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I quit Twitter 1 year ago this week and couldn’t be happier about my decision. The time distance has made me realize how banal the whole thing is. I used to thi

I quit Twitter 1 year ago this week and couldn’t be happier about my decision. The time distance has made me realize how banal the whole thing is. I used to think I was staying in the loop of what society is thinking about. In retrospect, it was really just the loudest 1% and didn’t represent what anyone I know in real life was talking about.

altano 5y ago
The internet in general is prone to “the loudest 1%” problem, but Twitter is something special where it’s the craziest and loudest 0.01%. It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Was JS Twitter itself toxic? Because if not I don't see why you wouldn't just follow the relevant accounts and not see any of the stuff the article talks about.
  - lhnz 5y ago
    Yes. A lot of JS Twitter is extremely toxic.
    - g00gler 5y ago
      It’s absolutely insane and there’s really no reason for it. Controversy with the angular team or high profile developers — why? I’ve been off social media for years but I’d hear about it second hand from coworkers.
    - hallway_monitor 5y ago
      A lot of JS is extremely toxic.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        JS is actually okay. Horrible, horrible language, but like PHP there's some decent stuff in it. The only bad things about JS (other than JS itself) are the "write everything in four layers of frameworks" (but that's more a webdev thing than a JavaScript thing) and "four billion node dependencies that re-implement JavaScript built-ins" (bad, but not "extremely toxic").
  - altano 5y ago
    Yes, even JS Twitter is extremely toxic by my definition. But more importantly there is no group of people you can follow to keep the ratio of JS related content above even 10%. It’s not a reasonable way of following a topic.
    - j4yav 5y ago
      I have had a simple rule to unfollow anyone who posts off topic, and honestly it works pretty well. A lot of people have accounts just for talking about whatever topic they are interested in. It does mean occasionally unfollowing someone who has otherwise great content, but often it’s retweeted by someone else I do follow, and anyway - it’s worth the cost.
      - whatever_dude 5y ago
        Same. I keep my Twitter feed extremely on topic of what I enjoy/want and it's a great experience as a result. Anything proud gets culled via muting specific keywords or unfollowing.
    - FreeSpeech 5y ago
      It extends beyond JS Twitter. Every second JS project website or repo reads like a tribal Twitter bio. The more accessible the language, the more politicised.
  - tayo42 5y ago
    You cant filter topics, like I followed kenji from serious eats on twitter for food stuff but kept posting about politics. I guess he eventually quit and just posts food on instagram now.
    - undfg 5y ago
      Even if you could filter topics somehow, many users would do whatever to bypass the filters to get their political messages through them. It would reach the point where not trying very hard to bypass the filters would make you liable somehow: "you, a JavaScript developer, should've tried harder to bypass the politics filters when you posted your pro LGBT tweet. What are you, an anti-Semite?"
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    The problem is that you can follow lists of people related to, say, VueJS (how these lists are create I don't know, but they are more or less accurate), but you don't subscribe to their VueJs posts, you subscribe to their twitters. Google Plus got this right in reverse, in that you could organize your people into circles based on your interests and then you could choose which circles to share any post with. If they had done it so that I could subscribe to you for either everything or just things about VueJS, than they would probably still be around. In fact if somebody is trying to start a Twitter competitor, there is a space for a copy where you must select at least one tag for your posts and where I can then subscribe to intersections of tags and people. It doesn't even have to be anything about politics, but Cpervia tweets about cryptography and FreeBSD. I have no interest in the latter, but I have to skip over the tweets that he makes because there is no good filter for them. Now suppose It was somebody posting about compilers and upsetting pictures of aborted fetuses. In theory I could still skip those, but it would be far harder.
- colordrops 5y ago
  I created two accounts, one for political screaming and the other for "sane" follows, like programmers and scientists and artists etc. I ended up only paying attention to the screaming Twitter just deleted it.
- Blikkentrekker 5y ago
  It's not so much the internet as it is websites with voting and “like” systems. I notice it too on H.N.; it would not surprise me if 75% of votes on posts come from 25% of users, if not more extreme. The people that vote on posts, not the people that comment, dictate what becomes visible, and it stands to reason that the former group is considerably less prudent and more prone to impulsive angry decisions than the latter. I've certainly noticed quite a bit on H.N., and even more so on Reddit that upvoted threads with sensationalist headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for being misleading.
  - all2 5y ago
    dang, Could we try "influence" boosting posts? Some kind of combination of "this person has X karma, commented on Y post, that yields the same result as upvoting in Z fashion" and normal upvotes? I don't know that this would solve the above described problem (and it will likely introduce other issues in the social fabric of HN), but it might be interesting to see the outcome...
    - batch12 5y ago
      You could use the API to get historical posts and comments and run the numbers to get a taste of the outcome instead of testing on the live site.
    - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
      I personally think the best way to rank posts is by simple activity myself, the system that DeviantArt uses, a simple recursive algorithm where the top post is the one that had a reply in one of it's children of the same level twice, but the tree is maintained. So say we have a these posts: A - B - C - - D E - F - - G - H Say that a new post, I, be made, which is a reply to H, then after that the tree would appear so: E - H - - I - F - - G A - B - C - - D By replying to H, I has now pushed H to be the top child of E, and also pushed E above A. This results into posts whose children have the most activity statistically are more visible, but if an inactive post be replied to, it will briefly be at the top and more visible, and any new post will also start at the top. Essentially, it is the treed evolution of the traditional linear thread system where threads are simply ranked based on most recent replied. DeviantArt uses this system and it's boards do not feel as though they be an echo-chamber and are full of people challenging each other's views and trees seem to be more balanced out rather than al replies being under the top post, which became the most visible due to upvotes such that others are ignored completely.
- rektide 5y ago
  > It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake. Imo there haven't been any competing attempts. There's been nothing remotely as interesting or viable as a system for many broad discussions about JS to happen. The ability for someone to take an old post, staple a new opinion on top, & retweet it, and for anyone to engage with it as they like is pretty unsurpassed. Nothing remotely comes close. Everywhere else on the planet, once a thread is 2 months old it's dead, never to be seen again. Relying on individual people to be the relays, the beacons in the conversation was a huge plus, something exceedingly unique & powerful & special about Twitter that nothing else comes close to capturing. I've been off twitter semi-involuntarily for a year now. I still think the network of people model is incredible. But also, JS Twitter had been in bad decay for a number of years. There's problems & problematic issues, but to me, the defining problem was that there was much less interesting stuff to talk about. We are way latter in the game, everyone seemingly works for gigantic humungo corporations closed-source systems. There's way way more stuff that just works, way more really good libraries. And there's way way less inter-action among the different tech-stacks. Where-as before JS Twitter made sense, now the massive audience is pretty heavily divided into various stack pieces. There are some general-JS tweetings that happen but the common thread is the slowest, least interesting part of JS & JS Twitter & what it was, which was more cross-ranging & examining of new ideas. JS left college, got a job, got boring.
- Lammy 5y ago
  > Twitter is something special where it’s the craziest and loudest 0.01% > all JS related discourse moved to Twitter The jokes write themselves at this point :v
- brailsafe 5y ago
  I used to do the same, but then realized I wasn't missing anything. What about JS related discourse is remotely important and what kind of stuff doesn't make it onto other channels?
tunesmith 5y ago
What do you use to check news every day?
- leesalminen 5y ago
  News.Google.com for a max of 30 minutes per day.
- underseacables 5y ago
  Hckrnews.com
- iliekcomputers 5y ago
  Taking a step back, do we really _need_ to check news every day? I read The Economist which is weekly, and I haven't felt like I'm uninformed much.
  - ptk 5y ago
    This is me too. And the me of 2 years ago would have been aghast about that. But I now finding myself missing pretty major news cycles regularly because eventually you learn to trust the fact that you can "catch up" at any point in time. I've really enjoyed letting news happen and not getting caught up in the immediacy of it.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    I've stopped. I check my local news, I still read HN daily, but I don't watch or read any TV or national news. 99.9% of it has zero impact on my day-to-day life.
  - all2 5y ago
    Replying to throwawayboise: I've done the same exact thing. I find very little usefulness in the national and international posturing, blaming, and virtue signaling that makes up most broadcast, cable, and print news.
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    I didn't need to before Covid, but our government decided that it was okay to change rules (drastically), on a day-to-day basis, then when they got called out for changing them with less than 24 hour warning, decided that 48 hours was fine. If you didn't follow the news, you could get caught up and have to pay a not insubstantial fine, or more realistically you were planning to do something that was deemed safe enough some days earlier. An older example: if you didn't pay attention to the news on 9/11 you risked being stuck in the airport for a very long time. So yeah, there are situations where you do need to follow the news. Not often, but two global events have happened in my lifetime (3 if you count the fall of the Berlin wall) where you really did need to pay attention to the news. Maybe some sort of exponential back-of is warrented? Say you check the news and if nothing relevant happend you check in again the next day, then you skip a day, then two, etc. When an event happens where you need to follow the news (say a local flood), you go back to an hourly checkup. The final thing I have noticed is that the news you need to follow are mostly very local. What happens in other countries is, relatively speaking, of no importance to you.
Blikkentrekker 5y ago
I think a big thing is that Twitter can often repræsent itself as though what many outside of it call “Twitter views” are more mainstream than they are. 4chan, for instance, also comes with rather niche views, but does not attempt to convince one that it's views are anything but niche. Being immersed in Twitter, and many other websites known to create “filter bubbles”, eventually might make one believe it is the mainstream. In fact, it is not so dissimilar from how I think U.S.A. culture works; it is often noted how often inhabitants inside of it loose perspective of how idiosyncratic U.S.A. cultural memes are nothing more than that, as the people there often phrase them as though they be of a more global, even timeless nature.
prasenjit_pro 5y ago
At a personal perspective it is best to quit most social media channels including Twitter for a daily surfing craving because only a handful people whom you care & whom you matter the most would be there waiting on social media. Most of my closed people miss the personal touch, some free time jumping around to the ground and spending time at some pals place and hate to talk on Social media while we can do many more things out of the Internet box. It's what matters. History of our online usage can be used by advertisers but not by our loved ones.

altano 5y ago

The internet in general is prone to “the loudest 1%” problem, but Twitter is something special where it’s the craziest and loudest 0.01%. It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake.

Tenoke 5y ago
Was JS Twitter itself toxic? Because if not I don't see why you wouldn't just follow the relevant accounts and not see any of the stuff the article talks about.
- lhnz 5y ago
  Yes. A lot of JS Twitter is extremely toxic.
  - g00gler 5y ago
    It’s absolutely insane and there’s really no reason for it. Controversy with the angular team or high profile developers — why? I’ve been off social media for years but I’d hear about it second hand from coworkers.
  - hallway_monitor 5y ago
    A lot of JS is extremely toxic.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      JS is actually okay. Horrible, horrible language, but like PHP there's some decent stuff in it. The only bad things about JS (other than JS itself) are the "write everything in four layers of frameworks" (but that's more a webdev thing than a JavaScript thing) and "four billion node dependencies that re-implement JavaScript built-ins" (bad, but not "extremely toxic").
- altano 5y ago
  Yes, even JS Twitter is extremely toxic by my definition. But more importantly there is no group of people you can follow to keep the ratio of JS related content above even 10%. It’s not a reasonable way of following a topic.
  - j4yav 5y ago
    I have had a simple rule to unfollow anyone who posts off topic, and honestly it works pretty well. A lot of people have accounts just for talking about whatever topic they are interested in. It does mean occasionally unfollowing someone who has otherwise great content, but often it’s retweeted by someone else I do follow, and anyway - it’s worth the cost.
    - whatever_dude 5y ago
      Same. I keep my Twitter feed extremely on topic of what I enjoy/want and it's a great experience as a result. Anything proud gets culled via muting specific keywords or unfollowing.
  - FreeSpeech 5y ago
    It extends beyond JS Twitter. Every second JS project website or repo reads like a tribal Twitter bio. The more accessible the language, the more politicised.
- tayo42 5y ago
  You cant filter topics, like I followed kenji from serious eats on twitter for food stuff but kept posting about politics. I guess he eventually quit and just posts food on instagram now.
  - undfg 5y ago
    Even if you could filter topics somehow, many users would do whatever to bypass the filters to get their political messages through them. It would reach the point where not trying very hard to bypass the filters would make you liable somehow: "you, a JavaScript developer, should've tried harder to bypass the politics filters when you posted your pro LGBT tweet. What are you, an anti-Semite?"
- tomjen3 5y ago
  The problem is that you can follow lists of people related to, say, VueJS (how these lists are create I don't know, but they are more or less accurate), but you don't subscribe to their VueJs posts, you subscribe to their twitters. Google Plus got this right in reverse, in that you could organize your people into circles based on your interests and then you could choose which circles to share any post with. If they had done it so that I could subscribe to you for either everything or just things about VueJS, than they would probably still be around. In fact if somebody is trying to start a Twitter competitor, there is a space for a copy where you must select at least one tag for your posts and where I can then subscribe to intersections of tags and people. It doesn't even have to be anything about politics, but Cpervia tweets about cryptography and FreeBSD. I have no interest in the latter, but I have to skip over the tweets that he makes because there is no good filter for them. Now suppose It was somebody posting about compilers and upsetting pictures of aborted fetuses. In theory I could still skip those, but it would be far harder.
colordrops 5y ago
I created two accounts, one for political screaming and the other for "sane" follows, like programmers and scientists and artists etc. I ended up only paying attention to the screaming Twitter just deleted it.
Blikkentrekker 5y ago
It's not so much the internet as it is websites with voting and “like” systems. I notice it too on H.N.; it would not surprise me if 75% of votes on posts come from 25% of users, if not more extreme. The people that vote on posts, not the people that comment, dictate what becomes visible, and it stands to reason that the former group is considerably less prudent and more prone to impulsive angry decisions than the latter. I've certainly noticed quite a bit on H.N., and even more so on Reddit that upvoted threads with sensationalist headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for being misleading.
- all2 5y ago
  dang, Could we try "influence" boosting posts? Some kind of combination of "this person has X karma, commented on Y post, that yields the same result as upvoting in Z fashion" and normal upvotes? I don't know that this would solve the above described problem (and it will likely introduce other issues in the social fabric of HN), but it might be interesting to see the outcome...
  - batch12 5y ago
    You could use the API to get historical posts and comments and run the numbers to get a taste of the outcome instead of testing on the live site.
  - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
    I personally think the best way to rank posts is by simple activity myself, the system that DeviantArt uses, a simple recursive algorithm where the top post is the one that had a reply in one of it's children of the same level twice, but the tree is maintained. So say we have a these posts: A - B - C - - D E - F - - G - H Say that a new post, I, be made, which is a reply to H, then after that the tree would appear so: E - H - - I - F - - G A - B - C - - D By replying to H, I has now pushed H to be the top child of E, and also pushed E above A. This results into posts whose children have the most activity statistically are more visible, but if an inactive post be replied to, it will briefly be at the top and more visible, and any new post will also start at the top. Essentially, it is the treed evolution of the traditional linear thread system where threads are simply ranked based on most recent replied. DeviantArt uses this system and it's boards do not feel as though they be an echo-chamber and are full of people challenging each other's views and trees seem to be more balanced out rather than al replies being under the top post, which became the most visible due to upvotes such that others are ignored completely.
rektide 5y ago
> It’s so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to keep quitting for my sanity’s sake. Imo there haven't been any competing attempts. There's been nothing remotely as interesting or viable as a system for many broad discussions about JS to happen. The ability for someone to take an old post, staple a new opinion on top, & retweet it, and for anyone to engage with it as they like is pretty unsurpassed. Nothing remotely comes close. Everywhere else on the planet, once a thread is 2 months old it's dead, never to be seen again. Relying on individual people to be the relays, the beacons in the conversation was a huge plus, something exceedingly unique & powerful & special about Twitter that nothing else comes close to capturing. I've been off twitter semi-involuntarily for a year now. I still think the network of people model is incredible. But also, JS Twitter had been in bad decay for a number of years. There's problems & problematic issues, but to me, the defining problem was that there was much less interesting stuff to talk about. We are way latter in the game, everyone seemingly works for gigantic humungo corporations closed-source systems. There's way way more stuff that just works, way more really good libraries. And there's way way less inter-action among the different tech-stacks. Where-as before JS Twitter made sense, now the massive audience is pretty heavily divided into various stack pieces. There are some general-JS tweetings that happen but the common thread is the slowest, least interesting part of JS & JS Twitter & what it was, which was more cross-ranging & examining of new ideas. JS left college, got a job, got boring.
Lammy 5y ago
> Twitter is something special where it’s the craziest and loudest 0.01% > all JS related discourse moved to Twitter The jokes write themselves at this point :v
brailsafe 5y ago
I used to do the same, but then realized I wasn't missing anything. What about JS related discourse is remotely important and what kind of stuff doesn't make it onto other channels?

tunesmith 5y ago

What do you use to check news every day?

leesalminen 5y ago
News.Google.com for a max of 30 minutes per day.
underseacables 5y ago
Hckrnews.com
iliekcomputers 5y ago
Taking a step back, do we really _need_ to check news every day? I read The Economist which is weekly, and I haven't felt like I'm uninformed much.
- ptk 5y ago
  This is me too. And the me of 2 years ago would have been aghast about that. But I now finding myself missing pretty major news cycles regularly because eventually you learn to trust the fact that you can "catch up" at any point in time. I've really enjoyed letting news happen and not getting caught up in the immediacy of it.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I've stopped. I check my local news, I still read HN daily, but I don't watch or read any TV or national news. 99.9% of it has zero impact on my day-to-day life.
- all2 5y ago
  Replying to throwawayboise: I've done the same exact thing. I find very little usefulness in the national and international posturing, blaming, and virtue signaling that makes up most broadcast, cable, and print news.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  I didn't need to before Covid, but our government decided that it was okay to change rules (drastically), on a day-to-day basis, then when they got called out for changing them with less than 24 hour warning, decided that 48 hours was fine. If you didn't follow the news, you could get caught up and have to pay a not insubstantial fine, or more realistically you were planning to do something that was deemed safe enough some days earlier. An older example: if you didn't pay attention to the news on 9/11 you risked being stuck in the airport for a very long time. So yeah, there are situations where you do need to follow the news. Not often, but two global events have happened in my lifetime (3 if you count the fall of the Berlin wall) where you really did need to pay attention to the news. Maybe some sort of exponential back-of is warrented? Say you check the news and if nothing relevant happend you check in again the next day, then you skip a day, then two, etc. When an event happens where you need to follow the news (say a local flood), you go back to an hourly checkup. The final thing I have noticed is that the news you need to follow are mostly very local. What happens in other countries is, relatively speaking, of no importance to you.

Blikkentrekker 5y ago

I think a big thing is that Twitter can often repræsent itself as though what many outside of it call “Twitter views” are more mainstream than they are. 4chan, for instance, also comes with rather niche views, but does not attempt to convince one that it's views are anything but niche. Being immersed in Twitter, and many other websites known to create “filter bubbles”, eventually might make one believe it is the mainstream. In fact, it is not so dissimilar from how I think U.S.A. culture works; it is often noted how often inhabitants inside of it loose perspective of how idiosyncratic U.S.A. cultural memes are nothing more than that, as the people there often phrase them as though they be of a more global, even timeless nature.

prasenjit_pro 5y ago

At a personal perspective it is best to quit most social media channels including Twitter for a daily surfing craving because only a handful people whom you care & whom you matter the most would be there waiting on social media. Most of my closed people miss the personal touch, some free time jumping around to the ground and spending time at some pals place and hate to talk on Social media while we can do many more things out of the Internet box. It's what matters. History of our online usage can be used by advertisers but not by our loved ones.