8 ms·

“It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

81 points by prawn 6y ago

adzzzz 6y ago
In her case it was not cancel culture seeking her out to ruin her life. Assumedly no one doxxed her, sent death threats, or attempted to get her fired from her job and made a pariah so she can never support herself again. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In before it's just holding people accountable. If you want to go that route there was no red scare. Joe McCarthy was just holding people accountable.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  You're addressing people who haven't replied to you yet.
  - adzzzz 6y ago
    I've seen enough of the bad faith "accountability" arguments in favor of cancel culture to know the common refrain.
    - 66johnus 6y ago
      What common refrain is this exactly? That holding public individuals accountable is some how wrong, and equivalent to the cold war and Joe McCarthy? You can't excoriate bad faith arguments when you're doing this in return. You sure you don't want to compare your opponents to Nazis and Hitler too?
- heterodoxxed 6y ago
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  - adzzzz 6y ago
    Yes those are good examples of cancel culture. What point are you trying to make or are you just making assumptions about me?
    - heterodoxxed 6y ago
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      - adzzzz 6y ago
        Cancel culture isn't bound by politics, ethnicity, gender, etc. American conservatives are equally as guilty of this as progressives.
        heterodoxxed 6y ago
        ⠀
        adzzzz 6y ago
        the specific "Her" I was referencing was the journalist that was the subject of the linked article.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Joe McCarthy was operating with the force of government backing him in (to modern eyes) a pretty clear violation of First Amendment protections.
  - adzzzz 6y ago
    No politicians today participate in cancel culture? I doubt it. Regardless let's use a non political example. I assume if the issue is "force of government" then you were 100% okay with the Hollywood Blacklists? (Generally accepted to be part of MCCarthyism) After all that's basically analogous to deplatforming and it was private companies that were doing it with no force of government. Do you support the Hollywood blacklists?
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      I disagree with the studios' reasons for doing it (it was dressed up as a patriotic move, but was fairly thinly-veiled anti-labor action intended to disrupt the growing trend towards unionization in the entertainment industry). But as political affiliation was not (and for pretty obvious reasons, probably should not be, California's subsequent state-level decisions notwithstanding) a protected employment class, they certainly had the right to do it. The HUAC is a different story. (You take away the studios' right to blacklist communists and you take away their right to blacklist KKK members at the same time. It's a step I'm not personally comfortable with. And especially in the modern era, when the technology is cheaper and more decentralized, I prefer to see the solution to such things be competition to the Hollywood system instead of tying Hollywood's hands on political matters.)
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    If Joe McCarthy operated through Twitter instead and privately convinced private companies/individuals to take action on marked individuals, would it be any less of a cancellation? Government backing certainly made it worse, but I'd think many disagree with McCarthyism because of what he did rather than how he did it.
- test_alpha 6y ago
  It's still going on - a far more recent red scare that that badly fooled probably most people here and is still fresh in minds despite the awkward embarrassment to ever admit wrongdoing is the Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election conspiracy theory.
justinzollars 6y ago
I deleted my Twitter and I feel great after doing so. I believe Twitter is a platform where San Francisco exports its social problems to the rest of the world. The result is riots, chaos and hate.
- justinzollars 6y ago
  ^ oops. I gave a bad opinion. :p
  - vore 6y ago
    Are you implying that people aren't allowed to... disagree with you...?
- judge2020 6y ago
  There's still going to be riots, chaos, and hate regardless of if we have Twitter or not; the internet or not. Most revolutions throughout history have been accomplished via riots and wars have been fought over hate.
- starkd 6y ago
  Twitter is the worst of the social media. Messages that are at most 280 characters without any context are bound to be misinterpreted. If you're on it long enough, it starts to feel like the world is random, crazy and spinning out of control. For me, it was the easiest one to delete.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Riots, chaos, and hate existed well before Twitter and even well before San Francisco.
  - yurielt 6y ago
    Yes but they import what is considering offensive as well as their social movements outside of there and people only care about those things even when there are more important and pressing issues in their local communities, see for example Poland lots of marches in favour of blm even in places where there is less than 0.1% of melanated population or even in places where there is n o data about police brutality. Meanwhile real social issues go unnoticed all because of the American cultural export and their ideological social imperialism. And I am not saying that the things that affect SF don't affect anyone else but MOST issues in SF are different from the rest of the planet and focusing on what the bay people are yelling about on a global scale wont help .
MattGaiser 6y ago
This phenomenon is hardly unique to Twitter or social media. It happens all the time in schools. The local town newspaper could set off these sorts of things too (or national media). I suspect it could happen in any case where there is widespread (relative to audience) information discovery of something and people who are all too happy to be mad at people.
tqi 6y ago
Implicitly, this piece is making an argument for a return to gate keepers/taste makers of yore. I'm not sure that's better. For better or worse, would the BLM movement have the power and reach it does today if it were filtered through establishment news sources?
- Casadaro-labs 6y ago
  It was filtered through establishment news sources.
  - hervature 6y ago
    Right, but not on social media. The OP's point.
    - nemo44x 6y ago
      So called establishment media has in no way been critical of the movement though. Or other adjacent “movements” or ideas. They couldn’t be even if they wanted and that is the problem. You can’t really trust dishonest media that runs on fear. “Twitter is not on the masthead of the NYT, but it has become its editor.”
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  Assuming BLM is a force for good.
  - heterodoxxed 6y ago
    ⠀
    - skinkestek 6y ago
      and - killing of innocent people, cops and others - large scale looting and burning of shops - often smaller stores owned by minorities AFAIK I'm even afraid BLM has gotten many to question the whole story.
hooande 6y ago
I think the issue here is human socialization and not twitter or technology. People love to play the "did you see what so-and-so said?" game in all its variants, and as far as I can tell this has been true for millenia. It has nothing to do with a trending topics feature I feel like there are many articles and books that attribute basic elements of human interaction to whatever platform the author was using to observe them. Technology does enable new ways to relate and creates some unique situations. But the basic beats of these social phenomena are the same as they have been for a very long time
- refenestrator 6y ago
  Yes, and. Twitter being a nationally unified space of gossipy people, with journalists who actually write the narrative being addicted to the gossip as well... There were multiple actual news stories about this stupid Alien tweet! Sure, they weren't front page at the NYT but this stuff is melting the brains of all the journalists, who then go on to melt the normies brains with it.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Journalists using it for a source of news was strange to me until I happened upon a journalism job posting for Post Media, a major news chain up here in Canada. The job required 5 stories a day. So you basically need at least one piece that takes a half hour to write and Twitter is good for that.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- yuliyp 6y ago
  I think technology is changing which kinds of gossip get spread. It used to be either things you heard directly from the people in your circle, or on tv / newspapers / magazines. Now it's algorithmically determined to be the stuff that's most likely to be shared out of a giant planet of random gossip. Algorithms reinforcing these kinds of vices make it far more extreme.
david422 6y ago
I never got on the twitter boat. After reading articles like this, I'm glad I never did. However, why doesn't everybody else get off? People must like it enough? Then the cycle will never end.
- wrnr 6y ago
  IMHO Twitter is great, I think I find more interesting things there then HN. I't more how you curate your own feed, don't follow people that are "political" or have some "agenda". My feed is mostly about math, art, physics and EU policy level discussions. Same thing with youtube, you just have to train the AI so it knows the sort of things you like. And don't comment, no one cares.
  - Gracana 6y ago
    Same here. I like using twitter, it connects me with a lot of amazing people in my various hobby communities. Retro computers, cars, ham radio... It's fun to be able to talk to folks I hear / hear about in podcasts, blogs, and youtube videos. But... that's definitely a "bubble." People aren't wrong about how awful twitter is for debate. It works for me because I talk to people with shared interests and values. Arguments rarely work, the short message length and fast pace make it difficult to do anything other than play for points.
  - sevilo 6y ago
    But why? Something I never understand about Twitter is, for your claim, people who have interesting things to say and you want to read about. Why would people be interested in reading a huge essay broken down to 50 tweets instead of just reading a blog posts where you can post comments and discussions in a fashion that makes sense and doesn’t lose the context of the original topic?
    - taylodl 6y ago
      You don't read a huge essay broken down into 50 tweets - that's not how it works. In that case they'd just post a link to the essay. The point is twitter helped you discover the essay in the first place. If you've carefully curated your timeline then twitter acts as a content filter for the content you're actually interested in. Over time I've simply lost interest in such content curation, but others may still find it valuable.
CivBase 6y ago
> Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  What Marshall McLuhan said.
  - recuter 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk
- yurielt 6y ago
  This, so much of this. Twitter will just never be the best of the ways to have actual conversations. You just have to ask yourself when has anyone left a twitter exchange with their mind changed? I mean is not like impossible that being said I doubt is a high percentage. In top of that add the fact that a lot of people that grew up on tumblr (with its own h way of having conversations and with its won metalanguage) became a big part of the social justice movements in twitter and you have the perfect explosion. I honestly do not mean that actual and real accountability is bad however when the mob attacks somebody like Joe Rogan they just made him more famous, but when they attack somebody like the kid that said "n*ga guacamoles p*nis" the result is much different. A kid that didnt know quite better had his life destroyed and the lifelihood of his parents too. For those that do not know the life of thta kid and his parents got destroyed. SO instead of accountability and people evolving the dialogue and getting better you have this neopuritan mob destroying lifes, dividing people more and ultimately not changing the incorrect ways of anyone instead you just entrench their positions further. Is cannibalistic.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Twitter is good to make short announcements that everyone interested can receive. But the majority of exchange is someone publishing something interesting, a couple of people add something constructive and the enormous tail after that is people trying for brownie points by trying to prove they know more, trying to bring some forced social relevance/intersectionality and a bunch piling on like a yo mama joke that's run its course but the kids who can't do jokes make ham-fisted attempts and pile on more disconnected nonsense.
TechBro8615 6y ago
It's a waste of time is what it is. We don't actually need so many people in the world. So there are a bunch of folks with no real purpose who are bored. They spend their time doom scrolling and pulling others into their void. Some of them also feel the need to vocalize. It would be far better if we just paid everyone $4k a month and otherwise we all minded our own business.
- dexwiz 6y ago
  Scrooge in A Christmas Carol complains about the “excess population,” but I doubt he would support a UBI. Either way, complaining about too many people is not a new notion. The human race is not a machine to be optimized.
eitland 6y ago
I remember seing twitter early on and thinking it wasn't too impressive but guessed it was just an MVP and it could become fantastic in a couple of years when they added groups and topics and machine-to-machine and became a messaging backbone of the internet. Instead they doubled down on being a massive high intensity low value channel: technically impressive yet sad.
shadowgovt 6y ago
I don't know what the future of human interaction looks like on a global-scale omnidirectional communications medium... ... But Twitter ain't it. I deleted my account years ago and have never been happier.
sthnblllII 6y ago
Its not cancel culture because no one was cancelled. A woman posted a shallow and clechéd understanding of what a horror movie is and it went viral. She wasn't banned for "community guidelines", she wasn't fired from her job she didn't have her paypal confiscated. She got some angry emails and retweets for a flippant opinion of the kind she regularly makes irl with zero consequences. This is rule 37 in action and blaming "platforms" is just a call to actually cancel people the author disagrees with. There is a problem with platforms. But the problem is that they encourage unsuspecting and naive people to pimp their every thought and action for attention from internet strangers in exchange for getting blasted with targeted ads.
- cdash 6y ago
  No, it wasn't cancel culture but I would say it is the roots cancel culture grows from.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > the problem is that they encourage unsuspecting and naive people to pimp their every thought and action for attention from internet strangers in exchange for getting blasted with targeted ads. I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this (I just upvoted you), it's spot on. My tl/dr for the incident described in the story was "idiot treats Twitter like it's the group of friends she's at the bar with, the expected happens, idiot is surprised". It's a "platform failure", in the sense that hawking addictive products to people naive enough to use them does not speak well for the people who do it; in this case they did it with a platform on the Internet. But the general problem is much older than the Internet and I don't expect it to change any time soon.
temp8964 6y ago
> "We Need To Get Rid Of Twitter Trending Topics" "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists. Twitter is not about cancel culture. It's about using outrage to increase engagement. Cancel culture is just one natural outcome of the outrage machine. Cancel culture increases engagement from both sides and Twitter just loves it.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  > "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Had a short internal argument if I should downvote you for the line above or upvote you for the rest of your comment. Ended on upvote, but if you harvest downvotes that likely is the culprit.
  - temp8964 6y ago
    I did have a point on that sentence, but didn't expand on that. Actually I did know the tone is bad. I guess the idea is that "we" as public interest conflicts with Twitter's corporate interest, but "we" can't tell Twitter to do what "we" want.
- WalterGR 6y ago
  "Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists." Do you have proof for this? What distinguishes the writing of a professional outrage activist vs. an amateur outrage activist? What's the difference between an activist and an outrage activist? I hope it isn't whether you agree with that particular bit of outrage or not. Without proof of your claims, is your comment outrage about alleged outrage?
- whichquestion 6y ago
  The outrage pieces are only a slice of things that engage people. People can be engaged by things that amuse and entertain, things that inform, as well and those kinds of things make their way to trending frequently. Twitter feels more like a multi faceted vehicle, where cancel culture and outrage culture are well represented pieces of the bigger media machine.
xwdv 6y ago
Some form of this is happening to me on hackernews as we speak. A long time ago, I had a lot of karma, almost a thousand. I was a model citizen for HN. But at some point, I must have posted a controversial opinion, and then HN decided they wanted to cancel me. If it wasn’t for a downvote limit per post, my karma would be below zero by now. Instead it has dwindled and deteriorated slowly over time, trending toward nothing. Nothing I do will move the needle to recover my karma, I’ve simply accepted that someday my karma will be so low that I’ll be shadow banned forever. Part of this is my own fault, as my posting habits changed to more bitter and cynical tones as a result of knowing that no matter what I say I will accrue inexplicable downvotes, so why spend effort softening my words? But it’s amazing that sometimes a completely mundane post suddenly has -4 downvotes out of nowhere. I wish I could see a plot of my karma over time, and know the exact point it all went wrong, so that perhaps I could learn and conform a bit better to the popular opinion. Unfortunately I know of no such tool.
- Yaa101 6y ago
  Same here, it is like some people on here take any chance to down vote you at any given opportunity over mundane stuff.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  If you think someone is systematically downvoting you, you could email dang and ask him to look for a pattern of who's doing the downvoting. I'm sure he has the tools to do that. I'm also sure that stalking someone to downvote all their posts is against at least the spirit of HN, and probably against the letter of some of the guidelines.
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    Seconded. It might take a couple of days to get an answer but I always get one. As mentioned above I took a look at the first few pages of your lates comments and I too felt there might be something in your case. That said I also do expect HN to have scripts to detect serial downvoters and automatic voting.
- skinkestek 6y ago
saul_goodman 6y ago
False. Sure, platform failure as described is a real thing. But the point here assumes that there are not roving gangs of people who have weaponized this platform failure as a form of virtue signaling. Again, until you've had a few thousand people attempt to cancel you for a misunderstanding it's easy to keep repeating the lie that cancel culture doesn't exist. It does. It's real. And claiming it doesn't exist is the snake eating itself.
Waterluvian 6y ago
As shown with the horror movie tweets, literally anything said can offend someone. This is why I created a new social media platform for Cancel culture. https://cancel.pointless.click https://cancel.pointless.click
- eitland 6y ago
  Beautiful satire :-) BTW: if you own the whole pointless.click domain you could rent out subdomains, at least I instantly wanted one (or maybe you use them yourself already, I just don't find anything on pointless.click)
  - Waterluvian 6y ago
    Thanks! It's my favourite joke so far. My pet projects go on this domain.https://todays.pointless.click https://todays.pointless.click is my neglected home page. Never thought anyone would want a subdomain on it!
isoskeles 6y ago
> Wanna singlehandedly stop a disinfo catastrophe in October? > Tell Twitter to eliminate Trending Topics for the whole month. > Gaming Trending Topics was Wikileaks' strategy. It's how Pizzagate emerged from the fringe. Pizzagate "emerged" from 4chan or 8chan, not as a Wikileaks' strategy. If we're going to talk about bad faith interpretations or "context collapse", I'd like to see an example that isn't so clearly false, almost to the point of it just being political bullshit. I followed the logic of this story right up until it jumped into this nonsense.
temp-dude-87844 6y ago
The article title is a misquote [1] from the interviewed subject of the article, in which the subject recounts a situation where their mundane tweet was replied to thousands of times, and was trending before and after because of a Twitter feature designed to highlight high-interaction tweeets from verified accounts. This is essentially clickbait, because it sets up an expectation in the reader that cancel culture may be involved. I have a low opinion of intentionally manipulative titles, and consider them to be a platform failure. [1] It's literally a misquote, because the interviewed subject is in truth even more dismissive of the concept of cancel culture, but all of this is a red herring, because no one in their right mind ought to think this bizarre situation was a manifestation of cancel culture. Don't pick this apart uncharitably, my assertion does not preclude from "people in their right mind" nonetheless believing in cancel culture; my assertion is that no one in their right mind should think that This bizarre incident was a manifestation of cancel culture. Nonetheless, the writer does have a point. The 'trending' feature was easily manipulated in the past, and now that it's been changed to add some editorial commentary, it's now complete nonsense masquerading as newsworthy happenings. But the whole site has been like that since retweets were added, where everyone is just trying to ride the coattails of being adjacent to a viral tweet and go viral themselves. Lots of people claim they get value out of Twitter, but when you listen to their example, they invariable engage in curation of their friends and the people they follow, and stick to interest-based communities rather than bored people shitposting. There's no value in Twitter-at-large, except to the trolls and people who seek fame or infamy for its own sake. But where the writer falls short is they don't present a clear alternative. They point a laser pointer at some bizarre event that only a few thousand people know about that blowed up a blue-check person's phone for a day, conclude the whole site a cesspool, and ask us to ponder in our hearts if we deserve something better. Yes, we do, and we use those sites, like this one, and engage with those communities instead. And I think a lot of people do. Yet some people still use Twitter too, so perhaps it fulfills a genuine demand for something after all.
jancsika 6y ago
What would happen if there was an app that helped victims of Twitter pile-ons start tweeting generic political hot-potato non-sequiturs when something like this happens? E.g., * Stop the Uyghur Genocide * Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times * a UK judge found U.S. detainment conditions so brutal they refused to extradite Assange to the U.S. etc. Now the recommendation engine can do one of two things: boost the hot-potato and bring heat from the relevant nation state actor(s), or ratchet down the noise and eat the cost of the lost engagement. Edit: replace "app" with "static site with an unordered list of such geopolitical hot-potato non-sequiturs"
hintymad 6y ago
Isn't it an education failure? Somehow we educated a generation of angry people who favor "narratives" over facts, who favor mind-reading or attack-of-motives over rigorous debates, who favor what justice or righteousness in their mind over tolerance, who favor emotion over truthfulness. With growing number of such people, I don't see how a platform can help. On the other hand, the same group of people will be in charge of platform, like what see in Twitter.
mr_toad 6y ago
I don’t see what the fuss is about. “Alien wasn’t a horror movie”: just run of the mill flame-bait that started a flame war. Anyone who actually took it seriously needs to chill out. And Kevin Smith should make a second movie. And Event Horizon sucked.
strange_things 6y ago
It’s not Platform Failure, it’s culture failure. I never have and never will use twitter as it it too toxic for any well adjusted human to use. This applies to all social media: facebook, instagram, twitter, tik tok, ... If people just stop using these abhorrent apps all of these issues will be diminished as never in the history of humanity has each single human had so much access to ... other humans which are not well composed together and are ready to jump and argue on anything for a bit of dopamine (same as me actually right now, arguing against twitter. I’m part of the problem)
niceairport 6y ago
I mean to be fair, the opinion expressed in the tweet in question was pretty dumb.
jhanschoo 6y ago
It's interesting that naively you can't prevent "context collapse" and "filter bubble" at simultaneously: you must allow for people to be exposed to and engage in topics they don't really know anything about or contribute constructively in, or wall them off only into the communities that they participate in. There are probably nuanced and ingenious solutions to this, but nothing straightforward.
Koiwai 6y ago
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people", I quote this metaphorically, Twitter is used by Cancel Culture, yet you blame Twitter, that's typical Cancel Culture.
tonfreed 6y ago
Twitter rewards being a dickhead. It was fun when everyone was allowed to be a dickhead, but now there's a protected class that cannot be criticised and freely sends death threats and the like to whatever bad guy they think they have that day. This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
It's easy to formulate it this way, but the sad reality is that these are actual people reacting in this way, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes because it fits their worldview, sometimes because they believe that by expressing their anger they will really make the world a better place. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform, digital or analog. Social media just acts like an amplifier for all possible opinions. It's a common theme, actually: many people believe that everything they don't like should be eliminated. That's exactly the opposite of one of the best developments of our civilization: that many cultures and people with completely different worldview can live peacefully next to each other and even collaborate for the common good.
b215826 6y ago
Cigarette use was very common among people before it was shown that nicotine is a carcinogen. Since then, people have cut down cigarette usage drastically and most countries now require manufacturers to have warning labels on cigarette packets. I hope social media services suffer the same fate. It was cool to be on social media when it was new and people were genuinely happy that they could keep in touch with their friends and relatives so easily. Since then, harmful effects of social media—from privacy concerns to disinformation to psychological problems induced by their usage—have been widely discussed and established. So, just like it happened with cigarettes, I think it's time for people to collectively reject social media services and go back to communicating and expressing their thoughts like they did before.

81 points by prawn 6y ago

In her case it was not cancel culture seeking her out to ruin her life. Assumedly no one doxxed her, sent death threats, or attempted to get her fired from her job and made a pariah so she can never support herself again. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In before it's just holding people accountable. If you want to go that route there was no red scare. Joe McCarthy was just holding people accountable.

happytoexplain 6y ago
You're addressing people who haven't replied to you yet.
- adzzzz 6y ago
  I've seen enough of the bad faith "accountability" arguments in favor of cancel culture to know the common refrain.
  - 66johnus 6y ago
    What common refrain is this exactly? That holding public individuals accountable is some how wrong, and equivalent to the cold war and Joe McCarthy? You can't excoriate bad faith arguments when you're doing this in return. You sure you don't want to compare your opponents to Nazis and Hitler too?
heterodoxxed 6y ago
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- adzzzz 6y ago
  Yes those are good examples of cancel culture. What point are you trying to make or are you just making assumptions about me?
  - heterodoxxed 6y ago
    ⠀
    - adzzzz 6y ago
      Cancel culture isn't bound by politics, ethnicity, gender, etc. American conservatives are equally as guilty of this as progressives.
      - heterodoxxed 6y ago
        ⠀
        adzzzz 6y ago
        the specific "Her" I was referencing was the journalist that was the subject of the linked article.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
shadowgovt 6y ago
Joe McCarthy was operating with the force of government backing him in (to modern eyes) a pretty clear violation of First Amendment protections.
- adzzzz 6y ago
  No politicians today participate in cancel culture? I doubt it. Regardless let's use a non political example. I assume if the issue is "force of government" then you were 100% okay with the Hollywood Blacklists? (Generally accepted to be part of MCCarthyism) After all that's basically analogous to deplatforming and it was private companies that were doing it with no force of government. Do you support the Hollywood blacklists?
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I disagree with the studios' reasons for doing it (it was dressed up as a patriotic move, but was fairly thinly-veiled anti-labor action intended to disrupt the growing trend towards unionization in the entertainment industry). But as political affiliation was not (and for pretty obvious reasons, probably should not be, California's subsequent state-level decisions notwithstanding) a protected employment class, they certainly had the right to do it. The HUAC is a different story. (You take away the studios' right to blacklist communists and you take away their right to blacklist KKK members at the same time. It's a step I'm not personally comfortable with. And especially in the modern era, when the technology is cheaper and more decentralized, I prefer to see the solution to such things be competition to the Hollywood system instead of tying Hollywood's hands on political matters.)
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  If Joe McCarthy operated through Twitter instead and privately convinced private companies/individuals to take action on marked individuals, would it be any less of a cancellation? Government backing certainly made it worse, but I'd think many disagree with McCarthyism because of what he did rather than how he did it.
test_alpha 6y ago
It's still going on - a far more recent red scare that that badly fooled probably most people here and is still fresh in minds despite the awkward embarrassment to ever admit wrongdoing is the Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election conspiracy theory.

justinzollars 6y ago

I deleted my Twitter and I feel great after doing so. I believe Twitter is a platform where San Francisco exports its social problems to the rest of the world. The result is riots, chaos and hate.

justinzollars 6y ago
^ oops. I gave a bad opinion. :p
- vore 6y ago
  Are you implying that people aren't allowed to... disagree with you...?
judge2020 6y ago
There's still going to be riots, chaos, and hate regardless of if we have Twitter or not; the internet or not. Most revolutions throughout history have been accomplished via riots and wars have been fought over hate.
starkd 6y ago
Twitter is the worst of the social media. Messages that are at most 280 characters without any context are bound to be misinterpreted. If you're on it long enough, it starts to feel like the world is random, crazy and spinning out of control. For me, it was the easiest one to delete.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Riots, chaos, and hate existed well before Twitter and even well before San Francisco.
- yurielt 6y ago
  Yes but they import what is considering offensive as well as their social movements outside of there and people only care about those things even when there are more important and pressing issues in their local communities, see for example Poland lots of marches in favour of blm even in places where there is less than 0.1% of melanated population or even in places where there is n o data about police brutality. Meanwhile real social issues go unnoticed all because of the American cultural export and their ideological social imperialism. And I am not saying that the things that affect SF don't affect anyone else but MOST issues in SF are different from the rest of the planet and focusing on what the bay people are yelling about on a global scale wont help .

MattGaiser 6y ago

This phenomenon is hardly unique to Twitter or social media. It happens all the time in schools. The local town newspaper could set off these sorts of things too (or national media). I suspect it could happen in any case where there is widespread (relative to audience) information discovery of something and people who are all too happy to be mad at people.

tqi 6y ago

Implicitly, this piece is making an argument for a return to gate keepers/taste makers of yore. I'm not sure that's better. For better or worse, would the BLM movement have the power and reach it does today if it were filtered through establishment news sources?

Casadaro-labs 6y ago
It was filtered through establishment news sources.
- hervature 6y ago
  Right, but not on social media. The OP's point.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    So called establishment media has in no way been critical of the movement though. Or other adjacent “movements” or ideas. They couldn’t be even if they wanted and that is the problem. You can’t really trust dishonest media that runs on fear. “Twitter is not on the masthead of the NYT, but it has become its editor.”
marshmallow_12 6y ago
Assuming BLM is a force for good.
- heterodoxxed 6y ago
  ⠀
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    and - killing of innocent people, cops and others - large scale looting and burning of shops - often smaller stores owned by minorities AFAIK I'm even afraid BLM has gotten many to question the whole story.

hooande 6y ago

I think the issue here is human socialization and not twitter or technology. People love to play the "did you see what so-and-so said?" game in all its variants, and as far as I can tell this has been true for millenia. It has nothing to do with a trending topics feature I feel like there are many articles and books that attribute basic elements of human interaction to whatever platform the author was using to observe them. Technology does enable new ways to relate and creates some unique situations. But the basic beats of these social phenomena are the same as they have been for a very long time

refenestrator 6y ago
Yes, and. Twitter being a nationally unified space of gossipy people, with journalists who actually write the narrative being addicted to the gossip as well... There were multiple actual news stories about this stupid Alien tweet! Sure, they weren't front page at the NYT but this stuff is melting the brains of all the journalists, who then go on to melt the normies brains with it.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Journalists using it for a source of news was strange to me until I happened upon a journalism job posting for Post Media, a major news chain up here in Canada. The job required 5 stories a day. So you basically need at least one piece that takes a half hour to write and Twitter is good for that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
yuliyp 6y ago
I think technology is changing which kinds of gossip get spread. It used to be either things you heard directly from the people in your circle, or on tv / newspapers / magazines. Now it's algorithmically determined to be the stuff that's most likely to be shared out of a giant planet of random gossip. Algorithms reinforcing these kinds of vices make it far more extreme.

david422 6y ago

I never got on the twitter boat. After reading articles like this, I'm glad I never did. However, why doesn't everybody else get off? People must like it enough? Then the cycle will never end.

wrnr 6y ago
IMHO Twitter is great, I think I find more interesting things there then HN. I't more how you curate your own feed, don't follow people that are "political" or have some "agenda". My feed is mostly about math, art, physics and EU policy level discussions. Same thing with youtube, you just have to train the AI so it knows the sort of things you like. And don't comment, no one cares.
- Gracana 6y ago
  Same here. I like using twitter, it connects me with a lot of amazing people in my various hobby communities. Retro computers, cars, ham radio... It's fun to be able to talk to folks I hear / hear about in podcasts, blogs, and youtube videos. But... that's definitely a "bubble." People aren't wrong about how awful twitter is for debate. It works for me because I talk to people with shared interests and values. Arguments rarely work, the short message length and fast pace make it difficult to do anything other than play for points.
- sevilo 6y ago
  But why? Something I never understand about Twitter is, for your claim, people who have interesting things to say and you want to read about. Why would people be interested in reading a huge essay broken down to 50 tweets instead of just reading a blog posts where you can post comments and discussions in a fashion that makes sense and doesn’t lose the context of the original topic?
  - taylodl 6y ago
    You don't read a huge essay broken down into 50 tweets - that's not how it works. In that case they'd just post a link to the essay. The point is twitter helped you discover the essay in the first place. If you've carefully curated your timeline then twitter acts as a content filter for the content you're actually interested in. Over time I've simply lost interest in such content curation, but others may still find it valuable.

CivBase 6y ago

> Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.

hindsightbias 6y ago
What Marshall McLuhan said.
- recuter 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRcMsqCbzWk
yurielt 6y ago
This, so much of this. Twitter will just never be the best of the ways to have actual conversations. You just have to ask yourself when has anyone left a twitter exchange with their mind changed? I mean is not like impossible that being said I doubt is a high percentage. In top of that add the fact that a lot of people that grew up on tumblr (with its own h way of having conversations and with its won metalanguage) became a big part of the social justice movements in twitter and you have the perfect explosion. I honestly do not mean that actual and real accountability is bad however when the mob attacks somebody like Joe Rogan they just made him more famous, but when they attack somebody like the kid that said "n*ga guacamoles p*nis" the result is much different. A kid that didnt know quite better had his life destroyed and the lifelihood of his parents too. For those that do not know the life of thta kid and his parents got destroyed. SO instead of accountability and people evolving the dialogue and getting better you have this neopuritan mob destroying lifes, dividing people more and ultimately not changing the incorrect ways of anyone instead you just entrench their positions further. Is cannibalistic.
- mc32 6y ago
  Twitter is good to make short announcements that everyone interested can receive. But the majority of exchange is someone publishing something interesting, a couple of people add something constructive and the enormous tail after that is people trying for brownie points by trying to prove they know more, trying to bring some forced social relevance/intersectionality and a bunch piling on like a yo mama joke that's run its course but the kids who can't do jokes make ham-fisted attempts and pile on more disconnected nonsense.

TechBro8615 6y ago

It's a waste of time is what it is. We don't actually need so many people in the world. So there are a bunch of folks with no real purpose who are bored. They spend their time doom scrolling and pulling others into their void. Some of them also feel the need to vocalize. It would be far better if we just paid everyone $4k a month and otherwise we all minded our own business.

dexwiz 6y ago
Scrooge in A Christmas Carol complains about the “excess population,” but I doubt he would support a UBI. Either way, complaining about too many people is not a new notion. The human race is not a machine to be optimized.

eitland 6y ago

I remember seing twitter early on and thinking it wasn't too impressive but guessed it was just an MVP and it could become fantastic in a couple of years when they added groups and topics and machine-to-machine and became a messaging backbone of the internet. Instead they doubled down on being a massive high intensity low value channel: technically impressive yet sad.

shadowgovt 6y ago

I don't know what the future of human interaction looks like on a global-scale omnidirectional communications medium... ... But Twitter ain't it. I deleted my account years ago and have never been happier.

sthnblllII 6y ago

Its not cancel culture because no one was cancelled. A woman posted a shallow and clechéd understanding of what a horror movie is and it went viral. She wasn't banned for "community guidelines", she wasn't fired from her job she didn't have her paypal confiscated. She got some angry emails and retweets for a flippant opinion of the kind she regularly makes irl with zero consequences. This is rule 37 in action and blaming "platforms" is just a call to actually cancel people the author disagrees with. There is a problem with platforms. But the problem is that they encourage unsuspecting and naive people to pimp their every thought and action for attention from internet strangers in exchange for getting blasted with targeted ads.

cdash 6y ago
No, it wasn't cancel culture but I would say it is the roots cancel culture grows from.
pdonis 6y ago
> the problem is that they encourage unsuspecting and naive people to pimp their every thought and action for attention from internet strangers in exchange for getting blasted with targeted ads. I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this (I just upvoted you), it's spot on. My tl/dr for the incident described in the story was "idiot treats Twitter like it's the group of friends she's at the bar with, the expected happens, idiot is surprised". It's a "platform failure", in the sense that hawking addictive products to people naive enough to use them does not speak well for the people who do it; in this case they did it with a platform on the Internet. But the general problem is much older than the Internet and I don't expect it to change any time soon.

temp8964 6y ago

> "We Need To Get Rid Of Twitter Trending Topics" "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists. Twitter is not about cancel culture. It's about using outrage to increase engagement. Cancel culture is just one natural outcome of the outrage machine. Cancel culture increases engagement from both sides and Twitter just loves it.

skinkestek 6y ago
> "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Had a short internal argument if I should downvote you for the line above or upvote you for the rest of your comment. Ended on upvote, but if you harvest downvotes that likely is the culprit.
- temp8964 6y ago
  I did have a point on that sentence, but didn't expand on that. Actually I did know the tone is bad. I guess the idea is that "we" as public interest conflicts with Twitter's corporate interest, but "we" can't tell Twitter to do what "we" want.
WalterGR 6y ago
"Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists." Do you have proof for this? What distinguishes the writing of a professional outrage activist vs. an amateur outrage activist? What's the difference between an activist and an outrage activist? I hope it isn't whether you agree with that particular bit of outrage or not. Without proof of your claims, is your comment outrage about alleged outrage?
whichquestion 6y ago
The outrage pieces are only a slice of things that engage people. People can be engaged by things that amuse and entertain, things that inform, as well and those kinds of things make their way to trending frequently. Twitter feels more like a multi faceted vehicle, where cancel culture and outrage culture are well represented pieces of the bigger media machine.

xwdv 6y ago

Some form of this is happening to me on hackernews as we speak. A long time ago, I had a lot of karma, almost a thousand. I was a model citizen for HN. But at some point, I must have posted a controversial opinion, and then HN decided they wanted to cancel me. If it wasn’t for a downvote limit per post, my karma would be below zero by now. Instead it has dwindled and deteriorated slowly over time, trending toward nothing. Nothing I do will move the needle to recover my karma, I’ve simply accepted that someday my karma will be so low that I’ll be shadow banned forever. Part of this is my own fault, as my posting habits changed to more bitter and cynical tones as a result of knowing that no matter what I say I will accrue inexplicable downvotes, so why spend effort softening my words? But it’s amazing that sometimes a completely mundane post suddenly has -4 downvotes out of nowhere. I wish I could see a plot of my karma over time, and know the exact point it all went wrong, so that perhaps I could learn and conform a bit better to the popular opinion. Unfortunately I know of no such tool.

Yaa101 6y ago
Same here, it is like some people on here take any chance to down vote you at any given opportunity over mundane stuff.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
If you think someone is systematically downvoting you, you could email dang and ask him to look for a pattern of who's doing the downvoting. I'm sure he has the tools to do that. I'm also sure that stalking someone to downvote all their posts is against at least the spirit of HN, and probably against the letter of some of the guidelines.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  Seconded. It might take a couple of days to get an answer but I always get one. As mentioned above I took a look at the first few pages of your lates comments and I too felt there might be something in your case. That said I also do expect HN to have scripts to detect serial downvoters and automatic voting.
skinkestek 6y ago

saul_goodman 6y ago

False. Sure, platform failure as described is a real thing. But the point here assumes that there are not roving gangs of people who have weaponized this platform failure as a form of virtue signaling. Again, until you've had a few thousand people attempt to cancel you for a misunderstanding it's easy to keep repeating the lie that cancel culture doesn't exist. It does. It's real. And claiming it doesn't exist is the snake eating itself.

Waterluvian 6y ago

As shown with the horror movie tweets, literally anything said can offend someone. This is why I created a new social media platform for Cancel culture. https://cancel.pointless.click https://cancel.pointless.click

eitland 6y ago
Beautiful satire :-) BTW: if you own the whole pointless.click domain you could rent out subdomains, at least I instantly wanted one (or maybe you use them yourself already, I just don't find anything on pointless.click)
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  Thanks! It's my favourite joke so far. My pet projects go on this domain.https://todays.pointless.click https://todays.pointless.click is my neglected home page. Never thought anyone would want a subdomain on it!

isoskeles 6y ago

> Wanna singlehandedly stop a disinfo catastrophe in October? > Tell Twitter to eliminate Trending Topics for the whole month. > Gaming Trending Topics was Wikileaks' strategy. It's how Pizzagate emerged from the fringe. Pizzagate "emerged" from 4chan or 8chan, not as a Wikileaks' strategy. If we're going to talk about bad faith interpretations or "context collapse", I'd like to see an example that isn't so clearly false, almost to the point of it just being political bullshit. I followed the logic of this story right up until it jumped into this nonsense.

temp-dude-87844 6y ago

The article title is a misquote [1] from the interviewed subject of the article, in which the subject recounts a situation where their mundane tweet was replied to thousands of times, and was trending before and after because of a Twitter feature designed to highlight high-interaction tweeets from verified accounts. This is essentially clickbait, because it sets up an expectation in the reader that cancel culture may be involved. I have a low opinion of intentionally manipulative titles, and consider them to be a platform failure. [1] It's literally a misquote, because the interviewed subject is in truth even more dismissive of the concept of cancel culture, but all of this is a red herring, because no one in their right mind ought to think this bizarre situation was a manifestation of cancel culture. Don't pick this apart uncharitably, my assertion does not preclude from "people in their right mind" nonetheless believing in cancel culture; my assertion is that no one in their right mind should think that This bizarre incident was a manifestation of cancel culture. Nonetheless, the writer does have a point. The 'trending' feature was easily manipulated in the past, and now that it's been changed to add some editorial commentary, it's now complete nonsense masquerading as newsworthy happenings. But the whole site has been like that since retweets were added, where everyone is just trying to ride the coattails of being adjacent to a viral tweet and go viral themselves. Lots of people claim they get value out of Twitter, but when you listen to their example, they invariable engage in curation of their friends and the people they follow, and stick to interest-based communities rather than bored people shitposting. There's no value in Twitter-at-large, except to the trolls and people who seek fame or infamy for its own sake. But where the writer falls short is they don't present a clear alternative. They point a laser pointer at some bizarre event that only a few thousand people know about that blowed up a blue-check person's phone for a day, conclude the whole site a cesspool, and ask us to ponder in our hearts if we deserve something better. Yes, we do, and we use those sites, like this one, and engage with those communities instead. And I think a lot of people do. Yet some people still use Twitter too, so perhaps it fulfills a genuine demand for something after all.

jancsika 6y ago

What would happen if there was an app that helped victims of Twitter pile-ons start tweeting generic political hot-potato non-sequiturs when something like this happens? E.g., * Stop the Uyghur Genocide * Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times * a UK judge found U.S. detainment conditions so brutal they refused to extradite Assange to the U.S. etc. Now the recommendation engine can do one of two things: boost the hot-potato and bring heat from the relevant nation state actor(s), or ratchet down the noise and eat the cost of the lost engagement. Edit: replace "app" with "static site with an unordered list of such geopolitical hot-potato non-sequiturs"

hintymad 6y ago

Isn't it an education failure? Somehow we educated a generation of angry people who favor "narratives" over facts, who favor mind-reading or attack-of-motives over rigorous debates, who favor what justice or righteousness in their mind over tolerance, who favor emotion over truthfulness. With growing number of such people, I don't see how a platform can help. On the other hand, the same group of people will be in charge of platform, like what see in Twitter.

mr_toad 6y ago

I don’t see what the fuss is about. “Alien wasn’t a horror movie”: just run of the mill flame-bait that started a flame war. Anyone who actually took it seriously needs to chill out. And Kevin Smith should make a second movie. And Event Horizon sucked.

strange_things 6y ago

It’s not Platform Failure, it’s culture failure. I never have and never will use twitter as it it too toxic for any well adjusted human to use. This applies to all social media: facebook, instagram, twitter, tik tok, ... If people just stop using these abhorrent apps all of these issues will be diminished as never in the history of humanity has each single human had so much access to ... other humans which are not well composed together and are ready to jump and argue on anything for a bit of dopamine (same as me actually right now, arguing against twitter. I’m part of the problem)

niceairport 6y ago

I mean to be fair, the opinion expressed in the tweet in question was pretty dumb.

jhanschoo 6y ago

It's interesting that naively you can't prevent "context collapse" and "filter bubble" at simultaneously: you must allow for people to be exposed to and engage in topics they don't really know anything about or contribute constructively in, or wall them off only into the communities that they participate in. There are probably nuanced and ingenious solutions to this, but nothing straightforward.

Koiwai 6y ago

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people", I quote this metaphorically, Twitter is used by Cancel Culture, yet you blame Twitter, that's typical Cancel Culture.

tonfreed 6y ago

Twitter rewards being a dickhead. It was fun when everyone was allowed to be a dickhead, but now there's a protected class that cannot be criticised and freely sends death threats and the like to whatever bad guy they think they have that day. This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet

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dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

It's easy to formulate it this way, but the sad reality is that these are actual people reacting in this way, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes because it fits their worldview, sometimes because they believe that by expressing their anger they will really make the world a better place. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform, digital or analog. Social media just acts like an amplifier for all possible opinions. It's a common theme, actually: many people believe that everything they don't like should be eliminated. That's exactly the opposite of one of the best developments of our civilization: that many cultures and people with completely different worldview can live peacefully next to each other and even collaborate for the common good.

b215826 6y ago

Cigarette use was very common among people before it was shown that nicotine is a carcinogen. Since then, people have cut down cigarette usage drastically and most countries now require manufacturers to have warning labels on cigarette packets. I hope social media services suffer the same fate. It was cool to be on social media when it was new and people were genuinely happy that they could keep in touch with their friends and relatives so easily. Since then, harmful effects of social media—from privacy concerns to disinformation to psychological problems induced by their usage—have been widely discussed and established. So, just like it happened with cigarettes, I think it's time for people to collectively reject social media services and go back to communicating and expressing their thoughts like they did before.