131–140 of 555 posts
The problem isn't that this is a Twitter problem. It's that this is a cultural problem. People kinda suck. People kinda suck a lot. I was having a conversation with a friend at lunch, when I started putting ketchup on my hotdog. He looked at me and incredulously questioned, "really? What are you, like, 8 years old?" I had never even heard of the idea that "only children put ketchup on a hotdog." Yet here was someone…
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Your dig on capitalism is ironic, given that the original post was about the power of activism to politicize everything it touches.
The status quo is always political. There is no apolitical center.
I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would loo…
It's like the way that millennials communicate with emoji I'm GenX and not a millennial. I don't see anything wrong with using some emoji as part of my language. I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. I'm happy to add a (poo emoji) when it's appropriate.
The emoji thing was a bad analogy and I should have just left out that clause entirely and started that sentence some other way.
I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would loo…
There is no friendly way to say it, the mass market are morons. It might be derogatory jokes, but this can also include things like spreading urban legends which were debunked four decades ago. Just like Usenet and countless other online communities, what starts a a small group of fairly privileged and elite eventually degrades in to garbage as the reach increases. This is not so much an overall size issue but a rela…
I hate this super-condescending attitude.
Even if you do happen to be smarter than the average bear (which, don't pat yourself on the back yet: there may be things these "morons" know way more about than you do), it's still asshole-ish to assume that everyone else just be completely dismissed...
Asking someone to shut up is much easier than assuming they're acting in good faith and have reasonable motivations that you can't perceive, because, you know, it's the Internet and nothing is more ridiculous than a person looking at the Internet and nodding condescendingly while explaining the exact nature of all these human beings they disagree with.
If from the get-go you assume people are acting in bad faith and you demand that they admit that this is the case before you even consider them as reasonable people, you are asking for full surrender instead of treating them as equals.
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> You can't choose your followers Can't you? I thought protected feeds were a thing (wherein subscribers would need the account holder's permission to follow / view their tweets)?
You're (willfully?) ignoring the implication of a private feed: lack of discoverability (finding new followers), for those of us who use Twitter as a source of promotion for our side projects/businesses/careers.
Egads! You saw through my duplicitous scheme!
Alternatively, I was simply pointing out that this is - in fact - a feature.
To your point, I'm not sure how you could both have audience selection and discoverability. How do you plan to both self-promote and cherry pick your viewers?
I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would loo…
On Twitter, trending is principally about volume. On Reddit, you can view and upvote 100 image macros in the time it takes to read one long-form article. So almost by definition the shared space will be filled with information that is quickly digestible, or that people have not read or watched. In attempting to synthesize and rank every piece of information on these sites, we are effectively trying to automate an editorial process for deciding what is currently the most important thing in the world, in the meantime separating what is poor content from what is merely controversial, and ranking an image macro against a 10,000 word essay. This is a herculean task, and the methods we are using are manifestly not up to the job.
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If you take a moment to look around, you’ll realize that a lot of socially progressive people are saying the exact same thing about Twitter, that the “professionally offended” are becoming too influential. Mind you, they’re talking about what happens when a woman criticizes video game culture and winds up with death threats and snuff porn choking her mentions. I am not saying this to suggest that one “side” or “the o…
I don't think Twitter is making things worse than they used to be. Society has the problem. Twitter just makes it public. Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers, it had actual physical lynchings, and it still has a culture where the police can do more or less whatever they want with limited accountability. People being disrespectful or even stalke…
Which twitter has and encourages. It's called "bluelisting."
I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would loo…
And because of that it's effectively become news, papers like The Guardian in the UK have endless opinion pieces which basically amount to people commenting on other people being angry on someones behalf about something someone said or did.