Unfortunately there are a lot of people who behave really well and have really interesting things to say about tech, but for anything political, they just vent really hateful, angry things (or retweet the same). The Go community has a fair amount of this, sadly. It sucks to have to choose, but more importantly I think Twitter actually radicalizes people toward hate and divisiveness. I don't think these people were so hateful or angry ~7 years ago. When I look at the curated news section, it seems purpose-built to make me mad, with the dumbest, most toxic comments at the top.

I honestly think Twitter has managed to rewire our brains, with people being shocked/offended by things that 7 years ago wouldn't have turned heads. Twitter has recognised this, and feeds this effect to increase engagement. Also see Facebook.

I'm not sure where this leads but it can't be good.

Something about all your expressions, questions, and silences being visible to everyone else, all the time.

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.

Agreed. I can't help but think that outrage is an addictive substance that would make Phillip Morris green with envy.

This is what finally pushed me off of Twitter. I just wish I had the ability to filter posts based on whether the user is qualified to have an opinion on the topic. I don't want opinions on technology from members of congress, and I don't want political rants from tech experts.

I think its inherent to the setup of the ecosphere and has similarities to high school politics of everyone desperately trying to get noticed that can lead to bullying.

To get noticed everything has to be larger than life and this tends towards hostility and partisanship.

Same here. My overall Twitter experience is great! Every time I had a bad experience, it was something I could have easily avoided by just not joining a conversation that I kind of knew was going to be a flame war.

Similar. Recently I’ve also started using twitter only on weekends, to minimise distraction and ensure it’s more consumption based (who in twitter has the patience to wait 5 days for a reply?!).

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!

Yeah if you aggressively block, unfollow, and curate Twitter can be really great.

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).

The problem I found with blocking and muting people is that twitter continues to show tweets from people I don’t follow - entirely in the hope of engaging me of course, which most of the time means trying to pull me into an argument.

Sometimes it introduces you to new people though that are interesting to follow (usually because people in your network liked their post or something). I find this generally valuable.

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.

That's quite surprising; I've found the ads to be fairly unobtrusive compared to almost any other website. I would prefer there to be a text only mode though - every so often, the ad repaint will cause the UI to "jump".

> My main Twitter complaint is the ads. There are so many and they suck.

There are no ads in third party clients such as Tweetbot.

When I was on Twitter I found the ads so distracting that I used the web version on my phone with Firefox and ublock origin. This did the job, just about if you can cope with the web client clumsiness and lag.

I tried to use tweet bot for a while, but I couldn't stick with it.

> twitter continues to show tweets from people I don’t follow

Are you using the reverse chronological timeline? That's the only way to fly.

I am, and it shows me tweets from people I don't follow. It cleverly uses the mechanism of "retweets" to show me them. It's only when you realise that _twitter only shows you selected retweets_ that you see the notion of retweeting is an excuse to show you tweets from people you don't follow.

reverse chronological?

Using twitter lists might solve that?

You're still supporting a platform where avoiding toxic content is active mental work.

Twitter's algorithm has a way of showing most toxic or controversial posts and comments first.

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 wouldn't be able to replicate your experience. My friends on twitter are either sidelining toxicity (by simply ignoring the usual in/outgroup messaging) or by just posting their (non-political, non-controversial, technical) stuff.

I don't know toxic people on twitter behaving the same on other social networks.

Life is a platform that requires active work to avoid toxic content.

Life happens to be so because of external factors nobody is benefiting from, and you can't avoid it.

Twitter is so because it is designed to encourage arguments (to generate "engagement") and you can avoid it.

Twitter could be doing so much more to fix this problem. It's abundantly clear that "hands off" moderation doesn't work. It doesn't work for Twitter, it doesn't work for Facebook, it doesn't work for any shared social space online or offline.

Twitter actively encourages the outrage machine. They aren't an organization that just needs to work a bit harder.

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?

While I absolutely agree with this, and think Twitter does things that make it worse: no automated (or human-driven in bulk) abuse-detector will ever work perfectly. People are creative. Some amount of manual blocking is a reasonable expectation... just not as much as is necessary now :)

I'm not asking for perfect, I'm asking for anything more than the literally zero effort they're putting forth now.

Apparently this comment is wrong according to votes. Logically, I'm wrong by either:

* 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?