14 ms·

I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator and found that no matter the post, the replies were filled with obvious disinformation

I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator and found that no matter the post, the replies were filled with obvious disinformation, flat out lies, and irrelevant accusations. I remember one person posting hand drawn graphs without a scale claiming global warming is just a cyclical process. Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? They probably believe what they posted to be true, and others who read that unrefuted reply may begin to think the same. So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand.

Aeolun 5y ago
> So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand. It is so hard to imagine how they just cannot seem to understand why you are right, despite all your trying to teach them. But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing. I cannot imagine what must’ve gone wrong in their lives that so many lies could be built on one another.
- javajosh 5y ago
  >But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing. I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who take seriously the fact that they could be wrong. They approach discussion with an open mind, listen to the other, look at evidence with a critical eye, and respond fairly. Others come to a "discussion" from a totally different headspace. They are bitter, angry, and, to be frank, not very smart. It's not discussion they are after, because they aren't open to the possibility they may be wrong. My theory is that this is the "rabble" that used to be led by the church, and then by mass media, and now by internet media. The internet is fractured into close-minded echo-chambers, and for many alive today, the classic error-modes of public online communication are new and exciting. The right is enamored with the brutal effectiveness of trolling. The left seems to prefer doxxing and blacklists. And internet companies care about metrics that don't capture any of the externalities of their platforms. Hopefully they'll all grow out of it.
  - oblio 5y ago
    I doubt it. Throughout history many people lived brutish lives and died none the wiser. Plus at some point some people can't be redeemed except for truly massive efforts no one will make.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
atatatat 5y ago
> I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand. Only because we're effectively alone in the responsibility. Hint: lack of research isn't limited to Twitter, folks. It's in your pub, your break room, etc
- airhead969 5y ago
  Yup. I think, as others like Chris Hedges have noted, individuals in Western society have become increasingly atomized and isolated, likely by design to sell more products and keep people feeling powerless/helpless: we're so close (in physical and online proximity), but so far (ideologically, wisdom, knowledge, and experience). Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness. The book The Mirror Effect by Dr. Drew comes to mind.
  - nineplay 5y ago
    > Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness. I wonder if that's ever happened in the history of humanity. I have my doubts.
    - airhead969 5y ago
      I also wonder, but perhaps some of these may approximate more "utopianish" collective community integration: - Genuine hippie communes (Do kibbutzes count?) - Amish - Indigenous tribes where elders are respected - Rural/suburban Minnesotans because they tend towards hardy dealing with life and climate struggles and unimpressed by immodesty - In the old days (80's/90's), my grandparents knew most of their neighbors, grocery store cashiers, butcher, hair stylist, and a number of other people well. What ever happened to that? I don't even know any of the neighbors in my apartment complex despite introducing myself, and one (Louis Vuitton-strutting cliché) woman neighbor next door won't even acknowledge my presence with pleasantries in passing. WTH.
oefrha 5y ago
Relevant article discussing the sad state of Twitter and other online battlegrounds: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  That was great, thanks for sharing it for those of us who hadn’t read it yet.
airhead969 5y ago
Twitter (and nearly every "social" media platform) is like democracy: a sewer hose of manufactured consent, ignorance, mob stupidity, disinformation, and bot-automated propaganda that you'll need more than a shower or 3 to rinse-off. I gave up and blew up all of my "social" media because they didn't serve any purpose. Maybe an invite-only platform could have higher signal with: - multiple "vouches" of others to get an invitation - frequency/reputation micropayment cost to post - reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased, and granted some with the invite - elimination of pile-on - multifaceted voting based on specific aspects of relevance, agreement, and insight - humor voted/tagged and filtered by readers to avoid using dv for that - dv has moderator-visible reasoning to double-check and prevent spurious dv - prevention of dv retribution - reduced anonymity (first name and picture) for higher-quality interactions - mediation and de-escalation facilities such as pre-comment emotional content scanning (AI-based sarcasm detection would rock), posting delay of 2 hours, and side chats - login required to view content, no search engine spidering - operate as a sustainable nonprofit to avoid pressures of corporate profiteering - servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control
- ttul 5y ago
  … in other words, something that is unlikely to materialize any time soon.
- tqi 5y ago
  Hacker news is social media. Most of your suggestions aren't implemented here. Yet the discourse is generally ok. The only thing that matters is the size of community. Beyond a certain scale, it always breaks down. Ultimately, the problem is the people.
  - anyfoo 5y ago
    And competent moderation, essentially editorial guidelines. (Something that pretty much implies a community that isn’t too big.)
    - tqi 5y ago
antihero 5y ago
There are many people who can think critically who also happen to use Twitter just as any other public space. Frankly your comment comes off as condescending and aloof so I can see why it didn't go well.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  I don’t think I said there weren’t, I was only referring to the posts that were clearly incorrect - they exist everywhere, but Twitter allows misinformed posters to have their speech elevated to the same level as sitting senators.
derefr 5y ago
> Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? It would be lovely to have a platform/forum where the whole concept was just that the moderation would ban people not only for spreading misinformation or making ad-hominem attacks, but also for applying unsound logic / not citing sources when asked / etc. All the same stuff that'd get a journal paper rejected during peer-review. (With public records of moderator decisions, and the ability to appeal a decision; but where the "appeals process" just translates to your post going through a Slashdot-like "bunch of regular users given temporary moderation duties approve/deny your post" — which, given the type of user who'd want to be on a platform like this, likely wouldn't be any more friendly to your post than the mods would be.) It'd sure be a niche platform, but that'd match well with how much work the moderation staff would have to do to keep up with discussion on it. I'd pay to be there! (Yes, this is what scientific journals were originally supposed to be: heavily-moderated public forums for conversation between scientists. They don't serve this function well any more, as they've been parasitized by the function of serving the needs of academic clout-seekers.)
- passivate 5y ago
  Its an extremely hard problem to solve. How do you hire the moderators and how to you track if they're doing a good job? You will need to hire experts in multiple fields. Things get especially tricky when you go into super specialized fields and only a person working in that field can smell the BS. I work in biotech, and lets pretend I'm an expert on a topic- say immunology. When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them? No amount of money is going to persuade me - but that's just me ofcource.
  - derefr 5y ago
    > When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them? Turn it around. Make it like Reddit's /new: have moderators able to sift through countless posts about misinformation and approve the good ones. It's not a large difference in what moderators end up doing — they still have to at least skim over all the misinformation. But it's psychologically very different — you can just "walk away" from annoying things that stink of quackery up-front, while "engaging with" only the things that seem good, and eventually "upvoting" the things that still seem good even after you've read them carefully. Yes, I'm actually suggesting that every post on such a site would go through a moderation queue. (Just one that any user can dip into to look at, if they like, but only moderators can actually vote on.) Or, if not every post, then a good sampling of them; or maybe every post from users with less than N approved posts. The big effect of that would be that there wouldn't be "countless posts about misinformation." There'd be a couple, mostly by new users with clear signal of that user just being an attacker to the community who doesn't actually want to become part of it (and therefore, can just be banned wholesale.) Noise would drop over time, because crackpots wouldn't even get a short blip of engagement. They'd get none. Their account would die in the crib, never witnessed by anyone but moderators and curious /new viewers. Combine it with a KYC mechanism (so users can't keep making new accounts) and the moderation load actually becomes reasonable.
paulpauper 5y ago
That is your mistake. People do not respond by being told how they are wrong. Instead, people will change their minds when they see that their friends do.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  What is the first trigger, the first "friend" who change his mind, triggering the chain ? Someone must have dug and learned something, for everyone else to blindly follow.
nineplay 5y ago
> So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills. I'm not surprised your effort failed, I'm sure if you offered to teach me critical thinking skills I'd wonder who the heck you thought you were. Frankly your confidence in your own impeccable critical thinking skills cast doubts. The smartest people are those who know they can be deceived. If you don't have the humility to check your own reasoning then you are probably wrong about something.
- black_yarn 5y ago
  So no one knows anything, no one can teach, and no one can learn? That's just nihilism.
  - nineplay 5y ago
    Many people can teach, but to do it successfully they must come from a place of respect and trust. If someone I know wants to teach me about their field of knowledge, that will be successful. If an anonymous stranger presents information with an attitude of "I think this will interest you as it interested me", that will be successful. If an anonymous stranger comes to me with "Let me tell you that how you think is wrong" - yea, I don't think I'm going to buy that.
    - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
      What's the difference between this and pointing out how someone's argument is flawed? i.e. "You said 'X therefore Y', but following that reasoning you could say 'X implies (obviously-wrong) Z'. X is not logically incompatible with !Y because..." (Not that this is ever successful in places like Twitter.)
      - nineplay 5y ago
        "Arguement is flawed" is still in the eyes of the poster. I certainly wouldn't just unthinkingly accept this sort of feedback, and the simple truth is that internet "sources" are rarely trustworthy beyond the writer opinion. It is still a matter of trust. Approach me with respect and I'll consider your POF. Approach me with "Your reasoning process is flawed beyond your understanding" and really - who the heck are you? In the anonymity of the internet you could be anyone.
lovegoblin 5y ago
> I followed my senator and found that no matter the post, the replies "Never read the comments" is common advice for a reason, and it has nothing to do specifically with Twitter.
jandrese 5y ago
Politicians are the worst people to follow on Twitter outside of maybe conspiracy theorists. Well, some politicians are both. It's better to follow creative people. They tend to have much more interesting things to say. Follow people like John Carmack, Simone Giertz, or The Onion instead.
- dawnerd 5y ago
  You almost have to follow politicians or news if you wanted to keep up on the vaccine and re-opening front. Following news outlets is about the same in terms of replies.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    Well, you could get your news from news sites directly rather than following them on Twitter! Then you're very unlikely to see stupid replies. (But choose news sites that either don't have comments at all or at least hide them by default.) My Twitter experience isn't nearly as good as it was some years ago, to be sure, but I follow fairly few people outside the "friends of friends" perimeter and rarely follow people who are given to performative outrage, even if they are people I generally agree with. While I do block people occasionally, I'm more free with "mute temporarily", "mute forever" and, importantly, "turn off retweets" -- that can have an almost magically cleansing effect on your timeline.
  - jpindar 5y ago
    Following politicians is fine. It's the replies to politicians that are never going to be worthwhile. There's no discussion there, just rants and cheers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hammock 5y ago
Global warming could be a cyclical process, just like covid could have come from a lab, and hand-drawn charts don't make it any more or less true. The two (claim and charts) can be separated, that is part of "critical thinking."
- matwood 5y ago
  Nuance, the other thing missing on Twitter.
gregmac 5y ago
> I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator I very much find the Twitter experience is what you make of it. I did it wrong the first time I tried twitter, and I hated and abandoned it, too. Second time around, I started with a handful of tech people that post interesting content or work in projects I'm involved or interested in, and organically grew from there. I also follow a couple people that post local (to my small city) traffic/news/etc. And within the last year, I follow some people that post COVID stuff about my region, who produce charts and stuff that are 10x more useful than the official government sources (eg: updated and realistic R calculations, include charts with hospitalizations/deaths, etc). What is absolutely not useful is anything political (the replies to COVID stuff tend to get political, so I also ignore that), or pretty much anything in "trending". Also don't be afraid to mute or unfollow people, and click "Not interested in this -> show fewer retweets/likes from this person" -- all things that have made it tolerable and even useful. If disinformation/lies or other similar nonsense starts getting in my feed, I do what I need to get rid of it. This has meant sometimes unfollowing someone I otherwise like (eg, they're replying that disinformation and causing fights) but honestly, it's just not worth it to me.
- r00fus 5y ago
  Same. I got back into it to get a better understanding of what was happening during fire season here in CA. Stayed for local + expert details. By curating my feed, I'm in general happy with it.
xwolfi 5y ago
Dude when ISIS was a big thing, I had a phase when I would try to debate the recruiters on Twitter (the guys who "thank the lions", write half arabic half english and seem to live in the middle east). This was fun time :D Twitter is such a trash, I mean on the IRC at least you can split in groups, kick out and prevent unsignaled readership. On twitter millions can read a random shit without segregation it's awful. I had to get away from it when the US required foreigners to disclose their twitter accounts upon entry, with all my ISIS "friends"...
dawnerd 5y ago
Im amazed Twitter doesn't have a report option for misinformation like Facebook has. But whats worse is if you report someone for making violent threats you get an instantly email, and I mean instant, saying they found nothing wrong. As for elected officials, I wish they'd just disable replies altogether for them. Nothing good comes from it.
baby 5y ago
Youtube is worse honestly, at least in twitter you can sort of create your own community.

Aeolun 5y ago

> So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand. It is so hard to imagine how they just cannot seem to understand why you are right, despite all your trying to teach them. But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing. I cannot imagine what must’ve gone wrong in their lives that so many lies could be built on one another.

javajosh 5y ago
>But then you imagine that they must be thinking the same thing. I'm not so sure about that. There are some people who take seriously the fact that they could be wrong. They approach discussion with an open mind, listen to the other, look at evidence with a critical eye, and respond fairly. Others come to a "discussion" from a totally different headspace. They are bitter, angry, and, to be frank, not very smart. It's not discussion they are after, because they aren't open to the possibility they may be wrong. My theory is that this is the "rabble" that used to be led by the church, and then by mass media, and now by internet media. The internet is fractured into close-minded echo-chambers, and for many alive today, the classic error-modes of public online communication are new and exciting. The right is enamored with the brutal effectiveness of trolling. The left seems to prefer doxxing and blacklists. And internet companies care about metrics that don't capture any of the externalities of their platforms. Hopefully they'll all grow out of it.
- oblio 5y ago
  I doubt it. Throughout history many people lived brutish lives and died none the wiser. Plus at some point some people can't be redeemed except for truly massive efforts no one will make.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

atatatat 5y ago

> I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter, but as you imagine this was a fools errand. Only because we're effectively alone in the responsibility. Hint: lack of research isn't limited to Twitter, folks. It's in your pub, your break room, etc

airhead969 5y ago
Yup. I think, as others like Chris Hedges have noted, individuals in Western society have become increasingly atomized and isolated, likely by design to sell more products and keep people feeling powerless/helpless: we're so close (in physical and online proximity), but so far (ideologically, wisdom, knowledge, and experience). Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness. The book The Mirror Effect by Dr. Drew comes to mind.
- nineplay 5y ago
  > Instead of lionizing celebrities, money, infamy, or hyper individualism, maybe it would be worth respecting wisdom, mastery, expertise, monetary-agonistic accomplishment, and insightfulness. I wonder if that's ever happened in the history of humanity. I have my doubts.
  - airhead969 5y ago
    I also wonder, but perhaps some of these may approximate more "utopianish" collective community integration: - Genuine hippie communes (Do kibbutzes count?) - Amish - Indigenous tribes where elders are respected - Rural/suburban Minnesotans because they tend towards hardy dealing with life and climate struggles and unimpressed by immodesty - In the old days (80's/90's), my grandparents knew most of their neighbors, grocery store cashiers, butcher, hair stylist, and a number of other people well. What ever happened to that? I don't even know any of the neighbors in my apartment complex despite introducing myself, and one (Louis Vuitton-strutting cliché) woman neighbor next door won't even acknowledge my presence with pleasantries in passing. WTH.

oefrha 5y ago

Relevant article discussing the sad state of Twitter and other online battlegrounds: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101244

ericbarrett 5y ago
That was great, thanks for sharing it for those of us who hadn’t read it yet.

airhead969 5y ago

Twitter (and nearly every "social" media platform) is like democracy: a sewer hose of manufactured consent, ignorance, mob stupidity, disinformation, and bot-automated propaganda that you'll need more than a shower or 3 to rinse-off. I gave up and blew up all of my "social" media because they didn't serve any purpose. Maybe an invite-only platform could have higher signal with: - multiple "vouches" of others to get an invitation - frequency/reputation micropayment cost to post - reputation/karma that isn't apparent or chased, and granted some with the invite - elimination of pile-on - multifaceted voting based on specific aspects of relevance, agreement, and insight - humor voted/tagged and filtered by readers to avoid using dv for that - dv has moderator-visible reasoning to double-check and prevent spurious dv - prevention of dv retribution - reduced anonymity (first name and picture) for higher-quality interactions - mediation and de-escalation facilities such as pre-comment emotional content scanning (AI-based sarcasm detection would rock), posting delay of 2 hours, and side chats - login required to view content, no search engine spidering - operate as a sustainable nonprofit to avoid pressures of corporate profiteering - servers and legally based in a country the US and EU cannot control

ttul 5y ago
… in other words, something that is unlikely to materialize any time soon.
tqi 5y ago
Hacker news is social media. Most of your suggestions aren't implemented here. Yet the discourse is generally ok. The only thing that matters is the size of community. Beyond a certain scale, it always breaks down. Ultimately, the problem is the people.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  And competent moderation, essentially editorial guidelines. (Something that pretty much implies a community that isn’t too big.)
  - tqi 5y ago

antihero 5y ago

There are many people who can think critically who also happen to use Twitter just as any other public space. Frankly your comment comes off as condescending and aloof so I can see why it didn't go well.

twobitshifter 5y ago
I don’t think I said there weren’t, I was only referring to the posts that were clearly incorrect - they exist everywhere, but Twitter allows misinformed posters to have their speech elevated to the same level as sitting senators.

derefr 5y ago

> Does it makes sense to report someone for bad science? It would be lovely to have a platform/forum where the whole concept was just that the moderation would ban people not only for spreading misinformation or making ad-hominem attacks, but also for applying unsound logic / not citing sources when asked / etc. All the same stuff that'd get a journal paper rejected during peer-review. (With public records of moderator decisions, and the ability to appeal a decision; but where the "appeals process" just translates to your post going through a Slashdot-like "bunch of regular users given temporary moderation duties approve/deny your post" — which, given the type of user who'd want to be on a platform like this, likely wouldn't be any more friendly to your post than the mods would be.) It'd sure be a niche platform, but that'd match well with how much work the moderation staff would have to do to keep up with discussion on it. I'd pay to be there! (Yes, this is what scientific journals were originally supposed to be: heavily-moderated public forums for conversation between scientists. They don't serve this function well any more, as they've been parasitized by the function of serving the needs of academic clout-seekers.)

passivate 5y ago
Its an extremely hard problem to solve. How do you hire the moderators and how to you track if they're doing a good job? You will need to hire experts in multiple fields. Things get especially tricky when you go into super specialized fields and only a person working in that field can smell the BS. I work in biotech, and lets pretend I'm an expert on a topic- say immunology. When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them? No amount of money is going to persuade me - but that's just me ofcource.
- derefr 5y ago
  > When I get home from work, what would motivate me to sift through countless posts about misinformation and flag them? Turn it around. Make it like Reddit's /new: have moderators able to sift through countless posts about misinformation and approve the good ones. It's not a large difference in what moderators end up doing — they still have to at least skim over all the misinformation. But it's psychologically very different — you can just "walk away" from annoying things that stink of quackery up-front, while "engaging with" only the things that seem good, and eventually "upvoting" the things that still seem good even after you've read them carefully. Yes, I'm actually suggesting that every post on such a site would go through a moderation queue. (Just one that any user can dip into to look at, if they like, but only moderators can actually vote on.) Or, if not every post, then a good sampling of them; or maybe every post from users with less than N approved posts. The big effect of that would be that there wouldn't be "countless posts about misinformation." There'd be a couple, mostly by new users with clear signal of that user just being an attacker to the community who doesn't actually want to become part of it (and therefore, can just be banned wholesale.) Noise would drop over time, because crackpots wouldn't even get a short blip of engagement. They'd get none. Their account would die in the crib, never witnessed by anyone but moderators and curious /new viewers. Combine it with a KYC mechanism (so users can't keep making new accounts) and the moderation load actually becomes reasonable.

paulpauper 5y ago

That is your mistake. People do not respond by being told how they are wrong. Instead, people will change their minds when they see that their friends do.

xwolfi 5y ago
What is the first trigger, the first "friend" who change his mind, triggering the chain ? Someone must have dug and learned something, for everyone else to blindly follow.

nineplay 5y ago

> So I tried to teach critical thinking to random people on Twitter Everyone everywhere on the internet thinks that the "other side" lacks critical thinking skills. I'm not surprised your effort failed, I'm sure if you offered to teach me critical thinking skills I'd wonder who the heck you thought you were. Frankly your confidence in your own impeccable critical thinking skills cast doubts. The smartest people are those who know they can be deceived. If you don't have the humility to check your own reasoning then you are probably wrong about something.

black_yarn 5y ago
So no one knows anything, no one can teach, and no one can learn? That's just nihilism.
- nineplay 5y ago
  Many people can teach, but to do it successfully they must come from a place of respect and trust. If someone I know wants to teach me about their field of knowledge, that will be successful. If an anonymous stranger presents information with an attitude of "I think this will interest you as it interested me", that will be successful. If an anonymous stranger comes to me with "Let me tell you that how you think is wrong" - yea, I don't think I'm going to buy that.
  - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
    What's the difference between this and pointing out how someone's argument is flawed? i.e. "You said 'X therefore Y', but following that reasoning you could say 'X implies (obviously-wrong) Z'. X is not logically incompatible with !Y because..." (Not that this is ever successful in places like Twitter.)
    - nineplay 5y ago
      "Arguement is flawed" is still in the eyes of the poster. I certainly wouldn't just unthinkingly accept this sort of feedback, and the simple truth is that internet "sources" are rarely trustworthy beyond the writer opinion. It is still a matter of trust. Approach me with respect and I'll consider your POF. Approach me with "Your reasoning process is flawed beyond your understanding" and really - who the heck are you? In the anonymity of the internet you could be anyone.

lovegoblin 5y ago

> I followed my senator and found that no matter the post, the replies "Never read the comments" is common advice for a reason, and it has nothing to do specifically with Twitter.

jandrese 5y ago

Politicians are the worst people to follow on Twitter outside of maybe conspiracy theorists. Well, some politicians are both. It's better to follow creative people. They tend to have much more interesting things to say. Follow people like John Carmack, Simone Giertz, or The Onion instead.

dawnerd 5y ago
You almost have to follow politicians or news if you wanted to keep up on the vaccine and re-opening front. Following news outlets is about the same in terms of replies.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Well, you could get your news from news sites directly rather than following them on Twitter! Then you're very unlikely to see stupid replies. (But choose news sites that either don't have comments at all or at least hide them by default.) My Twitter experience isn't nearly as good as it was some years ago, to be sure, but I follow fairly few people outside the "friends of friends" perimeter and rarely follow people who are given to performative outrage, even if they are people I generally agree with. While I do block people occasionally, I'm more free with "mute temporarily", "mute forever" and, importantly, "turn off retweets" -- that can have an almost magically cleansing effect on your timeline.
- jpindar 5y ago
  Following politicians is fine. It's the replies to politicians that are never going to be worthwhile. There's no discussion there, just rants and cheers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

hammock 5y ago

Global warming could be a cyclical process, just like covid could have come from a lab, and hand-drawn charts don't make it any more or less true. The two (claim and charts) can be separated, that is part of "critical thinking."

matwood 5y ago
Nuance, the other thing missing on Twitter.

gregmac 5y ago

> I had a brief foray into Twitter, but had to stop. I followed my senator I very much find the Twitter experience is what you make of it. I did it wrong the first time I tried twitter, and I hated and abandoned it, too. Second time around, I started with a handful of tech people that post interesting content or work in projects I'm involved or interested in, and organically grew from there. I also follow a couple people that post local (to my small city) traffic/news/etc. And within the last year, I follow some people that post COVID stuff about my region, who produce charts and stuff that are 10x more useful than the official government sources (eg: updated and realistic R calculations, include charts with hospitalizations/deaths, etc). What is absolutely not useful is anything political (the replies to COVID stuff tend to get political, so I also ignore that), or pretty much anything in "trending". Also don't be afraid to mute or unfollow people, and click "Not interested in this -> show fewer retweets/likes from this person" -- all things that have made it tolerable and even useful. If disinformation/lies or other similar nonsense starts getting in my feed, I do what I need to get rid of it. This has meant sometimes unfollowing someone I otherwise like (eg, they're replying that disinformation and causing fights) but honestly, it's just not worth it to me.

r00fus 5y ago
Same. I got back into it to get a better understanding of what was happening during fire season here in CA. Stayed for local + expert details. By curating my feed, I'm in general happy with it.

xwolfi 5y ago

Dude when ISIS was a big thing, I had a phase when I would try to debate the recruiters on Twitter (the guys who "thank the lions", write half arabic half english and seem to live in the middle east). This was fun time :D Twitter is such a trash, I mean on the IRC at least you can split in groups, kick out and prevent unsignaled readership. On twitter millions can read a random shit without segregation it's awful. I had to get away from it when the US required foreigners to disclose their twitter accounts upon entry, with all my ISIS "friends"...

dawnerd 5y ago

Im amazed Twitter doesn't have a report option for misinformation like Facebook has. But whats worse is if you report someone for making violent threats you get an instantly email, and I mean instant, saying they found nothing wrong. As for elected officials, I wish they'd just disable replies altogether for them. Nothing good comes from it.

baby 5y ago

Youtube is worse honestly, at least in twitter you can sort of create your own community.