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I resigned from Twitter

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Re: I resigned from Twitter

#401

Post by zpeti »

dionian wrote: post #359
spion wrote: post #352

Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time. By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else. There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the win…

What's worse, is it has ushered in a Technocracy, where unelected corporate interests now decide which political views are "misinformation" and, for example, may threaten "election integrity", which drugs doctors should prescribe, etc.

To be fair I think it’s more unofficial capture by those in power. There is a gun at this point at Facebook and Twitters head by super powerful people (including journalists) to get them to comply or else…

I think Silicon Valley made a major misjudgement thinking geeks with products with billions of people won’t be taken over by politicians with decades of power game experience. It’s not even a fair game. These are literally the biggest power players in the world, Zuckerberg and Dorsey didn’t stand a chance.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#402

Post by floatboth »

user-the-name wrote: post #18

About time. Twitter has been absolutely floundering for years under his control, since he has absolutely no idea why anyone is using the site and has just been throwing random ideas copied from others at the wall to see what sticks (nothing, so far), and cryptocurrency garbage nobody wants.

Sadly the cryptocurrency garbage is likely to continue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29381806 says that the CTO who will become CEO is also kind of a buttcoiner.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#404

Post by stcredzero »

brightball wrote: post #373
spion wrote: post #352

Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time. By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else. There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the win…

Where it all went sideways was when mainstream news started showing tweets on air. EDIT: I need to add clarification. I don't mean when breaking news gets onto mainstream channels. No question that happens. What I mean is the use of a single tweet with maybe 1 or 2 likes here or there to reflect public sentiment on different issues. All any news station had to do was fish through the pile of tweets about any given to…

Perhaps things had started to slide sideways before that? I distinctly remember a period of time, I think nearly a decade back, when I'd constantly hear about something on NPR and think, "I saw that headline on reddit yesterday! Are they even trying!?"

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#405

Post by jacobr1 »

dheera wrote: post #339
Hackbraten wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can enjoy a tweet while at the same time disagreeing with it. Same on HN. I often upvote comments, even though I disagree with them, whenever I feel they’re a meaningful contribution to the discourse.

Kudos. Many times if I want to bring up an unpopular opinion of mine it will get downvoted to oblivion, so I have to self-censor.

I see a pattern where they are downvoted initially, then later return. I suspect type of people that read HN periodically are different than those that are refreshing regularly.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#406

Post by sjg007 »

brightball wrote: post #373
spion wrote: post #352

Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time. By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else. There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the win…

Where it all went sideways was when mainstream news started showing tweets on air. EDIT: I need to add clarification. I don't mean when breaking news gets onto mainstream channels. No question that happens. What I mean is the use of a single tweet with maybe 1 or 2 likes here or there to reflect public sentiment on different issues. All any news station had to do was fish through the pile of tweets about any given to…

Broadcasters love it when the news writes itself.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#407

Post by handrous »

closeparen wrote: post #313
handrous wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it's not like we hide who the system's set up to serve. It's right there in the name. Capital - ism.

Managers and executives aren't capital. In fact their relationship with capital tends towards adversarial.

Middle management certainly aren't, that's true, but CEOs often are, or will soon join that group due to their income. It's true that preferential treatment for the C-suite is more a second-order effect, though. A mechanism by which favors are exchanged among and between capitalists, both as a high-tier reward for good servants, and deliberate leverage of the principal agent problem to capture more value personally for those with connections. A CEO can make choices that aren't necessarily the best for their company, but do scratch someone important's back or get them a personal favor of a similar sort elsewhere—see also: board members.

So, both because these positions are sometimes occupied by full-on capitalists (who will accept very few restrictions on their behavior) and because, when that's not the case, they're occupied by people who are being rewarded by capital (often for nepotistic reasons) they have much greater freedom than those lower down the org chart.

I do think this is a general behavior of class systems—and so, probably any large human organization—however, and not particular to capitalism, and certainly there are better-off and worse-off classes in term of norms and treatment by society, short of the capitalist class (as Fussell observes in Class, with his "mid-proles" subject to close monitoring, tight restrictions on time, drug testing, and other humiliations, while his upper-middle drinks on the job, has their own office with no-one watching what they do, would be outraged at having to submit to piss tests, and cuts out early for golf without consequence).

In this case the name just happens to tell us, very directly, who's on top of the pyramid. Not like other systems that may try to obscure who's the most-favored group.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#408

Post by sanderjd »

jacobr1 wrote: post #398
sanderjd wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem is that "person" is a broader category than I want to unfollow. There are precious few people whose posts I want to see all of. Most people I have ever followed exist somewhere on a continuum of what proportion of their tweets I want to see. It would be nice to have more positions on the knob than 100% and 0%. What I'd really like would be to say "don't show me tweets like this from this person". Yes it's…

> seems like you could throw some work toward figuring this out. They already have a start - they push following categories. So presumably they are categorizing individual tweets into these categories. It should be feasible to both provide finer-grain categories, and tooling to include/exclude how those intersect with those accounts one is following.

Indeed. The final step is learning fine grained personal preference informed (but not entirely) by those coarser categories.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#409

Post by Swizec »

dnautics wrote: post #348
eyelidlessness wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, but I went the opposite direction and started following more people to curate my feed. I seldom unfollow anyone unless I feel any interaction with them is likely to have a high proportion of conflict or strong disagreement on values. I considered a similar purge, but ultimately decided the variety and evolution of what I’m exposed to is better for my experience. I’ve also made several friends through Twitter (a…

Yeah I had a very selective strategy for purging: - follow only tech people/tech-adjacent people - unfollow any tech people/tech-adjacent people who post too much off-topic and/or do too much clickbait or too much emotionally taxing stuff and moving forward I do: - follow a more diverse (race, ethnicity, country, political leaning, gender) people, while following the above guidelines. - follow some people who "post i…

To sum it up: Most worthwhile twitter follows are a mini publishing house in disguise. They talk about a few things, regularly, but aren't using twitter to shoot the shit with friends.

This is the exact opposite of how twitter felt in the beginning – a massively global IRC chatroom for people to shoot the shit.

Re: I resigned from Twitter

#410

Post by drjasonharrison »

sAbakumoff wrote: post #381
spion wrote: post #352

Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time. By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else. There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the win…

Yeah, feeling of novelty causes a dopamine spike, but shortly afterwards the level is back and we feel like they need more new stuff. Mindless purposeless scrolling may last hours and hours. Twitter is bad, but Tik Tok is the worst. Remove all this stuff from your phone and read HN instead. Here you at least should focus on sophisticated comments like yours!

Please don't use dopamine to explain addictive/repetitive behaviors. It's like blaming your eyes for finding the button to click. It's more complex. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/women-who-stray/20...
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