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In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook pro
by redwood 4y ago
In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoTwitter is the most interesting on the internet, by far. If the discourse quality sucks, you're following the wrong accounts.
- koheripbal 4y agoAll the nobody asinine replies are noisy. It can definitely do better.
- nemo44x 4y agoIsn't that the point of the subscription? People that don't pay will be buried and you won't see them.
- tomp 4y agoReally? On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political leaders, and billionaires?
- thundergolfer 4y agoYou’re missing the point of their comment. If the medium is the problematic thing being focused on in their comment then who the communicating parties are is not significant. Checkout Postman and McLuhan.
- whoooooo123 4y agoA lot of people reading this aren't going to understand what you mean by "checkout Postman". I'm guessing you mean "read Neil Postman's books"? If so, I agree - especially Amusing Ourselves to Death.
- trgn 4y agoTechnopoly too, for an easy to digest mash-up of McLuhan and Ellul.
- Barrin92 4y agothat's literally the very mechanism that weakens public discourse because it turns discourse into a 280 word soundbite popularity contest. Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.
- wussboy 4y agoAny idea of significance has subtlety and complexity, both of which are anathema to Twitter. Rage, on the other hand, can be perfectly encapsulated in a few characters.
- s1k3 4y agoTwitter has destroyed public discourse. It has turned conversations into contents to be as short and as edgy as possible. I’m sorry you don’t see that.
- Overtonwindow 4y agoHey, that sounds like the mainstream press!
- tomp 4y agoDo you even use Twitter? You can find a lot of very deep, long-form content. I'd recommend following Samo Burja or Doomberg for example.
- falcolas 4y ago153 characters, in response to a message 152 characters in length. Did these shorter-than-twitter lengths destroy this discourse?
- notacoward 4y agoIs that really Twitter's fault? Please go through this thread right here and see how many of the comments would fit in a tweet. Many of them also match (or exceed) the Twitter standard for lack of basic humanity. The appetite was there. If Twitter hadn't provided the outlet, some essentially identical alternative would have. It's quite likely that some other will do the same after Musk finishes driving Twitter into the ground. The platform isn't the problem. The people using whatever platform they can find to spread an anti-democratic anti-intellectual anti-humanitarian message are. I'm sorry you don't want to see that.
- blibble 4y agoin the vast majority of cases it's going to be their PR team, not them
- bogomipz 4y agoWhy is it important to directly communicate with or even "listen to unfiltered" the world's dictators and billionaires? As for communicating directly with politicians it's very unlikely that the vast majority of them manage their own social media accounts. You probably have the same level of direct communication as you do sending their office a letter or an email.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y agoNonsense. This a big beef with me about Twitter. It purports to be an egalitarian platform where you can "directly communicate" with significant people, but the sheer volume and signal-to-noise ratio of popular accounts means that they will never even see your comment, let alone reply, except in extraordinarily rare examples.
- rpastuszak 4y agoFB would still be #1 for me on this scale. The panopticon they’ve build is bigger and wider (sharing data between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don’t know what would be the “Cambridge Analytica of Twitter” but time will tell. Twitter’s catching up though.
- fny 4y agoI'll go out on a limb and say it's not entirely the specific medium's fault. It's the people. It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have seen families torn apart because of this. I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile at strangers.
- boringg 4y agoOut of all the most heart breaking things that the internet you choose this example? Agenda much?
- fny 4y agoI deleted that because it colored what I said enough for you to miss my message. I have no agenda, but I think your comment proves my point that there's something off about how we're communicating right now.
- boringg 4y agoFair but I didn't miss what you wrote, you choose to explicitly choose an example that would get eyes rolling. Which, if I read your comment correctly, you accept the responsibility with "there's something off about how we're communicating right now". Inflammatory language get's more reaction - well documented and your probably aware of that.
- fny 4y agoI seriously was not attempting to be inflammatory or get a reaction. I was just expressing how I felt.
- ronnier 4y agoReddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago> Reddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact. I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of their friends, but you better believe they and all their Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of the other social media.
- uni_rule 4y agoI think Reddit is more centralized in its younger age range than the other popular social media sites.
- bart_spoon 4y agoI personally feel like the lows of Reddit are just as low as Twitter, but the highs are much higher.
- rdtwo 4y agoI don’t think that’s true. Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium where experts had a voice. During the pandemic doctors and infectious diseases experts were using it to call or government blow hards. Now that’s going to die as well and we may return to complete darkness.
- devwastaken 4y agoI saw the opposite. "Experts" being totally wrong and fear mongering without evidence. It was rural governments that said "prove it". Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's. Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y agoI see Twitter as possibly working up to the ideal of "crowd sourcing" the truth. If Musk does what he seems to be saying he will do -- and take the training wheels off the moderation, and get the government out of it -- we might be left with a system that really can sort out the truth from fiction. Or, at least, present both sides, and let people decide for themselves, without hiding one side.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nikau 4y agoI'm sure it will be just as successful as the voat platform was.
- goldenchrome 4y agoAbsolutely based. There are more morale virtues than just “prevent harm”.
- 4y ago
- blippage 4y agoI checked out Twitter again after a few months absence. There is good content, for sure, but by crikey, most of what passes for political discourse amounts to a stream of non sequiturs and ipse dixit (assertion without proof).
- mensetmanusman 4y agoIn Brazil it’s WhatsApp. That’s just to say everyone is in a bubble and people are the problem.
- bambataa 4y agoGonna be weird when journalists have to start digging up stories rather than just reposting tweets.
- dayvid 4y agoDuring the initial COVID outbreak, it was one of the only decent information sources I could find. Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety of professionals across different disciplines and regions to parse together some useful info. You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being misinformed in some way.
- faizshah 4y agoI read this kind of comment all the time on HN, it’s so confusing to me. I only joined twitter 2 years ago because there are a large number of high quality tweet threads on finance, ML, NLP, breaking news etc. A lot of the time I get information earlier on twitter than I do on any other platform. If anything, for me, twitter has strengthened the quality of public discourse. If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform. I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem? If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.
- ramg 4y agoIf you don't mind me asking, which accounts are you following for your financial news? Thanks!
- faizshah 4y agoToo many, you can start with: - https://twitter.com/saxomarketcall https://twitter.com/saxomarketcall and their podcast - https://twitter.com/macroalf https://twitter.com/macroalf - https://twitter.com/unusual_whales https://twitter.com/unusual_whales Then you’ll see their retweets and likes in your feed and thats how you can build a good list. I would stay away from anyone whose primary focus is crypto, biotech or tech stocks unless you are a critical reader.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoHave you not noticed tiktok? People are being trained to have the attention span of a gnat.
- nikau 4y agoSorry can you repeat that with some 80s music played 20% faster and pitched up a few semitones in the background.
- fleddr 4y agoI couldn't agree more. An entire series of anti-social tactics have been exclusively invented on the Twitter network, and then normalized.