I wonder if he still would or if the amount of spam hitting public figures from every direction is so overwhelming that they can't possibly respond to it all. And I wonder how much of the "responses" you get from blue checks on Twitter is really them and how much is a hired social media manager running their account.
I'm not sure where this leads but it can't be good.
You can see everyone else is constantly tweeting about how awful the Capulets are - your friends mostly aren't, but they're retweeting people who are. You remember one time you expressed some doubts about something the Montagues did and people you don't know turned up to tell you off. You think the Capulets might actually be right about something this one time, but you don't dare say it.
Private conversations give you more room to be wrong, to be uncertain, to be curious, to be uninterested. On Twitter you always have an audience.
To get noticed everything has to be larger than life and this tends towards hostility and partisanship.
Observations: I know longer expend energy thinking about the terrible state of discourse on twitter, the sanctimony, bad faith, etc. Also, my thought patterns seem to be changing, my brain feels like it has “spare capacity” and I find myself starting new hobbies. Just anecdata, but I am certain I am calmer and less worried about twitter destroying humanity!
I think it's super cool to be able to interact with different people doing interesting things (a little like HN, but it's easier to remember who the people are where as on HN I never remember 99% of the usernames in threads).
If you want to be extreme about it, you can put everyone in lists and then this won't happen. You can also use a third party client that doesn't do this.
My main Twitter complaint is the ads. There are so many and they suck. I'd much rather have Twitter premium that removes the ads.
There are no ads in third party clients such as Tweetbot.
Are you using the reverse chronological timeline? That's the only way to fly.
There are people that are very good friends of mine in Real Life, but their Twitter profiles show a completely toxic persona. This doesn't happen with their other social media profiles.
TikTok on the other hand shows up higher more "feel-good" content which is why it's the only social media app I have installed on my phone.
I don't know toxic people on twitter behaving the same on other social networks.
Twitter is so because it is designed to encourage arguments (to generate "engagement") and you can avoid it.
They tell you when your tweets are reported even if no action is taken, just to make you mad that people are reporting you.
They tell you when someone blocks you and you can't visit their twitter anymore even though you can if you log out.
Who would build a system like this unless they wanted to fuel drama?
* assuming that Twitter is mostly toxic
* or that avoiding toxicity isn't mental work
What is it where I'm wrong, and if so, why?
Not to pick on it but compared to curated reddit / twitter, I found it very hard to find anything interesting on discord I kept jumping from server to server.
I get a lot more value out of forums about a topic, or HN, or groups of friends I already know. Facebook groups on my hobbies, etc. Joining/participating in "private" (but open to anyone) groups rather than broadcasting outwards to all and getting engagement through shock/clickbait type content.
That doesn't mean what works for me has to work for you, though, and of course it's without getting into how problematic one platform's LEADERSHIP might be versus another.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939
I don't have a solution. But it's a real problem.
Even though cancel culture is probably overreacting, I'm not sure if there is another way than to get rid of the toxic loud minority.
I'm a mod in a subreddit that has a very toxic circle jerk sister subreddit. Like "jokes about the recently died father of one of the persons the main subreddit is about" bad. Some people frequent both subreddits and while they are just behaved enough to not be straight banned in the main subreddit, their behavior in the circle jerk would well justify a perma bann.
In my experience there is no reasoning with certain persons. Even if they seem reasonable 80% of the time, the 20% completely destroy any basis for normal discussions. There's a latent sentiment that creeps into every discussion if you don't remove these persons. Even if they haven't shown their bad side in the main subreddit.
I used to run my own BBS back in the dialup days. Even then, the problems would be recognisable to a modern forum mod.
The only workable solutions I've found are that the more focused a board on a select number of topics, the easier it is to effectively moderate in a humane manner, and that it is impossible to rules-lawyer your way to success. In the end, you have to spend significant brain-time evaluating behavior on a case-by-base basis, and be willing to ban, listen, and revise in equal measures. It's hard work, and generally unappreciated.
In my special case, we have a very heterogeneous audience because we are not mono thematical. It is quite problematic if you have people coming together who have widely different expectations.
> and that it is impossible to rules-lawyer your way to success.
I agree. Never do this. The rules will always be used against you, regardless of how detailed they are. And discussions about rules take up so much time. Keep them short and concise but also make clear that they are not set in stone. You will need leeway anyway.
> In the end, you have to spend significant brain-time evaluating behavior on a case-by-base basis, and be willing to ban, listen, and revise in equal measures. It's hard work, and generally unappreciated.
The "significant brain-time" is a problem. You are outnumbered and then fighthing and debunking bullshit takes much more time than producing it (the Trump tactic).
For my case, I came to the conclusion that being nice 80% of the time is good enough. Save the 20% evilness for the notorious cases and you can cut down a lot of mod time. Educating newbies is a different matter but for regulars, I started to warn them one time and afterwards I start temporarily banning in a fibonacci like manner for every subsequent temporary bann. Most get it then or even leave before I have to perma-bann them.
Basically, you make a strawman argument: rather than arguing whatever point your opponent was claiming, you make something up and argue against that instead.
But since you're arguing on the internet, you can always find some dipshit somewhere who actually supports the insane thing you made up. So you turn to your opponent and say "look at what your side believes!"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conversations with anyone because the focus is on "dunking" people for the benefit of other readers. Like anything else reddit, it gets better the smaller you go.
I find this is actually true on Twitter, too. I've had some positive interactions in the replies under a @patio11 tweet with 120 likes. But any moderately popular tweet is just a shitshow.
Twitter (and Reddit, and HN, etc.) are sort of pretending to be conversation-software, when really, they're tiny blogs; by and large, you don't write replies for the benefit of the person to whom you're responding, you write them for all the people who you know are going to see your reply. That's the source of so much of the toxic feeling, IMO, but it's also the entire value propositon: come see the interesting (or funny, or infuriating, or horrifying) back-and-forth of internet strangers!
Maybe the toxicity can be eliminated or mitigated somehow, but I really think it's part-and-parcel with the format of "public conversation."
God knows I'm part of the problem; I write between 1 and 10 HN/reddit comments every day. It's an addiction! External validation feels very, very good. I try not to "dunk" people, but if there's one thing the internet has, it's no shortage of idiotic comments, and it's hard for me not to take a condescending tone when someone's talking about how women don't deserve to play videogames or how Joe Biden wants to eat babies or whatever.
I guess the best you can hope for is a community spirit that encourages thoughtful conversation and discourages shit-talking. And I think that's where Twitter, by and large, really fails. Twitter culture at large is so, so based around "look at this dumb shit this idiot said! aren't they stupid?" It sucks, and it absolutely warps people like the author says.