23 ms·
The tyranny of the supertweeter
- amadeuspagel 4y agoA classic on this topic, more general: Most of Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People[1]. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
- refurb 4y agoI know the article doesn't literally mean "insane" as in mental illness, but it reminded me of something that happened long ago and its implications for the internet. My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and could listen to all the voicemails left. Now this is a news show with millions of nightly viewers. Pretty plain Jane, just the news-type-show, and this is before the Fox News vs. MSNBC stuff we have now, so I assume a pretty decent cross section of America watches it. Unsurprisingly, the mailbox contained hundreds of voicemails and would be deleted daily to make room. But what was interesting listening to these "comments from just regular-Joe Americas" was that the vast majority were insane ramblings from clearly mentally ill people. They would call multiple times, talk about aliens or how someone was Jesus Christ. We're talking manic episodes, schizophrenia, drug-induced psychosis, whatever. And these messages were left every day, every week, for years and years. And not to say there weren't regular folks - there were. Someone who thinks "we should get involved in another war" and "family is important". You know, normal things. But they were maybe 10-15%? Maybe. I assume most regular folks just watched the news and thought "why would I call a number? I got shit to do and it's not like they actually care." It wasn't until a couple decades later that I realize they called because someone listened. It was an outlet. And for those with serious mental illness, likely their only outlet. It was then I started to draw comparison to the internet. How much of what we read online is just the rambling of the same people who left 'detached from reality' messages on that voicemail service decades ago? I'm starting to think it's a pretty good percent. And I don't mean "insane" in the way this article describes it, but "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness. So while we like to talk about Russian disinformation and bots, my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet is people believing what they read represents the actual views of average citizens. It's not. Your average American doesn't even know what Reddit or HN is. And if they go online they probably read and upvote something and leave. The bulk of what we read online are the insane ramblings of 1% of the population who likely have diagnosable mental illness of some sort. That's my hypothesis anyways. And hey, maybe I'm one of those mentally ill folks... right?
- jstarfish 4y agoRobert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus" books were borne from his time as an editor for Penthouse's letters-to-the-editor section, where he had the same experience. In writing the story, took all of the crazy conspiracy letters and entertained the idea of "what if every single one were true?"
- Bakary 4y agoYou don't even need serious mental illness. Just the desire to have someone listen because you are discontent but otherwise sane.
- bombcar 4y agoAs people’s “real world” connections dwindle the desire to just talk continues - I’ve known people who are perfectly content with their crazy idea if they can talk about it now and then, but if they have no outlet at all it’s like it begins to grow and starts to dominate them.
- nyokodo 4y ago> if they have no outlet at all it’s like it begins to grow and starts to dominate them. We’re a social species so a big component of our thinking is in community with others. When that community is healthy our rougher edges are smoothed out, when that community is lopsided or absent altogether then we drift and warp.
- peteradio 4y agoBulk? That seems hard to believe, is that outside of HN or are you including your own large paragraph here as part of the denominator?
- nyokodo 4y ago> “insane" in the sense of serious mental illness. Fatigue, stress, trauma, injury, alcohol, aging, other illness, ideology, anger, envy etc all can also induce irrational thought patterns and behavior for long enough to leave a voicemail. Add in trolls and pranksters and we’re practically doomed to wade through a sea of dross in any public communication mechanism.
- jbuhbjlnjbn 4y agoThere is a different explanation about the 'power posters' - not that they are "insane", but that it's their job. They get good amounts of money for doing what they do. As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a single person, but multiple people, posting under the same name.
- yew 4y agoSome of them probably are effectively paid advertising teams. That doesn't really explain some of the people you used to get on forums though. Why pay someone to write 24/7 micro-serial "Transformers" fan-fiction?
- bombcar 4y agoAnyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly realizes that the “all the posters I don’t like are paid shills” argument doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s often a cope - “my side/the good side would obviously be winning if it weren’t for these paid shills”. There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.
- yew 4y agoEh. It can happen. I know someone who's paid to moderate [1] a "grassroots" brand subreddit. It's just that "you're not real" is easier to believe than "you genuinely think Donald Trump is the prophesied Jewish messiah." Barring conclusive evidence (which rarely [2]) people gravitate in one direction. I'd guess it's a mix, with a little straight money, a lot of obsession, and a middling amount of compensated cat herding. [1] The playbook being basically "discuss reasonable criticism, remove unreasonable criticism" ie "nobody talk too much about that battery fire, but don't make it look suspicious." [2] "On the Internet, you know everybody who disagrees with you is a dog."
- tablespoon 4y ago> Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly realizes that the “all the posters I don’t like are paid shills” argument doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s often a cope - “my side/the good side would obviously be winning if it weren’t for these paid shills”. > There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there. There doesn't have to be a single explanation, though. It can be paid shills and obsessives.
- dang 4y agoSomeone has posted it here, perhaps in response to your comment: Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812 - Sept 2022 (36 comments) - but generally, we downweight follow-up/copycat posts, partly because frontpage space is so scarce that having two variations of the same discussion is space-inefficient, and partly because it tends to split the discussion. (You did the preferable thing by talking about this in the original thread.)
- jiggywiggy 4y agoTwitter is one of the worst places I've ever visited. In general makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets. It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage. Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.
- password1 4y agoIt also thrives in "hot takes" that might sound smart at first glance but are incredibly ignorant if you analyse them. Everything is oversimplified to fit the character limit, but nobody seems to notice. It's ignorant hot-takes in answer to other ignorant hot-takes. TikTok is basically the same btw, but in video format.
- metacritic12 4y agoAgreed. I first thought the flaw with twitter was that people tweeted insights with a minimal of background or literature research. This leads to shallow analysis of problems others have spent years thinking about. I realized later that the more accurate flaw is not that, but correlated to that. The real flaw is that it's a breeding ground for low-effort takes. The person espousing some grand theory of life can tweet it after thinking about it for just a few minutes. This leads to theories that not only are not exposed to peer review, but theories that literally the writer herself hasn't spend more than a few minutes thinking carefully about. If you only have to type 140-characters, you get both really great theories distilled, and fleeting thoughtlets.
- bombcar 4y agoLike all social media it values speed way more than anything else. Even on HN you’ll see it. Hundred page document gets posted, but the first comments will be from people who clearly couldn’t have read it.
- duxup 4y agoThe medium is the message and the medium is really horrible. Every time I’ve tried to cultivate a nice list of feeds it has been constant hassle to manage it.
- Bakary 4y agoThe part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession. The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort. Of course, this is fairly illusory and the resulting quality of stories is poorer each year to the point where Twitter threads repackaged as articles are a significant portion of most outlets. It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't touch grass. The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists.
- cinntaile 4y ago> The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists. This has given rise to what I saw coined as Twitter professors a couple of days ago (I read it somewhere on HN), their fame made it easier to get funding was the claim. This is a bit problematic because that should be based on the merit of the research. The same issues could arise for other experts or famous people, where as you say their opinions are disproportionately echoed due to their presence and activity on Twitter.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoI am happy to see professors engaging with the public, especially if it helps to make the underappreciated half of their job that is teaching more glamorous. I am very unhappy that some of them would debase themselves by using Twitter to do so.
- crmd 4y ago>finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the right combination of search terms. This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".
- isaacfrond 4y agoI've admittedly only scanned the article. But apart from a lot of statistics, where is the headline question answered? Neither tyranny nor supertweeter occur anywhere in the article. Is this the tyranny of needing a clickbaity title otherwise no one will read it? I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are journalist or a politician. And then concludes with the non-sequitor that it is not like real life after all. I'm left a bit confused.
- yew 4y agoThe entire article is an extended definition of the headline term mixed with discussion of the implications of presentation bias. It's also quite concise. To the point that I almost can't believe this isn't trolling.
- ufo 4y agoI think the main takeaway is that twitter over represents people who tweet a lot, because those people are responsible for a larger percentage of the tweets. The author argues that this makes twitter more negative than real life, because negative tweeters post more tweets. They also point out that journalists and politicians, who consider twitter to be very important, are affected by the twitter atmosphere. For example, during the black lives matter protest the #DefundThePolice hashtag got a lot of circulation on twitter and reverberated with mainstream media and politicians. Despite it being a relatively fringe slogan, the way it's worded (taken literally, it sounds like abolishing the police altogether).
- jimmaswell 4y agoYou could also say your attention span in real life overrepresents people who talk your ear off about Joe Biden at the checkout line or protest on the road. Maybe it's not really so different.
- thrown_22 4y agoProtesting on the road takes time and effort. Tweeting merely requires a toilet break at work. Once I started viewing all online media as the equivalent of the graffiti on toilet stalls the world started making sense again.
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- petesergeant 4y agoAs someone from one of the many countries with a right/left/liberal split, I really don’t like that American politics conflates left and liberal together.
- Bakary 4y agoThat's because the "actual" left was dormant or in small numbers until a decade ago
- ceejayoz 4y ago
- guerrilla 4y agoI don't think this is why. Look at the number of Bernie supporters. I think what's really going on is that the right-wing media has a strategy of shifting the Overton window by calling liberals "left" and those same liberals have little problem with that because they consider themselves left, not knowing any better.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Look at the number of Bernie supporters. Mostly liberal, not leftist. (Even if they were, Bernie'd prove the point.)
- mhneu 4y agoIt's not just the word liberal, which means something different for most Americans than its meaning in other countries. In Australia, the Liberal party is the conservatives who are allied with Murdoch. The word "neoliberal" is also a problem. It is used negatively and aimed at a broad swath of center-left to center-right. But in other countries, the people called "neoliberals" would be understood to be conservatives. Instead of using "n*liberals", we should be calling them "conservatives". Larry Summers, for example, is a conservative.
- 4y ago
- tlholaday 4y agoIs this tool feasible? Block user @A, and also block any user who has chosen to `follow` user @A. Ideally: > twitprune --block --recursive --depth 2 @A Edit: API Review Time!
- Pxtl 4y agoWell, there's a similar action: https://megablock.xyz/ https://megablock.xyz/ > Don't like a bad tweet? Block the tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it—in one click.
- rchaud 4y agoThe new head of YCombinator can probably attest to its effectiveness [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639125
- brezelgoring 4y agoThe idea is nice and technically possible using the Twitter API but the system will clock you and ban you instantly if you try blocking 100 people at once. I used to have an add-on that blocks people with NFT PFPs, and it queued the blocks to be done at random so the system wouldn't be able to tell it was a robot doing it.
- ec109685 4y agoTwitter should queue the blocks internally and apply them at a rate they can handle. Pretty crappy to limit people’s ability to curate. Go one step further and support block groups, so if NFT’s become interesting you can enable them.
- jccalhoun 4y agoI would like something a bit more fine grained. Have you retweeted positive things about x, y, or z or negative things about a, b, or c? Then I want your tweet marked with "do not engage" because there will be no point in trying to engage with them
- 4y ago
- fortran77 4y agoI keep my twitter politics-free. And I follow tech/hacker people and routinely mute/block those who think I want to hear their inane/naïve political opinions. And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.
- tomcam 4y agoSame, and with Reddit too (for me).
- Vaslo 4y agoAgree here. For example I used to follow Scott Hanselman of Microsoft on there as he has some interesting tech material but it was constantly blended in with his far left views so I quit. I follow tech folks for the interesting tech opinions they have. Their expertise or thoughts on politics are about as important to me as my 10 year old neighbor’s.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- colpabar 4y agoWhat do you do about the recommendations? I am constantly bombarded with suggestions for topics that I have 0 interest in. I click not interested, I update my settings, I create custom ublock rules, and yet they always come back eventually.
- patchtopic 4y agoanyone else disappointed this wasn't about high frequency audiophile mafia?
- codpiece 4y agoMe. Here I was hoping to learn more about why I can't reproduce those sweet, sweet high notes.
- enviclash 4y agoIs it only me perceiving that people is growing aware of the disadvantages of twitter, or at least its frequent use?
- guerrilla 4y agoMost people on Twitter have referred to Twitter as "this hellsite" enough times that I can't say that I think this is anything new. Knowing Twitter is terrible and terrible for you is a prominent part of Twitter culture. There are many memes around the subject.
- bombcar 4y agoA quite large group of people call it a hellsite precisely because there are people on it who disagree with them. The real red pill is realizing it is a hellsite because it is full of people who agree with you.
- enviclash 4y agoI wonder if Discord will be one day a sort of "Twitter of Twitters" dealing with all these issues, with some servers focusing on Echo Chambers and other servers on either organized discussions or flame bait.
- bombcar 4y agoIt’s already that; we just don’t see it because the servers are default private (not indexed).
- guerrilla 4y ago> A quite large group of people call it a hellsite precisely because there are people on it who disagree with them. This very far from my experience. I've pretty much never met an avid Twitter user who doesn't think Twitter is a personal and societal problem. As I said, it's banked into the culture and there are tons of memes about it. You won't even find journalists not speaking in this self-deprecating way...
- sh4un 4y ago
- equalsione 4y ago"Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets." Conservatives are less likely to self-report as conservative. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor
- ec109685 4y agoThey don’t ask “are you a conservative” but ask questions to tease that out. Whether they are making accurate classifications, not sure. And if you look at the graph below, it does seem to show Twitter users who post political opinions skew liberal.
- giantg2 4y agoPretty much anything in here applies to journalism as well. We see bias in all outlets. Nobody reports on the mundane day to day, only the exceptional events. This leads to a skewed view of the world, even if they leave other biases out of it. There's also group-think where every network is carrying 90%+ of the same story (even if the takes are polar opposite). I wouldn't call any of this tyranny, as an educated public should understand and see through the biases. It's a poor model given the realities though.
- prions 4y agoSo Twitter isn't important except for: * influential politicians * journalists * Jerome powell "... though there's some evidence that Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, may consult it for ideas on monetary policy" * College educated people (94 million americans) I don't think this is the own-the-libs that the author intended
- PaulHoule 4y agoMy first take was that a "supertweeter" is the opposite of a "subwoofer".
- h2odragon 4y agoI bet we could sell ultrasonic transducers to audiophiles at a fat profit. "Restoring the all important 48Khz to 500Khz band to your audio improves the listening experience, repels bats and mosquitoes, drives dogs mad, and will lengthen your lifespan by 100 years. Only $495"
- lowbloodsugar 4y agoPish. $49,500 or it’s clearly a cheap knockoff.
- iancmceachern 4y agoI thought this was going to be about speakers.
- unwise-exe 4y agoSure. Being active online is one way to try to drum up expose if you're trying to make a career out of public speaking. Which potentially has implications if your area of interest isn't inherently tied to the main polarization axis.
- iancmceachern 4y agoI meant loud speakers, like Sony or Bose. Super tweeters are a type of high frequency driver used in audio speakers.
- bnralt 4y agoI think this overlooks the biggest issue. It's not just that Twitter (and most online forums) aren't representative of the public at large. It's that these sites are driven by a tiny number of hyper-online turbo posters, many of whom are likely mentally unwell. It's worth reading this post: "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People"[1]. Even that, I believe, understates the problem, because I think these hyper-online folk are more likely than the average person to be active in multiple internet communities. I've been surprised to find a personality on small niche game forums pop up as well known Twitter political commentator, or read a comment on Hacker News, switch over to a niche Reddit sub about an unrelated topic, and see comments by the exact same user (same screen name and beliefs). The other day I passed a crazy person on the street who had mountains of handwritten cardboard signs plastered all over a park. We can easily tell someone like that is crazy. But if they plaster their screed all over the internet in bit sized posts and Tweets, and none of them are _too_ obviously insane, it's easy to think this is just a normal person. And since almost no online site has posting limits, crazy people that spam messages online all day are simply going to drown out any normal people on the platform (with the upvoting systems only exacerbating these problems). https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
- Tycho 4y agoI remember @pmarca kept a Twitter list of journalist accounts. It was a pretty good thing to browse, full of stories that journalists were trying to bring to light. Then in 2016 it became unreadable, just a 24/7 TDS group therapy forum.
- vintermann 4y agoThis blog does not inspire confidence when it cites studies which classify people from "extreme liberal" to "extreme conservative". Much of the US left has rejected the term liberal for decades (check out Phil Ochs' classic "Love me, I'm a liberal"). You throw away way too much information when you just use people's self identification on a scale like that.
- uwagar 4y agoused to be a regular twitter user until a few things shocked me that a person could tweet thru out the day..eg., many coronavirus expert accounts...it seemed like personal accounts but how can they tweet thru out the day like serious / data intensive tweets...7 days a week....felt these accounts were fronts, maybe they had a team of people contributing the tweets. it really put me off when twitter started inserting suggested topics and tweets from people i really didnt follow to just fill out my feed. even more offputting was the suggested tweets came interspersed in the tweets of those that i follow. does it happen to others or is it just me because i only follow a few people < 50.
- antonymy 4y agoEvery time I think about how to improve Twitter I inevitably conclude the simplest solution that generates the most net good for the world is to remove it from the internet. This is true for virtually all social media, however. The way these networking sites are set up is practically an invitation to bad actors and social engineers to manipulate large swathes of society, or at best, simply exploit people for advertising money. I don't think the good from these sites outweighs the bad, not even close. People who use them tend to become miserable, misinformed, and distracted. I have faith the internet can supply a better alternative for disseminating useful, timely information than Twitter. God I hope so, anyway, because if Twitter is the best we can do then there is no hope.
- ausbah 4y agoI think if social media wasn't designed to be addictive it would be great. less feed curation, less infinite scrolling, etc.
- rchaud 4y agoCensorship? Well, it works for China! /s I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction.
- rchaud 4y agoCensorship? Well, it works for China! /s I don't disagree by the way, social media algos are primed to keep people on the site/app, and the only way they can do it is with a intermittent streams of negativity with the occasional positive, fun interaction. They wouldn't have to do this if they didn't need people to watch as many ads as possible. So perhaps the solution is a version of Twitter that can exist without monetization.
- slg 4y ago>The more interesting part comes when we use the "how often do you use/post" questions to ask not what the distribution of users looks like, but what the distribution of tweets looks like: >Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets. Where did this 60% come from? Did the author really translate survey responses along the lines of a user "sometimes" posting political content and uses Twitter "a few times each week" to a direct percentage of all tweets? This isn't even getting into that "using" Twitter doesn't necessarily mean posting tweets.
- jraedisch 4y ago"On Twitter, you don't see people; you see tweets." Very well put.
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- thepasswordis 4y agoHere is an example of how insane twitter is: https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1571629917372039168 https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1571629917372039168 This person, a "verified user", is claiming that this group of people is performing a "nazi salute". This claim has 20,000 likes, meaning it has influenced at least that many people. The video is very obviously a group of people praying. This person is perpetuating the idea that there are mainstream American political candidates who are aligned with Nazis. This is so far beyond anything even remotely grounded in reality that it's actually difficult for me to imagine a scenario where the person making this claim isn't either literally experiencing mental health realated hallucinations, or is directly attacking the psyche of the people reading what he writes. And yet: this person, tacitly endorsed by twitter, is pushing this insane paranoid delusion out into the world and having it massively amplified. Terrifying.
- teachrdan 4y ago[flagged]
- thepasswordis 4y agoThe Nazis were openly and explicitly engaged in genocide. They killed millions of people in death camps. They didn't talk about it, they didn't allude to it. They did it. MILLIONS of people were killed like cattle. This happened in real life. White nationalists are bad. Racists are bad. The people associating themselves with those people shouldn't be. Being a stupid ignorant racist, and building actual in real life death camps and then putting millions of people to death in gas chambers are galaxies apart, and the people implying that idiots saying stupid things on youtube are equivalent to an actual genocide are, in my opinion, engaging in a form of holocaust denial. The death camps were core to the Nazis political ideology. Is there a single US politician calling for this or anything even remotely aligned with it? Your implication that MTG appearing on stage with a racist internet troll is somehow equivalent to her aligning with people engaging in the industrialized murder of millions of people is absurd.
- deleted 4y ago
- PKop 4y ago>Twitter Is Not Real Life Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality. Quoting comment section of that article: "This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world." Is TV real life? Are movies? How about online news sites, are those real life? Especially back when a few monopolies and 3 or 4 channels dominated the discourse, this one-way flow composed of even fewer voices still greatly influenced "real life". Reminds me of "hyper-reality" defined by Baudrillard. Most people's references points for understanding significant portions of their world-view come from constructed realities of media, not first hand experience anyways. So impassioned debate from extremely-online minority may actually impact the real world in various ways. I know different political issues that only seemed to exist on Twitter 10 years ago made their way into most other nooks and crannies of the real world a few years later.
- trgn 4y agoWrt baudrillard. It always strikes me how well the modern condition was understood by the 70s. It's equally baffling how little has changed. Perhaps more specifically, the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology than say the industrial processes that enabled commoditization or the telecommunication and image reproduction technologies that enabled instant broadcasting.
- imbnwa 4y agoDuring the Bush era, my debate coach in HS made the interesting point that neocon conservatives were more 'post-modern' (a tortured term 20 years later) relative to old-school 'truth-seeking', anti-imperialist Leftists like Chomsky
- trgn 4y ago> a tortured term 20 years later To me, it has helped to see postmodernism more as a literary term, rather than an epoch. Postmodernists looked at the modernist hellscape and understood it completely: its mechanisms, its origins, its technology, its social dimensions. Then, rather than to draw the correct lessons, they threw up their hands in defeat and capitulated. In the 2020s, we are still in the same modernist dystopia from the 70s, the wagon kept rolling down the exact same mountain as it has since then.
- readingnews 4y agoI swear, I was thinking: https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/super-tweeters/ https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/super-tweeters/
- npc54321 4y ago[dead]
- dexwiz 4y agoSuper tweeters are very likely narcissist, possibly psychopaths, if they are not actually a front/shill/bot. Think about the people in real life who always have to be the center of attention. Rarely you will find someone with a virtuous mission, who recognizes the power of a group. Most often you just find an emotionally damaged person who is trying to fill a hole. Either these narcissists develop a cult of personality or move on once the narcissistic supply dries up. Twitter is just an endless supply of attention, and we all know the most divisive get the most attention. Do they want to be divisive? Maybe, but they certainly want the attention it provides and act accordingly.
- rconti 4y agoOften the super-Tweeters will be people who literally have nothing better to do (eg, their time is worth very little), or who are being paid to do so one way or another, and all of the things that implies. Remember that whenever spending your valuable time arguing on the internet :)
- jonnycomputer 4y agoI've said this before, and I've said this a lot. If you want discourse to be more representative of what people generally think instead of reinforcing and normalizing the most ideological and extreme opinions, platforms should curtail or rate limit user's public posts/comments. If you casually scan a typical news comment section, you might come under the impression that lots of people feel some particular way, when in fact, its just a couple of posters dominating the boards. The simplest way to make that problem go away is to have post limits of some kind. Lots of ways you can do that. You can be granted points each day, which expire. You can increase the limits when particularly important things need to be discussed (Russia invades Ukraine! etc.). You can find ways to reward people with more speech, or limit trolls to less speech on your platform.
- _8j50 4y agoInfosec is partucularly horrible at this. You have twitter rock stars who do legit know their shit but being human means they sometimes lack the right perspective and experience which can lead to posts that are incorrect or lead people to misunderstand their opinions. "AV is bad", "VPN is bad", "just convert your AD network to mac" stuff like that and then you have their fans who sometimes don't think for themselves. The main argument for Twitter is it has the most reach compared to activitypub or other alternatives. My main argument against it is it basically turns into an 80s era highschool with "cancel" bullies, popular people and their fans and outcasts and it is not easy to engage in discourse over it. If only their was HN for the hacking type of hackers (security focused).