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I understand how people get addicted to Twitter. But I don't understand why people started casually using Twitter in the first place. It looks like someone too

• polynomial 5y ago
  It seems to me it's not too different from other media; optimize for controversial and encourage polarization, which leads to more engagement. Ezra Klein extends this thesis to describe group identification, but at its basis it just seems to be about heightening tension. Of course if it's a black box algorithm, we may not know its parameters, but are only able to guess what they may be.
  • jancsika 5y ago
    The algorithm doesn't matter-- we can see the results of it filling otherwise reasonable people with vinegar and shaking them up. E.g., Glenn Greenwald-- who won a Pulitzer and civilly debated both Michael Hayden and a former Bush-era drug czar-- has tweets where the content is, "Fuck you." What is the point, and why does that attract users in the first place? At least with Facebook it really did connect boomers with long lost boomers from summer camp.