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'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

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Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#111

Post by satanic_pope »

beager wrote: post #106

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…

My experience w/ twitter has been diametrically opposite - the fact that ideas represented are easily digestible ideas (especially from fields I wouldn't bother about otherwise) have usually driven me towards exploring it further if it piques my interests.

Ofcourse, its about how you're interpreting this information - by inquiry or face value (which can be dangerous).

I was skeptical about feed quality getting diluted when twitter increased character limit to 280 -- fortunately, for me, it hasn't (as much as I expected) with few exceptions.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#112

Post by AgentME »

whatshisface wrote: post #97
AgentME wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site already doesn't allow child pornography, nonconsensual pornography, posting of private information, targeted harassment, spambots, etc., and people almost exclusively choose sites using rules like these over ones that don't. (Is it not interesting that we're having this conversation on the heavily-moderated HN, and not on a free-for-all 4chan spinoff? That's not coincidental.) Either the site and the interne…

Of course people only want speech protection for taboo topics, when else would they need protection? It's easy to prove that taboo topics need to be allowed: it's taboo today to express the usual 2004 opinion on homosexuality, and it was taboo in 2004 to express today's usual opinion on the same topic. So no matter what your beliefs are you have to admit that you, personally, either need or needed cover for having ta…

There's a big difference between opinions that are merely taboo and opinions that get censored on social media. Not everything taboo gets censored and banned on social media.

Facebook/Twitter/popular social media as we know it barely existed in 2004, but I'm going to make a guess that discussing homosexuality wasn't banned on any of them (or whichever precursors of similar style and policies existed) around that timeframe. I feel like by picking that time frame, you're alluding to the speech standards that newspapers or TV imposed on themselves, and I'm very glad that social media doesn't impose that kind of standard on all of its users, but I don't think anything present suggests that social media is in danger of slipping to that standard. It looks like those dynamics are a world apart, and drawing these parallels is very misleading.

A bit of an aside, considering a taboo opinion which often prompts discussions about censorship online (an opinion that I think is bad and is taboo for good reasons, including that it's hard to detach from harmful calls to action, but I imagine it could be): talking about the possibility of differences in human capability in sex or race is taboo, but it's generally not outright censored in social media as long as it's not tied with calls to action like "#race war now". I feel like there's an overlap between those of the opinion social media is censoring too much and people outraged at James Damore being fired from Google, but I feel like people conflate him being fired from a tech company with the content moderation policies of social media. He was never banned from YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/Google services, but I get the impression that the volume of defense of him is linked to people thinking that did or will happen. It seems right to me that a large serve-everyone social media company would have different standards of its employees and the content hosted. (Silly example: I wouldn't expect a large social media site to ban a user for routinely posting that "$site is the worst", but I wouldn't find it surprising if an employee at that site was fired for that.) One could argue that Google went too far in firing him (and I'm glad those arguments are permitted in many places even though I disagree with them), but I often see it all bundled with the argument that this is a sign that social media itself is too censored and should be censored less, despite that it already permits him and that the enforcement line is still a world apart from him.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#113

Post by coffeefirst »

beager wrote: post #106

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…

True, but worse than that: it flattens everything. In another medium, we can kind of tell how much work you put into a thought. A well-written 500 word post is a different animal than a throwaway line.

This isn't a good thing. Who's an expert vs an amateur just having fun? Who's just musing idly while sipping scotch versus gone through several drafts and really put a lot of work into this? Who's passionate, if wrong, vs a troll and a provocateur?

It's fine for all those things to exist, it's not fine that we can't tell the difference and then amplify an unsuspecting chunk of them to a massive audience.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#114

Post by AgentME »

iateanapple wrote: post #99
AgentME wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police. What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda? I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more supp…

> What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? They ban interesting content all the time - a very recent example is they banned the AYTU Bioscience page where they talk about an experimental covid treatment. YouTube censored their videos as well.

I think they have an understandable reason for that (too much harmful misinformation about covid going around, they don't have enough eyes to sort it out, and at their scale it's probably net harm reduction to put a simple wordfilter on it for now), but I'm a lot more sympathetic to arguments along these lines in particular. I could believe that moderation is more effective on smaller userbase-scales because it reduces the need to adopt blanket policies like this. I don't think it does the issue justice to reduce the problem down to just that there's too much/little censorship as the earlier post did.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#115

Post by joelrunyon »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65
joelrunyon wrote: post #13

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

> Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain. Maybe your strategy works for well known bloggers, but tweeting content that people actually read beats owning content that nobody reads. And it is much harder to get people to visit your self-hosted blog than it is to get them to read your tweets.

> And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain.

Then you have to gasp tell someone about it.

The idea that if you build something people will automatically know about it is a delightful fantasy that has never actually been true - regardless of whatever distribution promises Apple, Medium, or Twitter will make you.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#116

Post by 3131s »

beager wrote: post #106

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…

> Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets.

Or not use Twitter at all.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#117

Post by kirubakaran »

bpodgursky wrote: post #15
kirubakaran wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Static website (Hugo/Jekyll) that you host yourself and share on Twitter, relevant subreddits, and Hacker News?

This is a far less pleasant and high-variance process than you make it out to be. - Posting on Twitter just begs the "get an audience" question. You can't just GET followers, it takes months or years of constant content creation, tagging, hashtagging, etc to get an audience. - Subreddits are very hit-or-miss, and a lot of them will flat-out ban you for posting your own blog content, even if it's non-monetized OC (bee…

That the thing about Faustian bargains. Great in the short term.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#118

Post by egypturnash »

imglorp wrote: post #17
joelrunyon wrote: post #13

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

You can publish from any device that can load the WP web interface (or run an app built to talk to WP), instead of having to be at the one device that has the generator and the source files and everything else.

You don’t have to ever touch the command line or FTP or Git or anything technical like that. You can if you want to but nowadays it’s a one-click affair in the control panel of most hosting services. Who will also probably auto-install some cache and security plugins for you because this saves them a shit-ton of support tickets. Yes, YOU are comfortable with all this technical shit but most people are not.

WordPress has had auto-updates for years and years. You only have to manually intervene to upgrade it when they do a major version bump that may break things.

WordPress has a lot more themes available than any static site generator ever will.

WordPress has a ton of plugins to do stuff, some simple, some complex.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#119

Post by sircastor »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65
joelrunyon wrote: post #13

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

> Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain. Maybe your strategy works for well known bloggers, but tweeting content that people actually read beats owning content that nobody reads. And it is much harder to get people to visit your self-hosted blog than it is to get them to read your tweets.

C'mon. This is what SEO is for. People are still using Google and the like to find information. It's not all Facebook and Twitter. I'm some cases you don't even need to work hard. Google prides itself on finding the good content amongst the farmed garbage. If you write good material relevant to the topic, it's not invisible.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#120

Post by Bahamut »

3131s wrote: post #116
beager wrote: post #106

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…

> Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. Or not use Twitter at all.

I fall under this bucket - Twitter is a platform that has always been hostile to nuanced discussion because of its history with length restriction of posts. At that point, I rather use anything else for discussion on ideas/domains.
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