
Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn from It) - mkaroumi
https://medium.com/bad-words/why-twitter-s-dying-and-what-you-can-learn-from-it-9ed233e37974#.of7r1pkp4
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jerf
Alternatively:

"We have created an abusive society. We have normalized, regularized, and
routinized abuse. We are abused at work, by the very rules, norms, and
expectations of our jobs, at which we are merely “human resources”, to be
utilized, allocated, depleted. We are abused at play, by industries that seek
to prey on our innocence and literally “target” our human weaknessses. And now
we are abused at arm’s length, through the lightwaves, by people we will never
meet, for things we have barely even said. We live in a society where school
shootings are the rule, not the exception, where more people will have taken
antidepressants than not…and now one where nearly everyone will have been
abused on the web…for a random, off-hand, throwaway comment, an idle thought,
something trivial, unremarkable, meaningless."

(And on for a few more paragraphs of existential malaise. I do not use that
term sarcastically.)

Consider that this is mostly not true. Real society has mostly not changed.
Consider that the next level down of causation is that Twitter _convinces_ you
this is the truth, and that's the real problem... who wants that?

I've made a hobby of sort of studying how community structures create patterns
of interaction. There's a sense in which Twitter just thrusts too many people
too closely together... it isn't quite fair to say it's a "zero-dimensional
space" since there is structure in who is following who, but it is pretty
densely packed. Combined with the characteristics of tweets enforced by that
brutal character limit, and Twitter is just a terrible place for building a
community, and a terrible way to get news about the world. It may be useful
for other things, but not those.

The Internet at large can cause the same problems, but in general it disperses
people a bit more.

