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“It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

warzel.substack.com

101–110 of 116 posts

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#102
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't delete-edit your posts like that. It leaves the thread incoherent and isn't fair to the reader or to the commenters who replied. Edit: you did that on half a dozen different posts. That's basically vandalism and is not cool. Please don't do it again.

Maybe HN should get in the 20th century and allow users to delete their comments.

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#103
Twitter rewards being a dickhead. It was fun when everyone was allowed to be a dickhead, but now there's a protected class that cannot be criticised and freely sends death threats and the like to whatever bad guy they think they have that day.

This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#104
It's easy to formulate it this way, but the sad reality is that these are actual people reacting in this way, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes because it fits their worldview, sometimes because they believe that by expressing their anger they will really make the world a better place. It doesn't matter if it's Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform, digital or analog. Social media just acts like an amplifier for all possible opinions.

It's a common theme, actually: many people believe that everything they don't like should be eliminated. That's exactly the opposite of one of the best developments of our civilization: that many cultures and people with completely different worldview can live peacefully next to each other and even collaborate for the common good.

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#105

> "We Need To Get Rid Of Twitter Trending Topics" "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists. Twitter is not about cancel culture. It's about using outrage to increase engagement. Cancel culture is just one natural outcome of the outrage mach…

> "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Had a short internal argument if I should downvote you for the line above or upvote you for the rest of your comment. Ended on upvote, but if you harvest downvotes that likely is the culprit.

I did have a point on that sentence, but didn't expand on that. Actually I did know the tone is bad. I guess the idea is that "we" as public interest conflicts with Twitter's corporate interest, but "we" can't tell Twitter to do what "we" want.

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#106
post #82
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO Twitter is great, I think I find more interesting things there then HN. I't more how you curate your own feed, don't follow people that are "political" or have some "agenda". My feed is mostly about math, art, physics and EU policy level discussions. Same thing with youtube, you just have to train the AI so it knows the sort of things you like. And don't comment, no one cares.

But why? Something I never understand about Twitter is, for your claim, people who have interesting things to say and you want to read about. Why would people be interested in reading a huge essay broken down to 50 tweets instead of just reading a blog posts where you can post comments and discussions in a fashion that makes sense and doesn’t lose the context of the original topic?

You don't read a huge essay broken down into 50 tweets - that's not how it works. In that case they'd just post a link to the essay. The point is twitter helped you discover the essay in the first place. If you've carefully curated your timeline then twitter acts as a content filter for the content you're actually interested in. Over time I've simply lost interest in such content curation, but others may still find it valuable.

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#107

> "We Need To Get Rid Of Twitter Trending Topics" "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists. Twitter is not about cancel culture. It's about using outrage to increase engagement. Cancel culture is just one natural outcome of the outrage mach…

The outrage pieces are only a slice of things that engage people. People can be engaged by things that amuse and entertain, things that inform, as well and those kinds of things make their way to trending frequently.

Twitter feels more like a multi faceted vehicle, where cancel culture and outrage culture are well represented pieces of the bigger media machine.

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#108
Cigarette use was very common among people before it was shown that nicotine is a carcinogen. Since then, people have cut down cigarette usage drastically and most countries now require manufacturers to have warning labels on cigarette packets. I hope social media services suffer the same fate. It was cool to be on social media when it was new and people were genuinely happy that they could keep in touch with their friends and relatives so easily. Since then, harmful effects of social media—from privacy concerns to disinformation to psychological problems induced by their usage—have been widely discussed and established. So, just like it happened with cigarettes, I think it's time for people to collectively reject social media services and go back to communicating and expressing their thoughts like they did before.

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#109

Twitter rewards being a dickhead. It was fun when everyone was allowed to be a dickhead, but now there's a protected class that cannot be criticised and freely sends death threats and the like to whatever bad guy they think they have that day. This wouldn't be so bad, but there's now a bunch of normies who weren't raised on the mantra of keeping internet shit on the internet

[deleted]

Re: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

#110
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't delete-edit your posts like that. It leaves the thread incoherent and isn't fair to the reader or to the commenters who replied. Edit: you did that on half a dozen different posts. That's basically vandalism and is not cool. Please don't do it again.

Maybe HN should get in the 20th century and allow users to delete their comments.

There are tradeoffs here. Of course we allow users to delete their comments, but once a comment has replies, deleting it deprives the replies of their context, which is not fair to the users who replied. We're trying to be fair to everybody, as well as to the community as a whole.

If you delete-edit, you're doing an end run around that, which is not cool, and doing it on a whole bunch of posts is, as I said, vandalism, and something we'd ban an account for.

While I have you: can you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments, especially on inflammatory topics like political or ideological ones? It's not what HN is for, and it really damages what it is for. We're trying for curious conversation here, not smiting enemies.

To end on something positive, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26706409 is a comment you posted that manages to get that right, even though it's on a political/ideological topic. It gives substantive information and omits swipes—that's not easy, but it is simple—and it's the level conversations have to stay at if this place is not to destroy itself.

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