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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#101

Post by jacooper »

colpabar wrote: post #44
fortran77 wrote: post #23

I keep my twitter politics-free. And I follow tech/hacker people and routinely mute/block those who think I want to hear their inane/naïve political opinions. And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.

What do you do about the recommendations? I am constantly bombarded with suggestions for topics that I have 0 interest in. I click not interested, I update my settings, I create custom ublock rules, and yet they always come back eventually.

stop using the home page, and switch to the normal timeline from the star icon.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#102

Post by ceejayoz »

guerrilla wrote: post #42
ceejayoz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't think this is why. Look at the number of Bernie supporters. I think what's really going on is that the right-wing media has a strategy of shifting the Overton window by calling liberals "left" and those same liberals have little problem with that because they consider themselves left, not knowing any better.

> Look at the number of Bernie supporters.

Mostly liberal, not leftist. (Even if they were, Bernie'd prove the point.)

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#103

Post by jacooper »

tomcam wrote: post #28
fortran77 wrote: post #23

I keep my twitter politics-free. And I follow tech/hacker people and routinely mute/block those who think I want to hear their inane/naïve political opinions. And you know what? Twitter is pretty nice! It keeps me in a nice tech filter bubble where the biggest argument is 8080 vs 6502.

Same, and with Reddit too (for me).

Reddit politics is on a whole new level of extremism.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#104

Post by marban »

gonzo41 wrote: post #36
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.…

This is a good take on twitters effect on journalism. I was just thinking the other day about why journalists don't separate their work account and private accounts. I grew up in a time where you generally tried to keep your real identity to a minimum on platforms. Yet journalists seem to suffer from an identity fusion with their professional work, their personal views, and their ego all coming together under a singl…

Well, you gotta build your brand and launch a paid newsletter the minute you got laid off.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#105

Post by ajross »

vorpalhex wrote: post #83
ajross wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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". That... not remotely true. No one writes stories for major organizations based only on tweets[1]. Go pick up (figuratively) a newspaper and read the front page stories carefully, an…

NYTimes, front pages, sources from Twitter: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/business/media/russia-war...

Uh, no? Here's the only spot in that story where the word "Twitter" (I looked for "tweet" too) is used:

> Throughout the summer, the Network Contagion Research Institute noticed a spike in extremist activity related to the Dutch protests on Twitter, Telegram and 4chan, the message board on which conspiracy theories spread largely unchecked

The source for that statement is quite clearly NCRI. It's reporting news about twitter. It's not looking to twitter for news.

And frankly your attempt to blur the distinction is exactly the kind of memery that I was takling about. The NYT is your enemy, so you feel justified in spinning arguments to "attack" them.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#106

Post by tablespoon »

bombcar wrote: post #59
yew wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of them probably are effectively paid advertising teams. That doesn't really explain some of the people you used to get on forums though. Why pay someone to write 24/7 micro-serial "Transformers" fan-fiction?

Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly realizes that the “all the posters I don’t like are paid shills” argument doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s often a cope - “my side/the good side would obviously be winning if it weren’t for these paid shills”. There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.

> Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly realizes that the “all the posters I don’t like are paid shills” argument doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s often a cope - “my side/the good side would obviously be winning if it weren’t for these paid shills”.

> There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.

There doesn't have to be a single explanation, though. It can be paid shills and obsessives.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#107

Post by dylan604 »

analog31 wrote: post #22
crmd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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".

>finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the right combination of search terms. I'm struck by the parallel to typing the right prompt into GPT-3.

I've read articles where I'm not convinced GPT-3 was not the author

It also sounds like a Wikipedia editor's job

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#108

Post by enviclash »

bombcar wrote: post #63
guerrilla wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people on Twitter have referred to Twitter as "this hellsite" enough times that I can't say that I think this is anything new. Knowing Twitter is terrible and terrible for you is a prominent part of Twitter culture. There are many memes around the subject.

A quite large group of people call it a hellsite precisely because there are people on it who disagree with them. The real red pill is realizing it is a hellsite because it is full of people who agree with you.

I wonder if Discord will be one day a sort of "Twitter of Twitters" dealing with all these issues, with some servers focusing on Echo Chambers and other servers on either organized discussions or flame bait.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#109

Post by delecti »

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.

Which 1-3 tweets though? When I open my Twitter homepage, the top 3 tweets are: art, a selfie, and lighthearted nostalgia about 90s cartoons.

It's very easy to find unpleasantness on Twitter, but it's also very easy to not find it. If you walk down main street, you can look in the storefronts and people watch, or you can look down every alleyway and complain about the existence of dumpsters.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#110

Post by honkdaddy »

ceejayoz wrote: post #32
petesergeant wrote: post #15

As someone from one of the many countries with a right/left/liberal split, I really don’t like that American politics conflates left and liberal together.

Quoted post unavailable.

I think the two party system is ultimately to blame for this, though I have no idea what the solution would be. Up in Canada, we have three left-leaning parties, NDP, Liberal, and Green, which represent some very different political views but all have varying levels of representation in our parliament.

After living in the States a few years it's become clear that none of the 3rd parties are taken very seriously, and if you're not R you've gotta be D, and vice versa. For a country where I've met so many sharp and politically sophisticated folks, I think it's a bummer they have one binary choice when it comes to their national vote.

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