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Quitting Twitter

blog.nindalf.com

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Re: Quitting Twitter

#61

Post by sneak »

sago wrote: post #22
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…

> YouTube is the same way I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released. Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?

Yes. YouTube deserves a little bit of credit for preserving a chronological view, but this is perhaps cancelled out by their draconian restrictions on what you are allowed to publish.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#62

Post by undefined1 »

quitting Twitter will improve your life, but here's the problem:

it leaves it to the most radical.

and why is that a problem?

because there is a pipeline from Twitter into the real world, especially via journalists and politicians who live on there.

what's the answer?

I'd love to hear ideas! but I think either we need many, many more reasonable voices on Twitter (an uphill battle, given the platform rewards and optimizes for outrage) or the pipeline needs to be severed or replaced. the latter is probably the way to go, but how?

Re: Quitting Twitter

#63

Post by hvocode »

Muted words is the only thing that makes Twitter useful for me. Totally takes the temperature down by just excluding things that aren’t useful to see. I mute everything from specific words that I know are going to spark useless arguments to phrases/emojis that show up in intentionally provocative tweets (eg, “that’s the tweet” or the clap emoji).

Re: Quitting Twitter

#64

Post by Baeocystin »

ketzo wrote: post #8

For a post called "Quitting Twitter", I think this piece actually does a great job summarizing the really cool things about Twitter. I think there's something a little magical about finding someone you really respect in your field, responding to one of their tweets, and getting a thoughtful response six minutes later! The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conv…

This SMBC was written in 2013, and I still think it's the most accurate simplified explanation of how social media on the internet tends to work I've come across:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939

I don't have a solution. But it's a real problem.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#65

Post by _qulr »

bachmeier wrote: post #47
_qulr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> a perfect demonstration of how misinformation spreads

Which misinformation did I spread?

> Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect

That's quite an interference.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#66

Post by sneak »

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…

You can't promote some things to the top without simultaneously demoting other things down the page. Such is the tyranny of spacetime.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#67

Post by readflaggedcomm »

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…

>they'll be offended and block you

To them, their timeline is "curated" to remove "toxic" elements, which makes their filter bubble more pleasant. Then they blame you, even in this very thread, for finding these interactions useless. That isn't misinformation, that is a point of view.

The biggest problem is that Twitter- and Mastodon-style blocking make it impossible to engage with people who need to be engaged with, regardless of why (whether informational or emotional).

Re: Quitting Twitter

#68

Post by Nextgrid »

picks_at_nits wrote: post #56
Nextgrid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't get to declare what Twitter is or isn't. It has evolved over time from a kind of microblogging platform into an algorithmic-timeline social network. As a user, I don't care for it much, but in no way is it "defective." It does what it does, and if we don't like it, it's our obligation to make sure the door doesn't hit us in the ass on our way out. The thing we have to understand is that we who want a microbl…

The concept of following still (at least to me) implies seeing all the content said person is posting. Twitter liberally uses the word "follow" but then doesn't deliver.

They are not being transparent about your experience being manipulated for the purposes of generating engagement either. Most non-technical people don't immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking at said ads".

---

> are "Happy as Larry,"

Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts about quitting the website every so often) suggests they aren't?

> exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective

They profit from the fact that it's defective, so of course to them it is not a defect, just like a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#69

Post by mellosouls »

I won’t miss people dunking on each other while also not mentioning the dunkee, piquing my curiosity to the point where I investigate who the dunkee was and why. A waste of time

Next sentence:

Some guy with 14k followers said something. [proceeds to "dunk" on dunkee not mentioned]

Re: Quitting Twitter

#70

Post by ketzo »

Baeocystin wrote: post #64
ketzo wrote: post #8

For a post called "Quitting Twitter", I think this piece actually does a great job summarizing the really cool things about Twitter. I think there's something a little magical about finding someone you really respect in your field, responding to one of their tweets, and getting a thoughtful response six minutes later! The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits, too -- it's impossible to have conv…

This SMBC was written in 2013, and I still think it's the most accurate simplified explanation of how social media on the internet tends to work I've come across: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939 I don't have a solution. But it's a real problem.

Yep. Related is what SlateStarCodex called the "weak man" argument.

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...

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