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Quitting Twitter

blog.nindalf.com

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Re: Quitting Twitter

#41

Post by Groxx »

minikites wrote: post #38
kevinherron wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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 :)

Re: Quitting Twitter

#43

Post by Nextgrid »

picks_at_nits wrote: post #31
sneak wrote: post #11

Even if you have followers, if your individual tweets don't engage well, Twitter won't show them to 100% of the people who explicitly follow you, thanks to their algorithms. YouTube is the same way, which is why you see channels telling users to do three clicks to actually follow: subscribe, notifications on, notifications set to "all". They censor you from your own opt-in audience unless your content is clickbaity e…

What you describe in the first paragraph is not censorship. There's a whole thing around censorship not applying to private platforms, but even if you argue that the word "censorship" applies to a private entity moderating the content it publishes with its own money (like Hacker News: It definitely moderates content), the thing you describe is still not that kind of "censorship." Showing or not showing your tweets ba…

Censorship is maybe the wrong word, but we all understood what he meant and agree that this behavior wrong.

Twitter misleads you into believing following someone will deliver you 100% of their content (and similarly, that someone who follows you will see 100% of your content) while that's not actually the case.

It might not be censorship, but it's still a terrible move, and frankly a sign of a defective product. The whole point of Twitter is to "follow" accounts you're interested in - if the tool can't do this with 100% reliability it should be considered as broken.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#44

Post by hankchinaski »

i quit twitter after years of using it when i got exhausted of having to see political tweets from anyone i was following in tech. i just want to follow certain topics, but unfortunately the mute feature is not enough to filter out all the crap

Re: Quitting Twitter

#45

Post by liminal »

I check Twitter to learn what I should be outraged about. I literally say to myself "I wonder what I should be outraged about today?" and then lo and behold, Twitter tells me. I don't know where else to get that information. I wish I did, since Twitter is very inefficient with too many people retweeting the same tidbit so they can try their hand at a witty rejoinder. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the rejoinders, but they're also exhausting and lower the signal to noise ratio a lot.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#47

Post by bachmeier »

_qulr wrote: post #36
bachmeier wrote: post #23

I've used Twitter for more than a decade. I check it maybe once a day, and when I do, I read maybe 10% of my timeline and move on to something more productive. The biggest problem is viral misinformation combined with a focus on people that are "good with Twitter". Someone with a bunch of followers tweets something like "the sun rose in the north this morning" and if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't ha…

> if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't have happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll be offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you Have you considered that the problem might be you, and "Someone is wrong on the internet" repliers are super tedious?

Yes, and that's not the problem at all.

But I do want to thank you for a perfect demonstration of how misinformation spreads. Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect, and in most cases, it's made up so they can get likes and retweets. The post-truth world is alive and well. And, unfortunately, profitable for some.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#48

Post by tradesmanhelix »

I recently "quit" Twitter myself. I say "quit" because if you actually delete/remove/whatever your account, your handle may then become available for others to use. To avoid that, I used a combo of scripts/services to remove all of my Twitter data (tweets, likes, follows, etc.) and scrubbed my bio, profile pics, etc. I also set a reminder to log in every 6 months to avoid being purged and have my handle become available that way.

I'm using https://fraidyc.at/ in Firefox to follow any Twitter accounts I still care about and it works great, even better than Twitter honestly as all tweets are now chronological and I can segment accounts based on how often I care to view their updates, tag them to organize them, etc. Next, I need to move all my YouTube subscriptions to Fraidycat or similar, but, other than that, I'm done with modern social media (deleted Facebook in 2016). YMMV, but the less I use modern social media the more my quality of life and mental well-being have improved.

I say "modern" since social media has really been around since email and it's really only the more recent incarnations that have gotten so toxic. Communities like HN and some sub-Reddits are actually still quite enjoyable.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#49

Post by minikites »

trestenhortz wrote: post #13

I quit Facebook the other day. I didn’t like my online persona. I’d rather friends and family knew me in person or not at all.

>I didn’t like my online persona.

I think this is one of the bigger factors when people choose to quit social networks, even if they don't realize it explicitly. There's such a "hustle culture" to get likes and favorites that it really warps what you can post. You can't really be vulnerable on a social network because it either gets ignored or interpreted as another hustle ("You got this!!!") because the surrounding content from everyone else is "Look at how great I am!". YouTube creators have to explicitly say "Please like and subscribe!" but that's implicit and pervasive on Twitter and Facebook by their very nature.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#50

Post by minikites »

Groxx wrote: post #41
minikites wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
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