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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

#331

Post by timClicks »

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'…

I'm sort of the opposite. I'm attracted to Twitter because a) I get to learn the whole person and b) even "heroes" are very accessible. We're all humans trying to figure it out.

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

#332

Post by dogman144 »

duxup wrote: post #55
jameskilton wrote: post #12

"Never pass up a chance to keep your mouth shut" Words my Dad taught me as I was growing up, but only really sank in the last 5 or so years ago.

I once worked for a company where several groups were VERY vocal about their complaints about each other. It seemed like bitching about the other team(s) was part of the job. Lots of walls built here and there between teams. I kept quiet. I decided bitching was too tiresome / nobody was getting anything done, nobody was getting better by having complainants flung at them. After I established relationships with variou…

I call this employing tactical empathy and it is the single most important soft skill I learned. It's the only, only effective way to do cross-team coordination, arguably all the way up to C-level to C-level.

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

#333

Post by mattgreenrocks »

saiya-jin wrote: post #126
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a massively multiplayer video game that is culturally overvalued and entrenched because journalism and other influential fields got sucked in. It is absolutely insane that it is taken so seriously. It's also super weird that everyone is so addicted to this game they play it out in public. To illustrate this: imagine your ideal day. It could be on vacation, or hanging out at home, anywhere really. The key:…

Never joined the game, never will, see absolutely 0 reason. I don't care what he and she and he said, I guess you can say I am way more impressed by deeds than endless blabbing. Anytime I open it due to being embedded in news articles and wanting to see detailed photo being shown, I see basically news/youtube/whatever shallow and pathetic comment section. Echo chambers. Weird dynamics which don't happen in real life.…

> if you are a[n]...adult who knows what they want in life

Twitter feeds directly into the modern impulse to define oneself. It becomes sticky by coupling that with social validation. Say the right thing and you get a few Internet Points. Do it enough and people may follow you, which gives you a different type of Internet Points. Get enough of those, and you might get a blue checkmark, denoting you as a Very Important Person.

It is much easier to lean on externally mediated processes of identity formation (like Twitter) than it is to go at it alone. I almost don't blame people, except for the fact that I don't believe this outsourcing of identity even works on an individual level. It's as if everyone present is playing along with a game that they don't fully believe in, but the game goes on despite that.

It's quite modern and tragicomic in a way.

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

#334

Post by salawat »

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

...Wow.

That resonates hard with some stuff I'm seein' now.

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

#335

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

I think circles were too tied to privacy. Public posts ended up mushed together just like twitter.

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

#336

Post by singingboyo »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #252
psyc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a riff on Proverbs: "Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues."

This is why people like Queen Elizabeth (specifically, not the rest of the royal family) are widely held in such high regard. She rarely makes any comments about anything that could be discerned as political, and as a result she has stayed largely neutral. Even people like my dad, who is highly conservative and vocally dislikes all celbrities, still thinks she's a saint. I'm not convinced—she keeps her mouth shut bec…

I generally agree, though I don't think the "saintliness" even matters. The queen as seen by the public is probably a persona, sure, but so long as the persona stays put, she's a symbol of stability, and that is the whole point of the monarchy.

This even shows up in tech - Bill Gates isn't exactly known for widespread political opinions, and while we all know he was probably not a great person early on, he's now generally contributing to universally approved causes, and otherwise just there, so to some extent he's a symbol of the possibilities available through tech.

Meanwhile, you've got Elon, who I think would be reasonably similar - if he could stay the hell off Twitter and stop overpromising so goddamn often. He could have ended up as a symbol for the commercial space revolution and the surge of EV popularity, but instead he's polarising and often hated.

Generally, polarisation isn't great for authority figures. Even in politics this is sort of true - relatively centrist parties often have broader appeal than extreme views. (Though because politicians are our means of changing things, there's also an aversion to politicians with no opinions at all.)

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

#337

Post by mdoms »

buryat wrote: post #280
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…

> Every time, I would respond with the Navy Seal Copypasta, broken into eight twitter sized parts. Eventually they banned me for this. yeah, people like you should be banned

User who is receiving unsolicited messages from strangers should be the one banned because he decides to respond with a little joke?

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

#338

Post by AussieWog93 »

themaninthedark wrote: post #310
AussieWog93 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's an example...

I would ask you to think back to 2019 when a large majority on Twitter and from the mainstream media took a picture of some high school boys in Washington DC and brandied them about as the face of racism in America. "He has a racist smirk"

Do you have a link to this? I Googled the quote at the end and just found this weirdo tweeting under the hashtag #RealNiggas4Romney.

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

#339

Post by paganel »

cgrealy wrote: post #203
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'…

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.

A close friend of mine is, well, gay (as in man gay), and he doesn't have the fondest opinion of lesbians. He's also quite critical about trans people. He does like other (especially beautiful) men a lot, so that gay part is definitely covered, he's not in the closet by any means or anything like that.

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

#340

Post by erichocean »

jahnu wrote: post #241
javajosh wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that there are a LOT of disaffected Republicans who are conservative but not Trumpian authoritarians. In the same way, there are a LOT of disaffected Democrats who are liberals but not woke/cancel culture social justice warriors. So, yeah, I agree - there's room for a new party.

As a European, comments of this nature confuse me a little. This comments suggests an equivalency. But from this side of the pond I haven't seen the Democrats you describe actually in power and implementing policy. Can't say that about the other side. So why would any Democrats who are liberal but not "woke" be frustrated since those elements of their party wield little if any influence.

As an American, I'll try to explain how our two parties (and their voters) work in practice.

The Left (voters) have two main platforms: economic and cultural.

The Right (voters) have two main platforms: economic and cultural.

The Left votes for the Democratic Party. The Right votes for the Republican Party. Independents mostly vote one way or another, and a small percentage vote for whoever seems most moderate that particular election.

When governing, the Democratic Party works with the Republican Party to implement:

1. The cultural platform of the Left.

2. The economic platform of the Right.

The cultural platform of the Right and the economic platform of the Left are not implemented.

The Left calls the Democratic-Republican Establishment the "corporate" party and believes the country has moved strongly to the Right over the last 40 years. (They are focusing on the fact that the economic platform of the Right is being implemented.)

The Right calls the Democratic-Republican Establishment the "uniparty" and believes the country has moved strongly to the Left over the last 40 years. (They are focusing on the fact that the cultural platform of the Left is being implemented.)

This is a stable political system because neither a Left voter nor a Right voter wants to vote for the other party, because then they wouldn't even be getting half of what they want! The Democratic-Republican Establishment doesn't care who people vote for, because it wins either way. The important thing is for voters to believe their vote matters—even though it actually doesn't.

The key result is that neither the Left's economic platform nor the Right's cultural platform are ever implemented. (A few legacy cultural issues on the Right, e.g. 2nd Amendment gun rights, still exist. Same with pre-WW2 economic issues on the Left.)

Hope this helps!

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