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The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

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Re: The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

#291

Post by sefrost »

thrwawy283 wrote: post #274
vorpalhex wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my pet theories for why social media is such a cesspool is that it exposes us to the whole of someone else. If I play boardgames with Sue, that's enough. We meet, enjoy a beer and play some Catan and go our separate ways. That's a fine relationship. If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'…

This is an interesting idea: I wish you could Follow a combination of a person and the #topic they post to. You could choose to follow "all of" a person, but more realistically the default behavior would be to attach to posts from a particular topic that person is generating. This would be similar to your example of playing a game of Catan with someone and enjoying just that limited bandwidth you have with them. Know…

This is what I believe family/friend group chats on platforms such as WhatsApp are.

They are great in my experience, but if people started posting politics news I could see how they could turn bad.

Re: The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

#292

Post by vorpalhex »

DEADMEAT wrote: post #195
vorpalhex wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my pet theories for why social media is such a cesspool is that it exposes us to the whole of someone else. If I play boardgames with Sue, that's enough. We meet, enjoy a beer and play some Catan and go our separate ways. That's a fine relationship. If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'…

What's funny here are that the example issues you listed are exactly the issues that the vast majority of Americans actually do agree on. Those are wedge issues that were carefully crafted by political parties to try and create a division in popular opinion when there isn't one. It's a fairly common political strategy nowadays.

That is probably a sign you are trapped in an echo chamber.

Those three issues are polling in the 50-60% range on Pew research, and tend to fluctuate heavily based on recent events and question wording.

Re: The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

#293

Post by xena »

everdrive wrote: post #221
cgrealy wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree in general, there are plenty of circumstances where people don't get to not have an opinion about things. For example, you can't "agree to disagree" on LGBTQ rights if you belong to one of those categories. See also pregnant people and abortion rights.

> For example, you can't "agree to disagree" on LGBTQ rights if you belong to one of those categories. See also pregnant people and abortion rights. Why can’t you? Is it impossible to imagine civil friendly people who simply do not share one’s views on these issues?

As someone who is on the LGBTQ spectrum, people that actively advocate for me not being able to exist in civil society without doing anything but trying to be authentic about myself are really not people I want in my life.

I absolutely hate that my ability to participate in modern society without harassment for things that are inherent to my existence is limited and I hope that one day we can move past this kind of foolishness as a species.

Re: The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

#294

Post by fotta »

Pxtl wrote: post #275
sbierwagen wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweetdeck. It's the "pro" Twitter client that has strict chrono ordering and won't show likes or trending items. You can also set it to not show any retweets, at all.

Even vanilla Twitter allows you to get strict chrono order by switching your home-page. It does not show "likes" and reduces the use of "trending" iirc. It does show retweets, though.

I switched to this view a few days ago and it’s infinitely better. Originally when Twitter rolled out the toggle I figured I’d give the algorithmic feed a chance but eventually it got to the point where 80% of my feed was algorithmically recommended tweets from people I wasn’t following and I got fed up.

Re: The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

#295

Post by dogleash »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #147

I got my twitter account MyfirstnameMylastname somewhere early in the site's existence, probably around 2009. But never really got the appeal of Twitter so I never used it for anything, I'd check it once every six months or so. I eventually learned I share a name with a tech journalist who is very active on Twitter, and occasionally I would get tagged instead instead of him. Every time, I would respond with the Navy…

>Navy Seal Copypasta, broken into eight twitter sized parts. Eventually they banned me for this

Fucking killjoys.

If twitter is moderating for people who can't even figure out not to take that copypasta seriously[1], then they're showing their hand. There's no end state. No goal. There is no cultural equilibrium point that even perfect moderation could ever achieve.

Therefore, visible attrition is the end state. Twitter has to satisfy the normies who want to be on the internet but don't understand the internet. The moderation is a con because it can't be anything else. Lying "we're working on it, see?" to the monied/powerful normies who's continued use keep Twitter's stock price out of the dumpster.

[1]: It's not that people should recognize copypasta, it's that people should recognize the words of an idiot. This meme became a meme because how well everyone recognized the earnest original author of that post couldn't be taken seriously.

Re: The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

#296

Post by wanderer_ »

madrox wrote: post #273
vorpalhex wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my pet theories for why social media is such a cesspool is that it exposes us to the whole of someone else. If I play boardgames with Sue, that's enough. We meet, enjoy a beer and play some Catan and go our separate ways. That's a fine relationship. If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'…

My favorite theory comes from an HN comment describing it as the "toaster fucker problem." I'd attempt to re-explain it, but the original comment is great (and easy to search for. Not many mentions of the phrase "toaster fucker" on HN.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362

Ironically enough, that thread devolved into an irrelevant political argument.

Re: The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

#298

Post by lkxijlewlf »

vorpalhex wrote: post #146
toastercat wrote: post #71

I tried being a Twitter user for a bit last year, mostly because a lot of engineers I admire use it to communicate about interesting topics and also their work. But after a while, I realized even they will pollute my feed with politically divisive topics, whether it be from them retweeting something, or liking a tweet, or even entering into the fray themselves -- Twitter will find a way to get me to see it. For a whi…

One of my pet theories for why social media is such a cesspool is that it exposes us to the whole of someone else. If I play boardgames with Sue, that's enough. We meet, enjoy a beer and play some Catan and go our separate ways. That's a fine relationship. If I follow Sue on social media, now I know her politics, religion, sex life, drug usage, opinions on every little thing.. and frankly, I don't care or want to. I'…

> One of my pet theories for why social media is such a cesspool is that it exposes us to the whole of someone else.

We are naturally inclined to be negative. Or, said differently, it takes a LOT less effort to be negative than positive. On social media it's just way too easy for people to pile on.

Re: The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

#299

Post by delecti »

dvtrn wrote: post #286
delecti wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn off seeing retweets from accounts you follow on a per-account basis, and more people (including yourself, if you're ever curious to go back to Twitter) should more aggressively use the option to make the site far more enjoyable. Lots of accounts are fine to follow on their own, but complete spam-fests if your feed is full of everything they retweet. Just go to their profile, hit the three dots, and then…

Does Twitter respect this toggled option and persist the state? I’m a little burned out fighting over user preferences across social media that seem to always toggle themselves back to whatever default the platform wants that day.

I'm not going to promise it never forgets that option, but I've never noticed it forgetting across dozens of accounts I follow, and several years and multiple logins/devices/browsers. It's not like the usual per-device/session timeline options, it's more along the lines and persistence of a mute/block toggle.
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