5 ms·

And like nukes, make sure you know what using it does, and where to use it. There may be cases for this, but it's really easy to end up in one giant echo chambe

by avnigo 5y ago

And like nukes, make sure you know what using it does, and where to use it. There may be cases for this, but it's really easy to end up in one giant echo chamber if this is used overzealously.

sascha_sl 5y ago
I want my personal account to be an "echo chamber" (or rather, devoid of the culture war I have been conscribed to the front of), simply because I don't go on Twitter to argue. Being trans sometimes also turns these tools into safety mechanisms to combat harassment.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  This is a good way to put it. Twitter has a nasty habit of pushing politics on your feed no matter how many times you tell it not to. Digital nukes to clean up silicon valley's BS seems appropiate to wrest back some control. I can think and discuss politics on better platforms where the conversation works better. Twitter is too brief, useful for bird pics and science annoucements. Not for nuanced political essays.
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    "Twitter" doesn't do that, that's what Twitter is. It's become a platform for elites to virtue signal and everyone else will rally around that, be it virtue signaling from the left of the political spectrum, or the right. It stopped being about whatever it was supposed to be used for once journalists at so-called "elite" institutions swarmed to the platform.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Indeed. It's not an "echo chamber" if it's just the set of people who don't think you shouldn't exist. (I see this has attracted a downvote from someone trying to make their own echo chamber)
  - catchclose8919 5y ago
    Humans are a species of violent predators (that can occasionally even kill for fun or get sexual pleasure from torture) and have been so for thousands of years. There's always the possibility of encountering groups of people who "think you shouldn't exist" for multiple reasons (ethnicity, religion, sexual preferences etc.), it's just unfortunate that some otherwise inconsequential and quite benign and harmless psychological or biological features disproportionately amplify this probability for you... Sure we need to work harder to fix discrimination etc. But in the end just as people exist people who think they shouldn't exist also exist. Fortunately reality doesn't always match what people think "should be", for both sides. The normal pattern of behavior on social media just as in real life is to "leave the room" when the room if full of s*t / toxic people: if the room is Twitter and enough people leave it, it will cease to be a meaningful social media platform as more people move elsewhere. If you stubbornly sit in a room while ignoring other people that don't ignore you, sooner or later they'll punch you in the face regardless of who's right or wrong because people's right to not be ignored is more powerful than people's right to ignore others (eg. "let see how you ignore a punch? how about a tank? how about a missile?" it just is, people don't start wars attacking other people because they're not allowed to ignore something, but they really do so for being ignored too much). P.S. just upvoted you ;)
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > The normal pattern of behavior on social media just as in real life is to "leave the room": if the room is Twitter and enough people leave it, it will cease to be a meaningful social media platform as more people move elsewhere. If you stubbornly sit in a room while ignoring other people that don't ignore you, sooner or later they'll punch you in the face regardless of who's right or wrong because people's right to not be ignored is more powerful than people's right to ignore others (it just is, people don't start wars attacking other people because they're not allowed to ignore something, but they really do so for being ignored too much). There are so many double negatives in this pair of sentences that I can't work out what you mean or are advocating?
      - catchclose8919 5y ago
- catchclose8919 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > People should be constantly exposed to viewpoints that are against their own People should constantly be exposed to death threats? > and will have to do so with incarceration, beating, bullets, poison, nukes etc.! Are you arguing that trans people who block exterminationists for their own peace of mind are themselves creating a bubble who "cannot be reached" and will therefore .. have to be exterminated? Maybe you're not saying that, but it's very unclear? Are you sure you don't want to cool down the violent rhetoric a bit?
    - catchclose8919 5y ago
      I'm not saying that "trans people who block exterminationists" is not a legitimate use case for such a feature. Just that you can't engineer it so that only such use cases can be enabled by it, and most people using it will be "muh, stop advocating vaccines to me, wanna keep my blood pure" or equivalent types :| I probably have less faith in humanity than you do :)
      - pjc50 5y ago
        > and most people using it will be "muh, stop advocating vaccines to me, wanna keep my blood pure" or equivalent types I don't think so, partly because it's not "those types" that seem to be building these tools which they would if it was a priority for them, and partly because those people already have effective barriers inside their own head. Sometimes it seems like they need the opposite view so they can get angry about it. In other words, they can't be reached because of who they follow, not because of who they block.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - dageshi 5y ago
    Yeah no. Your argument falls apart because when everyone in the room has a megaphone screaming at each other the signal to noise ratio drops so far that it's no longer worth being in the room. You will have to mute or kickout some people from the room just to have any kind of coherent understanding of what's going on in there.
- Elinvynia 5y ago
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    > The "typical" HN reader - a privileged cishet white male (geez, just writing this out loud feels like I will get a ton of backlash) I mean, it's not exactly the nicest thing to accuse an entire community of ...
    - sascha_sl 5y ago
      This is a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of "privileged cishet white males" but also a lot of the time of the people invoking these words. This should not ever be meant as a judgement, but as a reminder which forms of discrimination a person will have a hard time to relate to (and also not that they will have a hard time relating to discrimination in general). It has turned into a pretty useless phrase, almost as useless as "stay woke" (which, believe it or not, was originally not pure irony), so I generally phrase it differently when it is relevant.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - pfarrell 5y ago
    As a typical HN user, I don’t think your assessment of HN is fair. I don’t see one negative or flagged response to this post. I see someone thankful for a viewpoint out of their experience. I see a reasonably productive argument over echo chambers. IMHO, this is one of the few communities I visit because it doesn’t have the qualities you mention. I’m not saying everyone here is enlightened on every topic, but I believe there is a strong lean towards curiosity, open mindedness, and civil debates. The reply is only two+ hours old. I’ll check here later today for more data.
    - sascha_sl 5y ago
      Usually comments where I do disclose I'm trans (it's also on my profile, but nobody checks) end up in the slightly positive upvote range. Right now, for instance, it is at +2. I've noticed that sometimes it even depends on the specific time of day I post, I've had comments that weren't incendinary at all sent to [dead] pretty fast a few times. It does make HN pretty atypically balanced for an online community, though of course the low bar anti intellectual engagement (there's a [dead] "cuck" comment here, for instance) always exists, followed by people who are too tethered to their own experience to consider others situation and reflexively disapprove of everything that looks "social justice".
- adhoc32 5y ago
  easy solution: Don't click on trends, read only tweets from the people you follow.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Back when I was actually using it, this wasn’t possible with the official app or website: if one of the people I followed retweeted or liked something, it would appear on my… what’s the terminology here? Timeline? View? My memory is a bit hazy but I think I could hide retweets from specific people one at a time, but not everyone all at once, and not favourites at all. Have these things changed?
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Top right of the app or timeline : the "stars" icon. Switch from "top tweets" to "home timeline". Like old.reddit, Twitter kind of hate it but realise that if they kill it they'll lose a lot of old users.
    - 5560675260 5y ago
      Twitter has two kinds of experience: "Home" and "Latest". "Latest" is only people that you follow, their tweets and retweets in chronological order. "Home" is generated feed of tweets from people you follow, sometimes tweets that they just liked, trends and random bullshit. Needles to say that "Home" is Twitter's default mode and you'll get occasionally switched to it even if you choose "Latest".
- teekert 5y ago
  As a white, heterosexual male I'm here to read reactions like this one. Thanx for the perspective, my first thought was that this tool can only be bad, and now I changed my mind.
  - PrincessJas 5y ago
TomSwirly 5y ago
The other day, someone told me that believing in the Holodomor made me a Holocaust denier, and ten people favorited it. If I had had this tool, I would have used it. Twitter is entertaining but can be noxious.

by avnigo 5y ago

And like nukes, make sure you know what using it does, and where to use it. There may be cases for this, but it's really easy to end up in one giant echo chamber if this is used overzealously.

sascha_sl 5y ago

I want my personal account to be an "echo chamber" (or rather, devoid of the culture war I have been conscribed to the front of), simply because I don't go on Twitter to argue. Being trans sometimes also turns these tools into safety mechanisms to combat harassment.

ImaCake 5y ago
This is a good way to put it. Twitter has a nasty habit of pushing politics on your feed no matter how many times you tell it not to. Digital nukes to clean up silicon valley's BS seems appropiate to wrest back some control. I can think and discuss politics on better platforms where the conversation works better. Twitter is too brief, useful for bird pics and science annoucements. Not for nuanced political essays.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  "Twitter" doesn't do that, that's what Twitter is. It's become a platform for elites to virtue signal and everyone else will rally around that, be it virtue signaling from the left of the political spectrum, or the right. It stopped being about whatever it was supposed to be used for once journalists at so-called "elite" institutions swarmed to the platform.
pjc50 5y ago
Indeed. It's not an "echo chamber" if it's just the set of people who don't think you shouldn't exist. (I see this has attracted a downvote from someone trying to make their own echo chamber)
- catchclose8919 5y ago
  Humans are a species of violent predators (that can occasionally even kill for fun or get sexual pleasure from torture) and have been so for thousands of years. There's always the possibility of encountering groups of people who "think you shouldn't exist" for multiple reasons (ethnicity, religion, sexual preferences etc.), it's just unfortunate that some otherwise inconsequential and quite benign and harmless psychological or biological features disproportionately amplify this probability for you... Sure we need to work harder to fix discrimination etc. But in the end just as people exist people who think they shouldn't exist also exist. Fortunately reality doesn't always match what people think "should be", for both sides. The normal pattern of behavior on social media just as in real life is to "leave the room" when the room if full of s*t / toxic people: if the room is Twitter and enough people leave it, it will cease to be a meaningful social media platform as more people move elsewhere. If you stubbornly sit in a room while ignoring other people that don't ignore you, sooner or later they'll punch you in the face regardless of who's right or wrong because people's right to not be ignored is more powerful than people's right to ignore others (eg. "let see how you ignore a punch? how about a tank? how about a missile?" it just is, people don't start wars attacking other people because they're not allowed to ignore something, but they really do so for being ignored too much). P.S. just upvoted you ;)
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > The normal pattern of behavior on social media just as in real life is to "leave the room": if the room is Twitter and enough people leave it, it will cease to be a meaningful social media platform as more people move elsewhere. If you stubbornly sit in a room while ignoring other people that don't ignore you, sooner or later they'll punch you in the face regardless of who's right or wrong because people's right to not be ignored is more powerful than people's right to ignore others (it just is, people don't start wars attacking other people because they're not allowed to ignore something, but they really do so for being ignored too much). There are so many double negatives in this pair of sentences that I can't work out what you mean or are advocating?
    - catchclose8919 5y ago
catchclose8919 5y ago
[flagged]
- pjc50 5y ago
  > People should be constantly exposed to viewpoints that are against their own People should constantly be exposed to death threats? > and will have to do so with incarceration, beating, bullets, poison, nukes etc.! Are you arguing that trans people who block exterminationists for their own peace of mind are themselves creating a bubble who "cannot be reached" and will therefore .. have to be exterminated? Maybe you're not saying that, but it's very unclear? Are you sure you don't want to cool down the violent rhetoric a bit?
  - catchclose8919 5y ago
    I'm not saying that "trans people who block exterminationists" is not a legitimate use case for such a feature. Just that you can't engineer it so that only such use cases can be enabled by it, and most people using it will be "muh, stop advocating vaccines to me, wanna keep my blood pure" or equivalent types :| I probably have less faith in humanity than you do :)
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > and most people using it will be "muh, stop advocating vaccines to me, wanna keep my blood pure" or equivalent types I don't think so, partly because it's not "those types" that seem to be building these tools which they would if it was a priority for them, and partly because those people already have effective barriers inside their own head. Sometimes it seems like they need the opposite view so they can get angry about it. In other words, they can't be reached because of who they follow, not because of who they block.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- dageshi 5y ago
  Yeah no. Your argument falls apart because when everyone in the room has a megaphone screaming at each other the signal to noise ratio drops so far that it's no longer worth being in the room. You will have to mute or kickout some people from the room just to have any kind of coherent understanding of what's going on in there.
Elinvynia 5y ago
- tpoacher 5y ago
  > The "typical" HN reader - a privileged cishet white male (geez, just writing this out loud feels like I will get a ton of backlash) I mean, it's not exactly the nicest thing to accuse an entire community of ...
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    This is a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of "privileged cishet white males" but also a lot of the time of the people invoking these words. This should not ever be meant as a judgement, but as a reminder which forms of discrimination a person will have a hard time to relate to (and also not that they will have a hard time relating to discrimination in general). It has turned into a pretty useless phrase, almost as useless as "stay woke" (which, believe it or not, was originally not pure irony), so I generally phrase it differently when it is relevant.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pfarrell 5y ago
  As a typical HN user, I don’t think your assessment of HN is fair. I don’t see one negative or flagged response to this post. I see someone thankful for a viewpoint out of their experience. I see a reasonably productive argument over echo chambers. IMHO, this is one of the few communities I visit because it doesn’t have the qualities you mention. I’m not saying everyone here is enlightened on every topic, but I believe there is a strong lean towards curiosity, open mindedness, and civil debates. The reply is only two+ hours old. I’ll check here later today for more data.
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    Usually comments where I do disclose I'm trans (it's also on my profile, but nobody checks) end up in the slightly positive upvote range. Right now, for instance, it is at +2. I've noticed that sometimes it even depends on the specific time of day I post, I've had comments that weren't incendinary at all sent to [dead] pretty fast a few times. It does make HN pretty atypically balanced for an online community, though of course the low bar anti intellectual engagement (there's a [dead] "cuck" comment here, for instance) always exists, followed by people who are too tethered to their own experience to consider others situation and reflexively disapprove of everything that looks "social justice".
adhoc32 5y ago
easy solution: Don't click on trends, read only tweets from the people you follow.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Back when I was actually using it, this wasn’t possible with the official app or website: if one of the people I followed retweeted or liked something, it would appear on my… what’s the terminology here? Timeline? View? My memory is a bit hazy but I think I could hide retweets from specific people one at a time, but not everyone all at once, and not favourites at all. Have these things changed?
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Top right of the app or timeline : the "stars" icon. Switch from "top tweets" to "home timeline". Like old.reddit, Twitter kind of hate it but realise that if they kill it they'll lose a lot of old users.
  - 5560675260 5y ago
    Twitter has two kinds of experience: "Home" and "Latest". "Latest" is only people that you follow, their tweets and retweets in chronological order. "Home" is generated feed of tweets from people you follow, sometimes tweets that they just liked, trends and random bullshit. Needles to say that "Home" is Twitter's default mode and you'll get occasionally switched to it even if you choose "Latest".
teekert 5y ago
As a white, heterosexual male I'm here to read reactions like this one. Thanx for the perspective, my first thought was that this tool can only be bad, and now I changed my mind.
- PrincessJas 5y ago

TomSwirly 5y ago

The other day, someone told me that believing in the Holodomor made me a Holocaust denier, and ten people favorited it. If I had had this tool, I would have used it. Twitter is entertaining but can be noxious.