offer some logical explanation for the amount of extreme polarization of opinion that can be witnessed in the world, this "crisis of epistemology" we talk about where different tribes seem to live in completely different realities from each other, with each reality having significantly different sets of facts? To me, this seems not only reasonable, but quite consistent with objectively observable reality.

SmokeyHamster 6y ago

Yeah, I agree. I still occassionaly read some people I follow on Twitter, but I rarely comment and never read notifications. I also entirely stopped using Reddit for the same reason. IMHO it's even more toxic than Twitter. And don't get me started about Facebook. What is it about politics that takes relatively sane friendly people who you've known for years and transforms them into raging psychopaths? When my own sister found out I didn't think Trump was a literal Nazi, she then proceeded to call me a racist, with all her douchebag "online friends" cheering her on. And before Facebook, we used to get along really well. But now it's like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

Spare_account 6y ago
Every occurrence of "twitter" in the top level comment could have any other social media site substituted and it would read the same and still be entirely accurate (HN is one of the rare exceptions obv.) I've ditched the lot, deleted my reddit and twitter accounts, configured my pihole to block the domains for the occasions that my willpower fails me and my life has improved dramatically.

christophilus 6y ago

I’m only a very light Twitter user, but I cull and curate my feed. It’s mostly funny, positive people in fintwit now, and it’s a good experience. I almost always learn something while flicking through. But yes, I’ve found that without careful curation, it quickly turns into a depressing cesspit. Then again, that’s not unique to Twitter. I culled my contacts in the real world when in high-school and college for the same reasons and to the same effect.

hpcjoe 6y ago
I find that some of my professional colleagues are some of the most toxic posters. I've got many active filters in place, but in some cases, I've simply muted/blocked some of them. Done the same on Facebook, which I use mostly for family communication and posting dad jokes. But again, as hard as I try to separate work / family life, colleagues want to connect and they spew the same tired BS I see elsewhere. So, on FB, I can permanently mute them. Which, I do. If twitter's business model was to be a toxic stew of partisan talk and censorship of "incorrect views", yeah, they nailed it.
croh 6y ago
I noticed same thing some years back. Don't let the social medias work ON you, push trends on you. Ignore all suggestions. Keep it minimal and use only for your personal goals. Importantly stop notifications on cell phone. Facebook I stopped using a while back. It gives me the feeling of universal garbage bag where everyone in a race to impress others. On twitter I follow top people from my domain and ignore everything. No political BS. In LinkedIn, I literally removed all HR connections and started to follow people whom I really adore and take direction from their career path.

theodric 6y ago

You need to get you some better Twitter follows, oof

rangoon626 6y ago

I had the same experience that leads me to delete my account entirely. You have to see it for what it is: An online digital slot machine. The stakes are, well your time and your life. And just like in real life, the house always wins.

epistasis 6y ago

Wow, that's rather shocking to me. I find Twitter to be a fantastic news source, with higher concentration of good links than HN, and often see stuff there far before it shows up ok HN. The thing about Twitter is that it is entirely about who you follow, and what those people talk about and retweet. So if somebody is a source of toxicity, unfollow them. I have a very low threshold for both following and unfollowing. This part, curating your feed, is not trivial, but it is what determines 100% of your experience. I don't blame you at all for having a bad experience and not wanting to use Twitter again! But also realize that it's not the only experience to be had there, and I think that for many, and hopefully most people, it's a positive experience.

kordlessagain 6y ago
Leaving curation to the user means certain users will have good feeds and others will have horrible feeds, with the default being horrible feeds. Thus, Twitter is horrible, no matter the fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience.
- epistasis 6y ago
  The default Twitter lets you select from lists of topics, none of which are very toxic unless you ease into confrontational politics. If this default is "horrible" can you say more about that? > fake emotional output of a single user's anecdotal experience What do you mean by this? What is the emotional output and what is fake? Are you talking about my single user's experience, or that of the person I replied to?

smallnamespace 6y ago

> Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous. People are posting so much shit it’s unbelievable how much time they waste of their lives there. One huge thread after another, people crying for attention. > I was part of the problem too. Not to be overly personal here, but doesn't this post veer close to describing itself?

kordlessagain 6y ago
Oversharing is a thing with modern media. But, does the emotional response really feel different than in person interactions?
tshaddox 6y ago
Very close? That’s precisely what this post is!

laser 6y ago

Learn to get the Twitter algorithm on your side! https://ibb.co/3BFQZhb https://ibb.co/3BFQZhb Look at how many negative words are in this post of yours and hopefully see the irony of what you’re saying. Twitter isn’t magic, it can only give you what it thinks you want from what you give it!

Fjolsvith 6y ago
Until censorship.

greggman3 6y ago

I am not a twitter user really. I check it maybe once every 2-3 weeks at most. But,.... It really depends on who you follow. I follow a few indie game dev friends and unfollow if one of them starts posting political stuff. My feed is mostly cool info about indie games in unity, unreal, pico-8, some graphics info. Very little bad stuff except for twitter itself with it inserting ads and trying to get me to follow "popular" people I have zero interest in or posting "trending" crap. Some of that I've managed to ublock origin away though of course it's extremely frustrating that both twitter and facebook obfuscate their css

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Strongly agree. If you’re seeing Tweets that make you angry, unfollow that person. It’s really as simple as that. If someone doesn’t have the willpower to avoid anger-inducing follows and tweets, deleting Twitter entirely is a good option. For everyone else, it’s really not difficult to curate your feed to be more reasonable. Use the unfollow button liberally.

Natsu 6y ago

It took me a while to realize what Twitter was. At first, it was described as "micro blogging" and it sorta looked like people just text messaging to the world with shades of IRC. But I eventually realized what it really is: a gossip site. With all the mean gossip anyone could ever want. I pretty much just ignore it now.

roland35 6y ago

I look at twitter discussions and it honestly like like a lot of people are just shouting past each other. I don't think anyone is out to win hearts and minds out there...

fullshark 6y ago
They are shouting past each other, because they aren't talking to each other, they are talking for a hypothetical audience, cheering them on.

karaterobot 6y ago

I haven't used Twitter or Facebook since about 2007. People say they need to use these platforms to stay on top of what's happening in the world, but I have not found that to be true at all. If something is important, I hear about it about an hour after everyone else, and then read up on it if I want to. What gets thrown out by that filter is all the inconsequential news, and gossip, and speculation, and learning people's knee-jerk reactions before you've had a chance to make up your own mind. You can still seek out all that stuff if you have the impulse, but you aren't being fed it intravenously all the time. This is all by way of saying that the cost of just cutting these platforms out of your life altogether is pretty low, and there are some benefits.

whatever_dude 6y ago

Twitter is a hellfire, but it still has value if well controlled. I use a third-party client and added dozens of muted word (eg anything political or covid related) and it's amazing; it's a bit of a escape even. Once I realized I don't have any obligation to mind the Latest Piece of Shitty News 24/7, I'm a much better online social media user. I still read the news every day (Feedly) and know what's going on, but it's compartmentalized.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

I long for the old IRC days...when you can open a room on DalNet and talk to a small group of like minded people about what you are interested in and curious about..invite/kick those who get obnoxious. It was cozy and I’d give anything to get an online community where we all get along and where it’s ok to be open to new ideas. Most of the BBS and IRC rooms I frequented had little to no moderation. Flamewars occurred, but everyone eventually calmed the fuck down..you just have to let it burn out almost like how you’d allow a child to have his tantrum and then it’s back to life as usual. I think moderation and rules are making communication worse. Anyone who has been in a marriage or a relationship can maybe attest to the fact that in the fiery instances where we don’t sit down and ‘figure out rules of engagement’ burn out fast. When there are rules for the emotional pressure valves to be released, arguments and disagreements become nested and multi layered. In today’s world..we are all toddlers and/or married to each other on social media and Twitter, FB et al have become our nannies creating and putting out meltdowns and tantrums at the same time. Having said that, IG is still my favourite. Except that they are allergic to images of certain parts of the human anatomy and sometimes even onions can be too sexy for their nipple detection algorithms..but otherwise it’s brimming with joy and positivity.

holler 6y ago
I miss those days too! I used to spend a lot of time in #efnet and #dalnet, speaking to strangers about things like #skateboarding and other random topics. It was kind of cool because back then most people didn't know what irc was, nor did they have the prowess to download, install, and configure a client. Mirc was the jam. I'm working on a new open chat site, https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im, and hoping to recapture some of that essence. Particularly the simplicity, and lack of overly strict moderation like you describe. Irc never hit mainstream because the majority of users would never download and install a client, but it's neat that with modern web technology we can finally build these experiences in a way that general users can enjoy.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Checked it out. I like the simplicity of the design. The font/size is a little odd for my eyes but I can get used to it.(maybe because I am seeing it on my phone) I am unsure tho how to navigate to get to the chat rooms. ETA: ahhh! I got it! Will there be some form of indexing? Eta2: can I describe it this way: the author of a topic of discussion is the moderator of the topic?

john_moscow 6y ago

You are not alone in this. There are actually tens of alternative social media sites started by people who are fed up with the status quo. For starters, here's a good maintained list: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...

trentnix 6y ago

I've aggressively sanitized my Twitter and Instagram to make sure it's little more than an easy way to see posts about computing, video games, vinyl records, or whatever nerdity I'm into at the moment. The moment one of those accounts posts something related to the outrage du jour, it's an almost immediate unfollow. It doesn't matter whether I agree with the content of the post or not. I'm sure I miss a few from time to time, but you get the point. I've unfollowed lots of tech luminaries I admire, lots of musicians whose music I love, lots of brands that make good products. And I still buy some of the books and albums and products they produce. I might even miss the occasional awesome announcement from one of those outlets. But the resulting sanity and focus of my social media feeds is worth it.

mmm_grayons 6y ago
That's the frustrating thing. I was convinced to try using a twitter account by a friend who talked about how great it is to follow interesting tech people. For some cases, I guess it could be. But the problem is, everyone seems to also tweet about current political stuff, and I have no interest in seeing that at every turn. I know "stop talking about politics everywhere" is trite, but stop talking about politics everywhere.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  It shouldn’t be seen as trite to want rest and reprieve from the psychologically exhaustive nature of “always on” political engagement[1]-especially in times such as these, but I completely understand what you’re getting at, and to my own individual extents: I agree with you. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-too-much-political-news-bad-happiness/616651/ https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-t...

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I did that years ago. Twitter is an even bigger cesspool than youtube comments and facebook. I use facebook but only for the messenger.

nullsense 6y ago

>Everyone is so negative, pessimistic, judgemental, sarcastic in tone, confrontational, and self righteous Welcome to planet earth. We hope you enjoy your stay.

swyx 6y ago

great job pivoting to posting negative stuff on Hacker news then

leobakerhytch 6y ago

Just to bring to levity to this discussion, your quote very much brings to mind the hilarious and ever-relevant Four Yorkshiremen[0] sketch from Monty Python. Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.' [0]: https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE

bmcahren 6y ago

You seem to have engaged with this content and followed networks of people who also engage. My twitter is a very engineering-forward happy place. Sorry you got the you know what end of the algorithm stick. I feel in some way this was self-fulfilling?