5 ms·

Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? The author's complaints are about other physicists' behaviors and attitudes to her

Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? The author's complaints are about other physicists' behaviors and attitudes to her writing, but it looks like much of it is specifically about Twitter interactions: about unhappy, defective people on Twitter (smart physicists, even) drawing other people into their miasma. These are people using Twitter with good intentions: smart people who login simply intending to have interesting discussions about philosophical topics. Professionals interacting with other professionals, or writing about their field of expertise. They don't seek out to waste time and serotonin on unpleasant social drama, but it finds them anyway.

mw888 4y ago
Because spreading negativity is easy, and clearing it up is hard. Clearing it up is hard, but worth it, but Twitter’s structure makes that hard type of work even harder by having character limits and measuring value by popularity.
pasquinelli 4y ago
"it" didn't find them. they joined twitter for some reasons, they stay on twitter for other reasons.
warpech 4y ago
I don't know why exactly, but Reddit seems to promote negativity much less so. It seems to me that unpleasant comments get buried by the algorithm and the people's votes.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  Moderators and community standards.
bowsamic 4y ago
I know it's not an excuse but Sabine definitely "starts it". Just look at her wording in the blog post? She is always combative at the outset. She does not seem to have the kind of people skills required to harshly (and you can't deny it's harsh) and publicly criticise an entire field without upsetting everyone in that field. It takes skill to do that in a good way. Unfortunately for her, the only people who are really strongly swayed by her arguments are her following of lay people, because the physicists are either 1) enough into theoretical particle physics that they immediately reject her undiplomatic comments (even if they may be right) or 2) like me a physicist who knows they know so little about theoretical particle physics that they should not have an opinion on it. Physics twitter is very cordial and positive if you simply ignore Sabine.
- PeterStuer 4y ago
  I have no horse in this race, but ... 1) 'undiplomatic' and 'truth' aren't mutually exclusive. While science is highly social in it's game, it is not in its object. Otherwise the discipline is scientism, not science. 2) even if I knew nothing about the intricacies of counting angles on the head of a pin, I can still have an opinion on its usefulness, lack of verifiability or predictive power. In a software analogy: A black box test still reveals errors even when it doesn't show how the errors are produced.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    1) If you aren't diplomatic while telling people their work is stupid and pointless then no one will listen to you. If no one will listen to you you may as well not talk. 2) No, you can't, or at least, your uninformed "opinion" is worthless. To clarify, Sabine's is not worthless, since she is actually a theoretical particle physicist. A lay person's opinion on the matter is worth nothing.
    - iopq 4y ago
      A lay person like a politician can complain they get no return on their investment, for example
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        Thankfully politicians don't think of science in terms of "return on investment" Obviously it must be justified as scientifically important, but they do not expect "something back". Government agencies generally take a more blurry and general approach to R&D, since you cannot predict what comes out of a given experiment. No one predicted an absolute revolution in squeezed light from gravitational wave detection for example. Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer will probably both get funded even though the science case is very minimal and they will cost many billions
        boltzmann-brain 4y ago
orbifold 4y ago
It is hard to use twitter and not be drawn into negativity and conflict. I think that is mainly because it not only recommends tweets by people you follow. You quickly end up getting exposed to lots of content other people „liked“. Which more often than not is written by people with several mental illnesses, people in tough financial or social situations or successes like Nature papers, Conference acceptances and so on. There is very little room for „normal content“. I’ve managed to promote one of my articles successfully there with ~1 million impressions, but otherwise using the platform has been a net negative.
- tayo42 4y ago
  While I was working there I had to delete my account. I seemed to somehow always be exposed to negative things.
- boltzmann-brain 4y ago
  I feel like there is a social aspect to this "tweets from other people" thing. We are, of course, social people, whether we like it or not - the social context of what we're seeing always heavily biases our perception. When reading opinions that challenge ours, when having to "go out on a limb", or picture something that we haven't been concerned with yet, we have to gift the writer our trust. We have to trust them that they're not wasting our time, that at the end of the effort of trying to understand in a deep fashion what they're saying there is going to be some pay-off. We have to trust them that they're not trying to maneuver us into something using underhanded methods. This trust only comes from knowing people for a while, from reputation. Especially if someone's famous for being contrarian, and "their reputation precedes them", people are going to outright assume the author has hostile intent. In fact, they end up feeling that the author has intent hostile towards them specifically. However, even without being overtly preconditioned to think the person is a trouble maker, social mistrust is our default behavior. Often you'll see something that's out of your sphere so much that you'll read it, say "haha, lol". That's not necessarily meant to deride the author, but this kind of behavior, which many of us at some level engage in (whether we tweet the reply or just think this), shows that often we just dismiss other people we don't really know. This leniency often is the first step towards derision, aggression, or even conflict. This is easy to picture if we compare social media to pre-internet social situations. For example, a Discord meant for a specific hobby (eg I run a Tektronix and HPAK Discord) is like a club for better or worse. People in there have common interests or goals and work together and exchange based on knowledge. This alone gives them enough social context that when they enter this virtual lodge, they know they should bestow others with a modicum of respect and not dismiss them outright. I've seen this very community turn people from not wanting to talk to each other, to talking to each other - not best friends, but good enough for a little small talk every now and then. The Discord of a celebrity youtuber is like the waiting line to a concert, where people usually discuss the act they're going to be spectating, and adjacent acts. Again, common context, a common story, that helps us understand each other. A personal Facebook account is like your local home town to large extent. Your family, your childhood friends, maybe people from work or university. Again, common context. Instagram is like going to a night club or a fair and seeing the people who try the hardest. It's a well known social dynamic. It's not great. It attracts a lot of sycophants and low lifes, but it is what it is. With Twitter, it's like you're confronted with everyone you pass on the street. Imagine that you're going down the street, and you get to hear exactly, in detail, what everyone is talking about - from the very start of the conversation, without those other people knowing you can hear it. Then if you want, you can hear everything they said in the past, since the beginning of their lives. If you were able to do this IRL, this would not just be stalking, it would be an extremely worrisome endeavor, and there is no question that it would create conflict. That's why our social norms evolved to where we like to speak to others with some degree of privacy. That's why we have laws against recording of conversations you aren't part of. That's why if you're talking to a friend on the street, and someone random shows up and starts talking to you, you feel weirded out. You're not "not accepting", you're just in a position that is awkward, maybe dangerous, and definitely upsetting. There is no commonality. There is no trust. This is not intentional or even conscious - it's entirely subconscious and important to our survival. It's the same reason why your dog barks at the mailman or why a bird might attack anyone coming close to its nest. It's a distrust of intruders, and in general intrusions (of any new phenomena we aren't yet familiar with) into our personal space, our "bubble". There are those rare people who are extremely accepting of rando's on the street. Some would call them too friendly for their own good. People like this can be easily taken advantage of by con artists and the likes. They're the people donation salesmen grab a hold of downtown, talking about dying children in africa or whatever. But it does show that such a mindset is possible. People like this see every such interaction as an opportunity to learn or experience something new. They'll approach people thinking first, "how can I help them" and "how can I be respectful of this person". On the other hand there are people who are welcoming of such interactions, but they welcome them in a many-times-reinforced adversarial manner. Those are the people who want to argue with you. They're the people who see you as sport. Put in this context it's easy to see that the social model that Twitter represents is deleterious. It can be salvaged by people who have good intentions which is why some of the most prolific accounts on Twitter are the open minded, usually left-leaning, cerebral accounts. And then there is the dark side, of people who just want to shout at you - whether they're extreme "rationalists", or right or left wing propagandists, they're going to be very prolific as well. This explains why there is such a war going on on Twitter. It was, unintentionally, made in this design that enables such people to thrive on the platform, as well as to create the tension between the different approaches.
Tade0 4y ago
I have a hypothesis: the original, 140-character limit was only useful for hurling insults and hot takes. Fast forward to today and we have a whole culture built around it, even though the limit is long gone.
ageitgey 4y ago
> Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? > These are people using Twitter with good intentions I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person without an agenda to push (or a product to sell, etc) has the time or energy to continuously engage in Twitter at the amount required to become a big figure unless they are otherwise already famous. In essence, Twitter is the same 5% of insane people driving everyone else crazy. The other 95% of passive consumers don't realize that most content they read on Twitter is written by negative people. That's just how the platform works. If you are a well-meaning person trying to engage with this mob, either you'll get tired of it and leave or you'll get dragged into the negativity. There's multiple studies showing that active posters on twitter skew more negative and more politically extreme (left or right) than the average population. It's a collection of people with axes to grind yelling at each other. If you want to test this theory, start aggressively blocking people who reply to tweets with negative opinions. You'll quickly start seeing those same people already blocked when you read the replies to totally unrelated tweets. It's a really small universe of the same negative people generating most of the content.
- boltzmann-brain 4y ago
  Wow, I was just writing the same reply. I started writing it before you made yours. It's uncanny. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33006788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33006788
  - ageitgey 4y ago
    I guess we have both wasted too much time on Twitter:)
    - boltzmann-brain 4y ago
      live and learn
- 4y ago
mkl95 4y ago
Twitter's recommendation system doesn't only try to draw your attention. Tweets and their replies form a tree, and the system wants those trees to grow as much as possible. It turns out the human brain is especially vulnerable to things such as political takes, violence, or simply stuff it perceives as dumb or useless. And there's FOMO as well. Twitter exploits those weaknesses to provoke a response. At worst it's a simple reply. Maybe a emoji tagging a friend, who then tags another friend, and so on. At best it will be a huge tree of people arguing with each other, a tree that can grow infinitely on paper.
bitwize 4y ago
The Great Banality Laser focuses and amplifies banality because... laser gonna lase.
newaccount2021 4y ago
Simple: Twitter is a midwit amplification service
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
I find that different social networks are more "conductive" for different types feelings or states. I think a lot of it has to do a person's natural negativity bias[0] but is further amplified by the given social network. Some tend towards conducting negativity towards self. Some tend to point the finger at others. I think as we better recognize and map these bizzare (and profitable) incentive structures over time we'll be able to build apps and networks that through various tricks and shortcuts more naturally conduct positivity, love, open mindedness, a desire to unite people, etc. I suspect in that world you'll still have a lot of networks trend negative but it would be pretty cool to get to a point where there is a choice. Sort of like ad blockers. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias
layer8 4y ago
What you see on Twitter also can’t be taken as representative of (say) physicists in general, because only a small minority of physicists is active on Twitter. “Being active on Twitter” likely correlates with a set of personality traits that aren’t representative of the population at large.

mw888 4y ago

Because spreading negativity is easy, and clearing it up is hard. Clearing it up is hard, but worth it, but Twitter’s structure makes that hard type of work even harder by having character limits and measuring value by popularity.

pasquinelli 4y ago

"it" didn't find them. they joined twitter for some reasons, they stay on twitter for other reasons.

warpech 4y ago

I don't know why exactly, but Reddit seems to promote negativity much less so. It seems to me that unpleasant comments get buried by the algorithm and the people's votes.

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
Moderators and community standards.

bowsamic 4y ago

I know it's not an excuse but Sabine definitely "starts it". Just look at her wording in the blog post? She is always combative at the outset. She does not seem to have the kind of people skills required to harshly (and you can't deny it's harsh) and publicly criticise an entire field without upsetting everyone in that field. It takes skill to do that in a good way. Unfortunately for her, the only people who are really strongly swayed by her arguments are her following of lay people, because the physicists are either 1) enough into theoretical particle physics that they immediately reject her undiplomatic comments (even if they may be right) or 2) like me a physicist who knows they know so little about theoretical particle physics that they should not have an opinion on it. Physics twitter is very cordial and positive if you simply ignore Sabine.

PeterStuer 4y ago
I have no horse in this race, but ... 1) 'undiplomatic' and 'truth' aren't mutually exclusive. While science is highly social in it's game, it is not in its object. Otherwise the discipline is scientism, not science. 2) even if I knew nothing about the intricacies of counting angles on the head of a pin, I can still have an opinion on its usefulness, lack of verifiability or predictive power. In a software analogy: A black box test still reveals errors even when it doesn't show how the errors are produced.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  1) If you aren't diplomatic while telling people their work is stupid and pointless then no one will listen to you. If no one will listen to you you may as well not talk. 2) No, you can't, or at least, your uninformed "opinion" is worthless. To clarify, Sabine's is not worthless, since she is actually a theoretical particle physicist. A lay person's opinion on the matter is worth nothing.
  - iopq 4y ago
    A lay person like a politician can complain they get no return on their investment, for example
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      Thankfully politicians don't think of science in terms of "return on investment" Obviously it must be justified as scientifically important, but they do not expect "something back". Government agencies generally take a more blurry and general approach to R&D, since you cannot predict what comes out of a given experiment. No one predicted an absolute revolution in squeezed light from gravitational wave detection for example. Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer will probably both get funded even though the science case is very minimal and they will cost many billions
      - boltzmann-brain 4y ago

orbifold 4y ago

It is hard to use twitter and not be drawn into negativity and conflict. I think that is mainly because it not only recommends tweets by people you follow. You quickly end up getting exposed to lots of content other people „liked“. Which more often than not is written by people with several mental illnesses, people in tough financial or social situations or successes like Nature papers, Conference acceptances and so on. There is very little room for „normal content“. I’ve managed to promote one of my articles successfully there with ~1 million impressions, but otherwise using the platform has been a net negative.

tayo42 4y ago
While I was working there I had to delete my account. I seemed to somehow always be exposed to negative things.
boltzmann-brain 4y ago
I feel like there is a social aspect to this "tweets from other people" thing. We are, of course, social people, whether we like it or not - the social context of what we're seeing always heavily biases our perception. When reading opinions that challenge ours, when having to "go out on a limb", or picture something that we haven't been concerned with yet, we have to gift the writer our trust. We have to trust them that they're not wasting our time, that at the end of the effort of trying to understand in a deep fashion what they're saying there is going to be some pay-off. We have to trust them that they're not trying to maneuver us into something using underhanded methods. This trust only comes from knowing people for a while, from reputation. Especially if someone's famous for being contrarian, and "their reputation precedes them", people are going to outright assume the author has hostile intent. In fact, they end up feeling that the author has intent hostile towards them specifically. However, even without being overtly preconditioned to think the person is a trouble maker, social mistrust is our default behavior. Often you'll see something that's out of your sphere so much that you'll read it, say "haha, lol". That's not necessarily meant to deride the author, but this kind of behavior, which many of us at some level engage in (whether we tweet the reply or just think this), shows that often we just dismiss other people we don't really know. This leniency often is the first step towards derision, aggression, or even conflict. This is easy to picture if we compare social media to pre-internet social situations. For example, a Discord meant for a specific hobby (eg I run a Tektronix and HPAK Discord) is like a club for better or worse. People in there have common interests or goals and work together and exchange based on knowledge. This alone gives them enough social context that when they enter this virtual lodge, they know they should bestow others with a modicum of respect and not dismiss them outright. I've seen this very community turn people from not wanting to talk to each other, to talking to each other - not best friends, but good enough for a little small talk every now and then. The Discord of a celebrity youtuber is like the waiting line to a concert, where people usually discuss the act they're going to be spectating, and adjacent acts. Again, common context, a common story, that helps us understand each other. A personal Facebook account is like your local home town to large extent. Your family, your childhood friends, maybe people from work or university. Again, common context. Instagram is like going to a night club or a fair and seeing the people who try the hardest. It's a well known social dynamic. It's not great. It attracts a lot of sycophants and low lifes, but it is what it is. With Twitter, it's like you're confronted with everyone you pass on the street. Imagine that you're going down the street, and you get to hear exactly, in detail, what everyone is talking about - from the very start of the conversation, without those other people knowing you can hear it. Then if you want, you can hear everything they said in the past, since the beginning of their lives. If you were able to do this IRL, this would not just be stalking, it would be an extremely worrisome endeavor, and there is no question that it would create conflict. That's why our social norms evolved to where we like to speak to others with some degree of privacy. That's why we have laws against recording of conversations you aren't part of. That's why if you're talking to a friend on the street, and someone random shows up and starts talking to you, you feel weirded out. You're not "not accepting", you're just in a position that is awkward, maybe dangerous, and definitely upsetting. There is no commonality. There is no trust. This is not intentional or even conscious - it's entirely subconscious and important to our survival. It's the same reason why your dog barks at the mailman or why a bird might attack anyone coming close to its nest. It's a distrust of intruders, and in general intrusions (of any new phenomena we aren't yet familiar with) into our personal space, our "bubble". There are those rare people who are extremely accepting of rando's on the street. Some would call them too friendly for their own good. People like this can be easily taken advantage of by con artists and the likes. They're the people donation salesmen grab a hold of downtown, talking about dying children in africa or whatever. But it does show that such a mindset is possible. People like this see every such interaction as an opportunity to learn or experience something new. They'll approach people thinking first, "how can I help them" and "how can I be respectful of this person". On the other hand there are people who are welcoming of such interactions, but they welcome them in a many-times-reinforced adversarial manner. Those are the people who want to argue with you. They're the people who see you as sport. Put in this context it's easy to see that the social model that Twitter represents is deleterious. It can be salvaged by people who have good intentions which is why some of the most prolific accounts on Twitter are the open minded, usually left-leaning, cerebral accounts. And then there is the dark side, of people who just want to shout at you - whether they're extreme "rationalists", or right or left wing propagandists, they're going to be very prolific as well. This explains why there is such a war going on on Twitter. It was, unintentionally, made in this design that enables such people to thrive on the platform, as well as to create the tension between the different approaches.

Tade0 4y ago

I have a hypothesis: the original, 140-character limit was only useful for hurling insults and hot takes. Fast forward to today and we have a whole culture built around it, even though the limit is long gone.

ageitgey 4y ago

> Twitter seems so persistently corrosive and unhappiness-inducing. Why is it? > These are people using Twitter with good intentions I've seen a few good articles on the phenomenon, but I think it boils down to the fact that Twitter encourages/rewards constant conversation and anyone can pop up in any conversation. As a result, it rewards the most abrasive people who tweet the most. No sane, well-adjusted person without an agenda to push (or a product to sell, etc) has the time or energy to continuously engage in Twitter at the amount required to become a big figure unless they are otherwise already famous. In essence, Twitter is the same 5% of insane people driving everyone else crazy. The other 95% of passive consumers don't realize that most content they read on Twitter is written by negative people. That's just how the platform works. If you are a well-meaning person trying to engage with this mob, either you'll get tired of it and leave or you'll get dragged into the negativity. There's multiple studies showing that active posters on twitter skew more negative and more politically extreme (left or right) than the average population. It's a collection of people with axes to grind yelling at each other. If you want to test this theory, start aggressively blocking people who reply to tweets with negative opinions. You'll quickly start seeing those same people already blocked when you read the replies to totally unrelated tweets. It's a really small universe of the same negative people generating most of the content.

boltzmann-brain 4y ago
Wow, I was just writing the same reply. I started writing it before you made yours. It's uncanny. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33006788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33006788
- ageitgey 4y ago
  I guess we have both wasted too much time on Twitter:)
  - boltzmann-brain 4y ago
    live and learn
4y ago

mkl95 4y ago

Twitter's recommendation system doesn't only try to draw your attention. Tweets and their replies form a tree, and the system wants those trees to grow as much as possible. It turns out the human brain is especially vulnerable to things such as political takes, violence, or simply stuff it perceives as dumb or useless. And there's FOMO as well. Twitter exploits those weaknesses to provoke a response. At worst it's a simple reply. Maybe a emoji tagging a friend, who then tags another friend, and so on. At best it will be a huge tree of people arguing with each other, a tree that can grow infinitely on paper.

bitwize 4y ago

The Great Banality Laser focuses and amplifies banality because... laser gonna lase.

newaccount2021 4y ago

Simple: Twitter is a midwit amplification service

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

I find that different social networks are more "conductive" for different types feelings or states. I think a lot of it has to do a person's natural negativity bias[0] but is further amplified by the given social network. Some tend towards conducting negativity towards self. Some tend to point the finger at others. I think as we better recognize and map these bizzare (and profitable) incentive structures over time we'll be able to build apps and networks that through various tricks and shortcuts more naturally conduct positivity, love, open mindedness, a desire to unite people, etc. I suspect in that world you'll still have a lot of networks trend negative but it would be pretty cool to get to a point where there is a choice. Sort of like ad blockers. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

layer8 4y ago

What you see on Twitter also can’t be taken as representative of (say) physicists in general, because only a small minority of physicists is active on Twitter. “Being active on Twitter” likely correlates with a set of personality traits that aren’t representative of the population at large.