4 ms·

It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares

by pavlov 4y ago

It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists who both write this drivel (one of the links is on a16zcrypto.com which I guess is the ideological enemy base of “establishment journos”). Will anyone else be left on Twitter when their private war is done?

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists (...) Would you say the same about GitHub stars? There's no end of people obsessing about those, completely oblivious to the fact that they're first and foremost bookmarks, and do not confer any particular sentiment for a starred repository. And yet, they're a popularity contest. Journalists and VCs care about this because enough users care about this that it can be used to print money.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  Weird, I've never heard of people obsessing over GitHub stars. I guess if you're not actively contributing to open source projects, it's not something you care about.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33309969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33309969 for a recent thread on this.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
You're seeing it more on HN because there's a huge (IMO growing) overlap between HN commenters and Twitter users. The comments on Big Tech articles look identical to entire slices of Twitter. Some of the talking heads on HN who comment a lot also have moderately large Twitter followings. Despite being in tech and working adjacent to Big Tech, in my circles only HN and Twitter users are this up in arms about Twitter. They seem to be more concerned about this than even friends of mine who work at Twitter (who are more peeved by the current instability in the company than anything going on with the product.) It's fun popcorn on HN right now but if this continues it'll get pretty tiring IMO.

by pavlov 4y ago

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists (...) Would you say the same about GitHub stars? There's no end of people obsessing about those, completely oblivious to the fact that they're first and foremost bookmarks, and do not confer any particular sentiment for a starred repository. And yet, they're a popularity contest. Journalists and VCs care about this because enough users care about this that it can be used to print money.

ProjectArcturis 4y ago
Weird, I've never heard of people obsessing over GitHub stars. I guess if you're not actively contributing to open source projects, it's not something you care about.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33309969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33309969 for a recent thread on this.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

You're seeing it more on HN because there's a huge (IMO growing) overlap between HN commenters and Twitter users. The comments on Big Tech articles look identical to entire slices of Twitter. Some of the talking heads on HN who comment a lot also have moderately large Twitter followings. Despite being in tech and working adjacent to Big Tech, in my circles only HN and Twitter users are this up in arms about Twitter. They seem to be more concerned about this than even friends of mine who work at Twitter (who are more peeved by the current instability in the company than anything going on with the product.) It's fun popcorn on HN right now but if this continues it'll get pretty tiring IMO.