Quitting Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: Quitting Twitter

#81

Post by readflaggedcomm » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:53 PM UTC

undefined1 wrote: post #62

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 optim…

Journalists outsourcing their job to squeeky wheels volunteering outrage is a problem with the journalists' superiors, customers, and sense of duty, not with the channels of communication available to us by technology and law.

But instead, we will suffer through algorithmic and legislative harrassment because the user is always the problem, not the corporate marketeers.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#82

Post by paulhallett » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

I quit about six months ago. The majority of people I followed, I felt obligated to follow, in order to keep ahead of social issues. But the toll of "doom scrolling" constant negative/angry/depressed posts really hammered my own mental health. I also developed a habit of refreshing the feed on my phone every five minutes.

I quit, and I found myself lost when I picked up my phone, like a lingering habit (I see someone mentioned it being similar to quitting smoking).

On reflection, I think the reason I felt an obligation to keep up with social issues etc, was because I was using my real name (ironic that this HN account is also my real name!). I felt like I had to show I was caring and keeping track of it. I do wonder, if I create an account without my real name, I can just use it how I like, and maybe it will be a different experience.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#83

Post by 7800 » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #71

My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone posting content that I don’t want to be consuming. That ranges from constantly dunking on every opportunity to people who simply tweet too many times per day. The best content and discussion comes from small groups of people with similar interests who aren’t using Twitter simply to fill time or to build their personal brand. Removing everyone else doesn’…

Doesn’t this by definition mean that you’re in a social media bubble with those who agree with you?

Re: Quitting Twitter

#84

Post by readflaggedcomm » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

_qulr wrote: post #80

readflaggedcomm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

> people who need to be engaged Who needs to be engaged with? On Twitter, you choose who to follow. Why in the world would you have an obligation to listen to random strangers who want to argue with you? Imagine if you were in a restaurant talking with your friends, some stranger sitting at another table overheard you, and then decided to come over and butt into the conversation? And when the stranger is told to go a…

One man's need is not your obligation, and Twitter is a public place. I don't understand your analogy.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#85

Post by randomsearch » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

tinyhouse wrote: post #16

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…

Toxicity on twitter is huge but once you unfollow toxic users (or any user who tweets nonsense too often) things look much better. Tbh I don't use twitter to engage in conversations. I use it mostly to consume interesting content.

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!

Re: Quitting Twitter

#86

Post by picks_at_nits » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #68

picks_at_nits wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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".

You have something there that applies to all of social media (and just because others do it doesn't make it ok). Algorithms are black boxes. Even if you make 100% sure I read a disclaimer explaining that the timeline is curated and algorithmic, I still will never know what I'm getting and what I'm missing.

The lack of control and transparency is abhorrent to a certain type of person, and you and I are probably those kind of people. But there's a vast world out there that simply. doesn't. care. Even after we explain why they ought to care.

Compare and contrast to walled gardens like iOS. There's a certain type of HNer who talks about iOS the way we're talking about Twitter. And yet... Many, many people are happy with an opaque system deciding which apps they can install, which apps appear on the front page of the app store, &c.

It can be very frustrating, but there it is. People like Twitter, and no amount of explaining why they shouldn't like it will change their minds.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#87

Post by dpifke » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

andrewmutz wrote: post #24

> I still want to read what people like Patrick McKenzie, Zach Weinersmith, John Carmack and others have to say. I quit twitter years ago for some of the same reasons mentioned in this blog post, and I 100% agree with this quote. I would love a way to get at the good content from twitter without all the constant rage. Does anyone know a good tool or way to get a much more curated Twitter experience?

After I quit Twitter a few months ago, I set up a private instance of Nitter[0], and use Huginn[1] to forward posts from it to an instance of Pleroma[2].

Which reminds me, I need to clean up and publish my Huginn agent for posting to Mastodon/Pleroma. :)

(Nitter supports RSS, so you could probably use a regular RSS reader instead of Huginn/Pleroma. But I also configured some other, non-RSS, content in my feed.)

[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [1] https://github.com/huginn/huginn [2] https://pleroma.social/

Re: Quitting Twitter

#88

Post by raunometsa » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

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…

>> Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who want to see 100% of the things I send.

I totally agree that you should have a direct channel (email) to your internet friends.

I think what Twitter can offer is to let new people discover you. Email lists don't grow that way on their own (people won't really forward your email to their friends, but they retweet your tweets and so their friends find you).

Re: Quitting Twitter

#89

Post by randomsearch » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #52

tinyhouse wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toxicity on twitter is huge but once you unfollow toxic users (or any user who tweets nonsense too often) things look much better. Tbh I don't use twitter to engage in conversations. I use it mostly to consume interesting content.

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.

Re: Quitting Twitter

#90

Post by mkl95 » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

I have been on Twitter for 10+ years. It was exciting the first few years, but I honestly don't know why I haven't deleted my account yet.

I have tried to "reboot" my Twitter account several times during this decade, but my timeline eventually gets full of random political diatribes, passive aggressive tweets, and cliquey inside jokes. It's as if Twitter's algorithms were designed to amplify toxic content and hide thoughtful, assertive stuff.