
The World That Twitter Made - chkaloon
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-world-that-twitter-made.html
======
just-ok
This is a great post, expressing thoughts that have been brewing in my mind
much better than I could. I couldn't agree more with the fundamental thesis
that 280 characters cannot lead to meaningful discourse as your exposure to
different communities grows. In their own words,

> _To run a high-follower account on twitter is to be constantly exposed to
> entire communities whose members will treat you as an enemy to be defeated
> or a buffoon to be humiliated the minute they become aware of you._

To me, though, this post begs the question: if having a large number of
followers is so toxic, why do it? This post clearly misses the tight-knit blog
communities of yesterday, yet they still insist on maintaining a public, high-
follower profile.

If you are writing something worth reading, and only (mostly) care to interact
with people who also write things worth reading, it doesn't seem prudent to
open yourself up to the Internet at large. Private profiles can't be
retweeted, and you get to moderate your reader list. Obviously, you reach a
smaller audience, but if you are interested in "open and honest exchanges,"
finding people that are "intellectually interested," and getting away from the
"bare-knuckle brawl," then isn't that a far, _far_ better way to reach that
goal?

> _Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat
> you with experience._

~~~
spectaclepiece
I was going to cite that exact first quote because it reflects my recent
experience on Twitter. Yesterday I deactivated my account. Did I have a large
following? I think I had 1 follower, I used it to follow mostly artists and
programmers.

So why did I deactivate my account? A couple of weeks ago I started following
the debate around free speech because classical liberal values are close to my
heart and it was like walking in on a car crash happening in slow motion. I
just couldn’t take my eyes of it.

In an attempt to regain my sanity and creative thinking I’m going back to
reading books and having private conversations with people, preferably in-
person.

Edit: HN discussions it should be mentioned are still a bastion of thoughtful
conversation which I would like to maintain. In respect to that please don’t
make this thread political, my reference to liberal values was only to give an
example of a topic largely infected with a negative discussion climate.
Original article was more about the dynamics of conversation, not the topics
themselves.

~~~
mackrevinack
not that it's much use to you now, but you don't need a twitter account to
keep up with someone... just use something like nitter that will let you add
them to your rss reader

------
rvp-x
It's true that simply having 30,000 people with a quick reply button creates
negative interactions, Twitter is also a website that makes money from
advertising, and people watch more ads if they're "engaged". This incentivizes
the website to show your content to people who will disagree with it.

------
raspyberr
An issue with closed systems like youtube/reddit/facebook/HN etc. is that when
you read something that you don't agree with the only way to directly have an
effect (whether you actually do or not) is by joining the system and further
perpetuating what it entails. Yes you can affect it from the outside by
writing articles/blogposts and hope that they get enough visibility to be
shown in those areas but that takes much more effort (not a bad thing).

------
blackrock
I think that world was already there. Twitter just made it apparent.

~~~
coffeefirst
Not at all. Twitter gave everyone access to bigger microphones, and one of the
main benefits of this went to asshats who would have ordinarily been booed off
the stage.

The fact that these people exist isn’t new. They’re ability to do what they do
at scale and to such a large audience is.

~~~
netsharc
The instant nature and character limit of Twitter is what made it so toxic, I
think. So now anyone can broadcast any dumb thought they have. If you were a
blogger, you'd think about your thought more before sitting down and writing a
long-ish essay about it (maybe you even learn as you write that your thought
is wrong, incendieary, etc), but with Twitter...

In theory Facebook also offers this instant thing, but the idea with Facebook
was, it would be limited to your friends/network...

~~~
coffeefirst
Agreed. Those little bits of friction, whether it's needing to put the time
into a blog and build an audience for it, or having some natural limits on
reach, really matter.

------
foobar_
At some point politics got intertwined with social media. Until that point ...
social media was a pleasant place. I'm pretty sure had email been still active
... you would get a ton of political mails as fwds as opposed to spam.

The shit show that politics is ... is pathetic in all media irrespective of
character length. Have you seen TV ? What excuses do they have, illiteracy ?
The boomer crowd is dishonest. Heck anyone remember Ron Paul, who was a
republican ? Maybe there should be an age limit of 40 in politics.

Surprisingly in YouTube, in some debate talks you find civility. People seem
to miss out one thing, no other generation has been that active in politics
for about 40 years. So that's actually a good thing as opposed to the passive
acceptance you see in the older crowd.

What I think is sad is ... all this political energy going nowhere and except
pointless shows of symbolism, which is fine in most cases but the lack of
change is what makes the thing even worse.

~~~
artsyca
We have a far too narrow view of what constitutes social media.

Every medium is a social one if you think about it and every social medium is
political.

The medium has and always will be the message and when you get to the core you
understand the message is simply the audience.

Do you think "primitive" civilizations compared to ours didn't have social
media before the advent of the tweet?

They were operating on levels we haven't even begun to understand in our
foolish pride.

We're as primitive as we were at the invention of electric light and our
technological advancements have outpaced our morality. We're just amplifying
the hysteria and confusion with our automated algorithms and always-on
engagement and now every poor schmuck has a voice where once it was limited to
the elites. You should be grateful that Twitter has democratized the inane
blatherings of the proletariat to drown out the voices of so called authority.

~~~
foobar_
Not all purpose of communication is political.

1\. Information dissemination

2\. Coordination

3\. Persuasion

4\. Feedback gathering

5\. Social grooming (jokes, status updates, needs ...)

6\. Artistic self-expression

All these are fairly reasonable in any social media.

Conflicting communication via threads is where they fail. Trolling is as old
as threads.

~~~
artsyca
Social and political are synonyms my dude but yes not all communication is
political but all communication is social.

