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Not going to lie, whoever owns it, I have an inner hatred for that hell site. The way I see it, it can go two ways...either Musk somehow manages to actually mak

Not going to lie, whoever owns it, I have an inner hatred for that hell site. The way I see it, it can go two ways...either Musk somehow manages to actually make the site tolerable, or it dies. Its going to be one or the other...nobody really knows which way yet. Either direction is a win in my eyes though. If it changes for the better: great! If it dies: even better! More social media sites will take its place.

exclusiv 4y ago
Agreed. Although I do think following just a few hand curated accounts has a lot of value as a topical news feed. Or to get local news in near real-time. The rest of it is worthless to me.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"I have an inner hatred for that hell site" What do you hate about it? I've never used it because it always seemed pretty shallow and vapid to me, but I don't have a visceral reaction against it. What am I missing?
- ihumanable 4y ago
  Not the person you asked, I wouldn't say I have a visceral hatred for twitter but I do have a strong dislike. One issue I find just generally with social media is that it incentivizes some inherent qualities in people that are detrimental to a functioning society. The nature of twitter encourages two behaviors that seem antithetical to constructive dialog. Tweets are short. This makes it extremely difficult to have nuance in any conversation and makes it really easy for people to take a tweet that might be part of a larger thread or a series of replies out of context. There are lots of examples of a tweet blowing up someone's life and then you come to find out that the reality was, unsurprisingly, unable to be captured in 140 (or 280) characters. Tweets are algorithmically promoted based on engagement. This really isn't just a Twitter thing, most social media works this way. The problem comes when you combine this with the first issue. "Hot takes" and things that outrage are pretty engaging and end up going far on the site. So you take these two things together and what you end up with is a lot of content that takes complex topics and turns them into snappy hot takes. People then engage with those and our natural tribal tendencies take over and people fall into camps of either agreeing or disagreeing with the tweet. Now their agreement or disagreement might not be total, but in comes the format of twitter, it's hard in so few characters to express a nuanced opinion like "Well I agree with these parts of the tweet because of XYZ but I disagree with ABC and I think it totally misses the complexities of JKL." In my experience a lot of twitter ends up devolving into a rabid sort of tribalism. But that's not universal, many people carefully curate who they follow and derive a great deal of value from the site. I think though when people have a strong negative reaction to it, they are probably considering what they (and I) perceive to be the majority case of people following popular twitter accounts (by definition they are popular because they have lots of followers) and taking part in the lower quality dialog trap I described above.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  For one, the lack of any nuance. 240 characters is not enough to accurately articulate a persons thoughts, so people infer meaning from otherwise harmless statements. Places that allow for longer comments, like HackerNews, have better discussion because you can post what you actually think. Second, I just don't like the site. You go to the site, click on the news ticker for any topic, and you see a million of the worst takes ever dreamed up by mankind. The format also encourages mob mentality which I find very disturbing.
kbelder 4y ago
This is my thought. One way or the other, Twitter is going to be less of a blight on society a year from now. I consider them far worse than Facebook, even though Facebook gets more criticism.

exclusiv 4y ago

Agreed. Although I do think following just a few hand curated accounts has a lot of value as a topical news feed. Or to get local news in near real-time. The rest of it is worthless to me.

pmoriarty 4y ago

"I have an inner hatred for that hell site" What do you hate about it? I've never used it because it always seemed pretty shallow and vapid to me, but I don't have a visceral reaction against it. What am I missing?

ihumanable 4y ago
Not the person you asked, I wouldn't say I have a visceral hatred for twitter but I do have a strong dislike. One issue I find just generally with social media is that it incentivizes some inherent qualities in people that are detrimental to a functioning society. The nature of twitter encourages two behaviors that seem antithetical to constructive dialog. Tweets are short. This makes it extremely difficult to have nuance in any conversation and makes it really easy for people to take a tweet that might be part of a larger thread or a series of replies out of context. There are lots of examples of a tweet blowing up someone's life and then you come to find out that the reality was, unsurprisingly, unable to be captured in 140 (or 280) characters. Tweets are algorithmically promoted based on engagement. This really isn't just a Twitter thing, most social media works this way. The problem comes when you combine this with the first issue. "Hot takes" and things that outrage are pretty engaging and end up going far on the site. So you take these two things together and what you end up with is a lot of content that takes complex topics and turns them into snappy hot takes. People then engage with those and our natural tribal tendencies take over and people fall into camps of either agreeing or disagreeing with the tweet. Now their agreement or disagreement might not be total, but in comes the format of twitter, it's hard in so few characters to express a nuanced opinion like "Well I agree with these parts of the tweet because of XYZ but I disagree with ABC and I think it totally misses the complexities of JKL." In my experience a lot of twitter ends up devolving into a rabid sort of tribalism. But that's not universal, many people carefully curate who they follow and derive a great deal of value from the site. I think though when people have a strong negative reaction to it, they are probably considering what they (and I) perceive to be the majority case of people following popular twitter accounts (by definition they are popular because they have lots of followers) and taking part in the lower quality dialog trap I described above.
danjoredd 4y ago
For one, the lack of any nuance. 240 characters is not enough to accurately articulate a persons thoughts, so people infer meaning from otherwise harmless statements. Places that allow for longer comments, like HackerNews, have better discussion because you can post what you actually think. Second, I just don't like the site. You go to the site, click on the news ticker for any topic, and you see a million of the worst takes ever dreamed up by mankind. The format also encourages mob mentality which I find very disturbing.

kbelder 4y ago

This is my thought. One way or the other, Twitter is going to be less of a blight on society a year from now. I consider them far worse than Facebook, even though Facebook gets more criticism.