It's almost as if the media was taking advantage of our psychological shortcomings and invading our personal lives for profit, at the expense of our well-being, eh?

The Internet used to be a refuge from the corporate public sphere; now it's its home.

The model I use for making sense of Twitter is that most of the blue check dialogue is just bringing the people-fighting-on-cable-news dynamic to the internet. Personalities on both sides of every debate have a symbiotic relationship where they have inane arguments because that's what gets boosted and gives them more visibility.

Which is fine, if you treat it as entertainment, but people think they're following the news and instead they're watching a wrestling match.

The painful realization about social media and most forms of media is that, at the end of the day, even the people you like, the people you agree with, have very little in common with you and far more in common with those they vocally disagree with, generally.

I'm generally politically very left and I listen to a show which I won't name here but is also relatively left. At some point, I realized the income the hosts make puts them squarely in the same economic bracket as many of the people that they are often calling greedy or unprincipled. From that realization stemmed the next, that these people, even if they started with perfect intention and perfect action, necessarily must be subverted towards entertainers over informers by the design of the platforms they use to spread their message.

This post feels 100% like it's about Chapo.

Yes. Surely it's about Chapo. I'd certainly not call them as 'greedy' or 'unprincipled' as the people they criticise. However I'll not waste this opportunity to call them bland, effete and ignorant.

Please stop downvoting comments just because you disapprove. This is probably the worst practice on HN of late.

This post is entirely independent of the subject being discussed. I have no opinion on these particular podcasters.

I don't even have the rep to downvote comments.

Late reply. It was your comment that had been downvoted into the negative when I came across it. So I was engaging in a kind of off-topic defense of your comment. ;-)

I was reading a book this morning about mushroom foraging and suddenly realized that I hadn't seen an advert in quite some time because it was a book and not my phone. Then I thought about getting rid of my phone and only reading books from now on. Now I'm posting this on my phone. It's quite annoying how terrible the internet is now. I used to feel comfortable having a conversation in a forum without thinking it was all generated from some AstroTurfing nonsense or would be used to send me highly personalized ads.

Install uBlock Origin and enable all filters. Enjoy the web and don't feel guilty about it. Nobody is entitled to views, ad clicks or even our attention.

Yes I did this on my laptop and it's always shocking when I look at my phone.

I highly recommend setting up a pi-hole on AWS somewhere, with custom DNS ports and using a vpn client that can redirect all DNS requests from the device there. On android NetGuard works well.

I hardly ever see an ad on the phone now. Astroturfing is a whole other question though.

I actually have been thinking very hard about the problem of astroturfing and how to combat it. Not really sure how I would go about it currently but one idea I tossed around is IP address physical location, it might work on HN...at least during working hours. Mixed with a bit of submission and comment history processing, it's almost viable as a concept.

Some eReaders (avoiding naming names to avoid advertising at you :P) also enable easy book-like reading (i.e. e-ink, no backlight/glare) without ads. I like them because I can have a whole library in the size of one book. And also I admit to a certain degree of anxiety about bending book binding, particularly in paperbacks.

I bought an e-reader when I went off to do an internship one summer and wouldn't have access to the university library.

Internship ended up being a dud (they paid me for 40 hours a week but only had work for me to do about 5-10 hours a week). I read over 50 books that summer, mostly classics that I got free from Project Gutenberg. Definitely got my money's worth.

I used to have an ereader but I guess I missed turning pages. I never felt like I completed a book or had some physical sense of where I was in a book.

Very well put. Though there is still some refuge in smaller online communities, if you know where to look. If you limit your exposure to specific places and avoid the rampant toxicity elsewhere, it's not that bad. :)

This is why I'm only on HN.

Uh....you’re the one following them. Take some freaking responsibility for yourself.

No. You see a lot of stuff that's retweeted or replied to from people you don't follow. Seems odd to have an irate opinion of someone's use of a social media platform that you are not familiar with.

Me? Hahaha. I don't "follow" anyone. I don't have any social media account. Haven't had one in five years, and I encourage everyone to do the same. I don't even use WhatsApp, for Christ's sake, and virtually everyone in my country uses it hourly! I'm responsible alright. Can you make the same claim?

If only there was an unfollow button!

Doesn't help you'll still see the retweets eventually through the algorithm or from followers you actually like, only way is to mute or block every one.

I'm not a huge twitter user, but I went into this article skeptical. I always saw the problem as too many bots - fake profile pictures and regurgitated statements that amplify pundits, harass people for having an opinion, scam people out of money, and altogether make the most of internet anonymity. I imagine a "grey checkmark" that would require some form of human-to-human authentication (although obviously such an institution would introduce corruption).

After this experiment, I'm realizing it's more complicated than that. Twitter is a reverse-shit sandwich. Crap in the lowliest dredges (the bot level), crap at the top (the pundit level), and a few pleasant people talking about cakes, music, and urban planning in the middle.

That's the thing - Twitter creates a situation where to dominate the medium, you need to be loud and abusive. Lots of people will use the medium without the need to dominate but those who need to be on top of the social hierarchy will do what it takes to get to the top of this hierarchy (or be replaced by those who do).

I mean, I'm pretty critical of social hierarchies (for a long time I considered myself an anarchist but no longer). But particular kinds of social hierarchies are part of this society and while improving this society is one thing, imagining we can eliminate social hierarchies without changing other stuff is another and problematic thing in my opinion. A lot of the problematic evolution of this society over the last fifty years has involved the change from authorized, rules-setting authority to bullying-authority and that's produced some actual abuse but has moreover, reduced our ability to act against visible problems, a situation that's past the verge of crisis.

not only that but how partisan blue checks are.

i felt the same: a lot of middle ground conversation, but nobody was calling out each other with quoted RTs.

That's how you get to be a Twitter celebrity: be either divisive or entertainingly obnoxious. Be a clown or lead a lynch mob.

It also overlaps to some extent with how you get to be a real celebrity, but social media makes the effect more extreme.

I didn't see any links to these in the replies so I thought I'd share: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...

Twitter users are extremely unrepresentative of the US population.

>The analysis indicates that the 22% of American adults who use Twitter are representative of the broader population in certain ways, but not others. >Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users

so 2.2% of Americans make 80% of the tweets lol

1 - unfollow the most polarizing blue check accounts

2- select "Latest tweets" instead of "Top tweets" in the timeline config (the "starts" icon on the top right middle corner)

It will improve the quality of the timeline

Latest definitely is the only true way to use Twitter. Does anyone really need to see what other people you follow have liked or replied to? If they wanted me to see they would have retweeted.

One thing I've noticed is that the app periodically switches my preference from "Latest tweets" back to "Top tweets". I'm not sure if it's just a bug, but I wouldn't be surprised if that behavior was intentional.

It happens on a lot of social media where there's a sort by "top" vs "newest". It's a dark pattern and I'm convinced it's both intentional and cargo-culted. I recall having the issue with Facebook about a decade ago when they first rolled out "top" posts in favor of newest.

It is intentional and if you look on the app when you're switching between the two it even says "We'll switch you back to top tweets after a little while" or something along those lines. True jerk design.

I believe this is intentional.

The problem isn't that Blue Check marks are polarizing. The problem is that there are lots of communities on twitter - gamers, scientists, tech, conservative, bernie. The problem is that accounts with a large number of followers will necessarily have followers who come from lots of different communities. It's when these communities come into contact with each other that fights happen. That's the mechanism for the creation of drama on twitter, it's two groups that come from fundamentally different bubbles intersecting.

one way i found to make sure my timeline is always on "latest" mode is by creating a private list and adding all my follows to it.

no ads, always latest.

Or even better, use Lists.

I wonder if we could have Twitter pause or blue-out the mobberatti when things get too hot.

PG&E style automated trips when things reach a certain pitch when it comes from the blue-checks (at least the ones historically looking for reaction)

How about when things should get a little hot? SOPA would have passed [1] without frantic outrage.

Where do you want to be when a major hurricane hits? New York or New Orleans? How about Puerto Rico? Having a voice matters.

[1] https://youtu.be/RJ194S7KjRg

So is Twitter a right guaranteed by the constitution or is it a private company free to censor whomever it deems to have crossed a fuzzy line it cannot define in plain terms?

Who was we in, "I wonder if we could have Twitter ..."?

If other citizens are making decisions for Twitter, some government rule about being a neutral carrier sounds less radical than a government rule about maintaining decorum.

Honestly, I don't even read Twitter or have an account, I'm just wary of calls to control conversations in order to seek harmony.

> The dialogue was way more in the middle. [] The whole thing felt pretty civilized.

> It made me realize how much content these twitter blue checks are creating.

Ironically, content that includes yelling at the unwashed masses for making twitter toxic. Bastards.

My goodness. It is almost as if creating class distinctions leads to tribal behavior. Who would have guessed?

This doesn't really seem to have anything to Twitter's account verification feature. Surely the verified accounts just tend to be more popular and you were just seeing what your feed looks like with less popular accounts.