Twitter has developed norms which prioritize anger. Some fairly prominent folks on Twitter can go weeks without tweeting anything positive. This isn't going away. Much like Reddit has developed norms around downvoting to disagree.
I think you're laser focusing on Twitter because of your experiences on the platform. I only started using Twitter recently as I felt the non-technical content on HN became too one-sided or rage-filled, so I can't offer much observation there, but I've been on non-algorithmic social sites for decades. I've been on HN for over a decade. Heck, you can hop onto Usenet today and see hellthreads still spawning. A Raspberry Pi group I'm in had a (crossposted) hellthread about Apple products.
People respond to rage whether there's algorithms or not. People give others online much less benefit of the doubt than they do in person. I've seen this constant on every non-algorithmic social site I've been on. Mastodon, despite being a much smaller network, also has huge chains of posts spawned by angry toots/posts. At this point I'm convinced that this is just a modality of failure in human discourse. I'm cautiously optimistic that humans will develop norms around socializing in the large, but it took centuries of political instability for the printing press to be normalized, so it may take (turbulent) decades for socializing in the large to be normalized.
I think you're laser focusing on Twitter because of your experiences on the platform. I only started using Twitter recently as I felt the non-technical content on HN became too one-sided or rage-filled, so I can't offer much observation there, but I've been on non-algorithmic social sites for decades. I've been on HN for over a decade. Heck, you can hop onto Usenet today and see hellthreads still spawning. A Raspberry Pi group I'm in had a (crossposted) hellthread about Apple products.
People respond to rage whether there's algorithms or not. People give others online much less benefit of the doubt than they do in person. I've seen this constant on every non-algorithmic social site I've been on. Mastodon, despite being a much smaller network, also has huge chains of posts spawned by angry toots/posts. At this point I'm convinced that this is just a modality of failure in human discourse. I'm cautiously optimistic that humans will develop norms around socializing in the large, but it took centuries of political instability for the printing press to be normalized, so it may take (turbulent) decades for socializing in the large to be normalized.