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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#11

Post by metacritic12 »

password1 wrote: post #4
jiggywiggy wrote: post #3

Twitter is one of the worst places I've ever visited. In general makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets. It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage. Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.

It also thrives in "hot takes" that might sound smart at first glance but are incredibly ignorant if you analyse them. Everything is oversimplified to fit the character limit, but nobody seems to notice. It's ignorant hot-takes in answer to other ignorant hot-takes. TikTok is basically the same btw, but in video format.

Agreed.

I first thought the flaw with twitter was that people tweeted insights with a minimal of background or literature research. This leads to shallow analysis of problems others have spent years thinking about.

I realized later that the more accurate flaw is not that, but correlated to that. The real flaw is that it's a breeding ground for low-effort takes. The person espousing some grand theory of life can tweet it after thinking about it for just a few minutes. This leads to theories that not only are not exposed to peer review, but theories that literally the writer herself hasn't spend more than a few minutes thinking carefully about.

If you only have to type 140-characters, you get both really great theories distilled, and fleeting thoughtlets.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#13

Post by yew »

isaacfrond wrote: post #9

I've admittedly only scanned the article. But apart from a lot of statistics, where is the headline question answered? Neither tyranny nor supertweeter occur anywhere in the article. Is this the tyranny of needing a clickbaity title otherwise no one will read it? I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are jou…

The entire article is an extended definition of the headline term mixed with discussion of the implications of presentation bias. It's also quite concise. To the point that I almost can't believe this isn't trolling.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#14

Post by crmd »

Bakary wrote: post #7

The part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession. The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.…

>finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the right combination of search terms.

This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#16

Post by refurb »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #2

A classic on this topic, more general: Most of Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People [1]. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

I know the article doesn't literally mean "insane" as in mental illness, but it reminded me of something that happened long ago and its implications for the internet.

My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and could listen to all the voicemails left.

Now this is a news show with millions of nightly viewers. Pretty plain Jane, just the news-type-show, and this is before the Fox News vs. MSNBC stuff we have now, so I assume a pretty decent cross section of America watches it.

Unsurprisingly, the mailbox contained hundreds of voicemails and would be deleted daily to make room. But what was interesting listening to these "comments from just regular-Joe Americas" was that the vast majority were insane ramblings from clearly mentally ill people. They would call multiple times, talk about aliens or how someone was Jesus Christ. We're talking manic episodes, schizophrenia, drug-induced psychosis, whatever. And these messages were left every day, every week, for years and years.

And not to say there weren't regular folks - there were. Someone who thinks "we should get involved in another war" and "family is important". You know, normal things. But they were maybe 10-15%? Maybe. I assume most regular folks just watched the news and thought "why would I call a number? I got shit to do and it's not like they actually care."

It wasn't until a couple decades later that I realize they called because someone listened. It was an outlet. And for those with serious mental illness, likely their only outlet.

It was then I started to draw comparison to the internet. How much of what we read online is just the rambling of the same people who left 'detached from reality' messages on that voicemail service decades ago?

I'm starting to think it's a pretty good percent. And I don't mean "insane" in the way this article describes it, but "insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.

So while we like to talk about Russian disinformation and bots, my current theory is that the biggest "threat" on the internet is people believing what they read represents the actual views of average citizens. It's not.

Your average American doesn't even know what Reddit or HN is. And if they go online they probably read and upvote something and leave. The bulk of what we read online are the insane ramblings of 1% of the population who likely have diagnosable mental illness of some sort.

That's my hypothesis anyways. And hey, maybe I'm one of those mentally ill folks... right?

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#17

Post by ufo »

isaacfrond wrote: post #9

I've admittedly only scanned the article. But apart from a lot of statistics, where is the headline question answered? Neither tyranny nor supertweeter occur anywhere in the article. Is this the tyranny of needing a clickbaity title otherwise no one will read it? I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are jou…

I think the main takeaway is that twitter over represents people who tweet a lot, because those people are responsible for a larger percentage of the tweets. The author argues that this makes twitter more negative than real life, because negative tweeters post more tweets. They also point out that journalists and politicians, who consider twitter to be very important, are affected by the twitter atmosphere. For example, during the black lives matter protest the #DefundThePolice hashtag got a lot of circulation on twitter and reverberated with mainstream media and politicians. Despite it being a relatively fringe slogan, the way it's worded (taken literally, it sounds like abolishing the police altogether).

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#18

Post by h2odragon »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #3

Twitter is one of the worst places I've ever visited. In general makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets. It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage. Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.

The PA cartoon, "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" really summed up the potential of the service right at the beginning. Twitter steamrolled other, better discussion sites with a sub-optimal design because it's impossible to have a real discussion there. Look who backed them, look at their early marketing efforts: This shit here was the goal all along.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#19

Post by polytely »

Bakary wrote: post #7

The part about journalism is particularly troubling because Twitter is like crack for journalists and has thus played a big part in decreasing the credibility of the profession. The platform is a journalist's fantasy brought to life. The ability to exist as an individual and have an audience independently of their publication. Blue check-marks. As the article mentions, the capacity to find stories with little effort.…

It is very convenient if you want to run influence operations, to change the perception of reality for news consumers you only have to influence a handful of journalists by planting some tweets on their timeline.
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