I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. They do, but it turns out that they are ordinary humans who like posting the same tweets (and rants) that I would post.
I don't think Twitter can have the same signal to noise ratio as a well moderated forum like HN, even if you follow the "right" people, because the format of the site incentivizes a different style of discussion.
HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person)
Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person)
The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason).
Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.
Thats an interesting observation. Username based forums value the content, while Twitter (where your identity is public) values the individual and his/her expertise.
The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from the community. This leads to the problem of people upvoting comments on topics in which they lack expertise (ie developers upvoting comments about astronomy that "sound right")
This results in a trend (on HN and reddit) where the most upvoted comments are comments that "sound correct", but would not hold up against scrutiny of people who have expertise in that area. I like that HN censors the upvote count, so we are forced to judge the comment on its own merit.
Karma scores are not front-and-center, though. Years ago, they switched to hide the score of an individual piece of content (such that an unvoted content is visually the same as one that has 100 upvotes [it might be sorted differently, but otherwise is indistinguishable]). To my mind, that was one of the better changes to the quality of community moderation.
Agreed. And HN has something I associate with it specifically: the back-and-forth argument, maintaining consistency in positions and reasoning, looking like two people taking. But, upon inspection, many people are involved. That, I think, is an example of the de-emphasis on identity.
> I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content.
I think you have to stop following famous people like those guys, and instead follow up-and-coming economists and other scientists and bleeding edge researchers/builders, who are working hard to make a name for themselves with novel research in some interesting area.
Those are more likely to keep their Twitter feed focused on their research, rather than off-topic tweets, rants, political advocacy and "influencer" stuff people do once they become famous.
Also, the community of people who engage with them tend to be similarly focused, so you can find more high S:N folks to follow in their discussions.
If you curate your Twitter feed to just those types, you get a very high S:N ratio there.
My personal favorite is Noah Smith (NoOpinon or some similar spelling). He is a journalist at Bloomberg. His articles are posted quite frequently on HN. His twitter has a lot of interesting discussions.
I've started using the Lists feature of Twitter a ton, carefully curating users who tend to post around specific topics that I'm interested in. Then I just poke my head in the appropriate list whenever I want to catch up on what's been happening in a given subject. Totally changed my Twitter experience.
> I've started using the Lists feature of Twitter a ton, carefully curating users who tend to post around specific topics that I'm interested in. Then I just poke my head in the appropriate list whenever I want to catch up on what's been happening in a given subject.
I've been doing the same (although I've actually been on a break from Twitter for over a year now). Care to share links to your lists?
BTW, it took me forever to realize that I didn't have to follow an account in order to put it in a list. I've been putting off a serious pruning (several thousand) of who I follow, and I wish there were better tools for doing that pruning.
I think the best example I can share is one that I actually can't take credit for, came across it a few weeks back. It's a list of people actively working on .NET: https://twitter.com/i/lists/120961876 My own lists aren't ready for "primetime" yet :)
That’s part of Krugman’s persona - he does plenty of ranting - agreed on trying other economists. I like Stiglitz but no one is immune from human moments on twitter :P
Twitter deliberately promotes outrage. While hateful screaming is nothing new in the world of politics (or elsewhere), for Twitter and other ad-sellers this is a way to capture attention of users and drag them into flame wars.
I don't see "so and so Liked this tweet" in my feed, and I only see get a handful of promoted tweets, so it feels like they've eased up on adding noise to our feeds. I also set my location (arbitrarily) to Cook Islands, and now my "$LocalArea trends" widget is empty (thank God), so with aggressive culling I now have a Twitter feed that shows me what I asked to see.
It might be useful to note that I don’t actually have a Twitter account. So I just read a handful of people’s pages once in a while who do a good job of pulling in all the best things of the communities I care about, and also people send me tweets from time to time. So usually I can skip over most of the drama.
You can (and I propose you should) use Twitter with the chronological timeline feature enabled. It's why Twitter is usable for me while Facebook is not.
One of these days someone at Twitter will remember they bought Tweetdeck and start messing with it in the same way they do for the main site and apps, but until then it’s fantastic.
