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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#131

Post by tchock23 »

dang wrote: post #95
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...

Someone has posted it here, perhaps in response to your comment: Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812 - Sept 2022 (36 comments) - but generally, we downweight follow-up/copycat posts, partly because frontpage space is so scarce that having two variations of the same discussion is space-inefficient, and partly because it tends to split…

Dang - related to OP’s post is there a 90/9/1 participation dynamic at play on HN?

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#132

Post by crazygringo »

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.

I'm very curious, but what does "liberal" mean in your context? What country are you in?

I've tried googling but can't find anything related to a right-left-liberal distinction.

But in case it helps explain, at least in America, "liberal" has the basic connotation of "individual equality". Originally this meant equality before the law, often called "classical liberalism" which both left and right generally endorse.

But then the left become associated with a greater expanded equality -- more social programs, safety nets, education, etc. The left therefore became associated with the term "liberal" while the right with "conservative" -- liberals interested in greater social equality, conservatives believing in more of a natural social hierarchy (still on top of legal equality). Then conservatives came up with the moderately-used term "neoliberal" to promote their market-based economic policies based on classical liberalism, in opposition to the left-wing expanded equality social policies. There's also the term "libertarian" which refers to classical liberalism without anything added -- no social equality of the left, and also no conservative cultural values of the right.

But nevertheless, I'm extremely curious to know what you call liberal that is distinct from both right and left?

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#133

Post by jiggywiggy »

delecti wrote: post #109
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.

I often catch up on latest news around several topics, sports etc. Twitter is normally faster then news mediums. So every now and then I check the trends. Every single trend you click turns into a cess pit from tweet nr 2 or 3.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#134

Post by Mattasher »

bachmeier wrote: post #92
SamBam wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also an excellent Exra Klein podcast where he talks to game-philospher C. Thi Nguyen about Twitter's Like button's effect on journalists. [1] He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every journalist is) it's nearly impossible to get away from measuring your worth/impact by the number of likes you get. It's so buit into our minds, we can't not use Likes as a proxy for how engaging our story is. T…

This is less of a problem to me than the other side effect of like-driven journalism. If you only preach to the choir, you can get away with misleading or inaccurate claims. Like-driven journalism encourages a style where you present only some of the facts or even just make stuff up. Folks like stuff because of what it says. They don't care if it's partial truths or lies. Like-driven journalism quite literally punish…

This gets to the heart of the problem and is even understated. If your audience is partisan, going against what they want to hear by providing nuance, context, or even straight news, can provoke extreme outrage. Perhaps people will recall when the NYT had to change a factually correct headline because it wasn't sufficiently critical of the previous president.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#135

Post by Bakary »

bnralt wrote: post #126
tux1968 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mercator projection, which exists to provide an objective map of longitude to up and down. While true, it also distorts reality and leads to mistaken ideas about the world: https://wonderfulengineering.com/the-authagraph-world-map-is...

_Every_ map projection distorts reality in some way. There's simply no way to accurately portray a sphere as a two dimensional object without some trade-offs. The Mercator projection has some useful trade offs, which is why Google maps used it for so long (and still does as certain scales, I believe). I don't believe the authagraph projection is even the best map projection for preserving things like shape and area (…

The Mercator is like circumcision. There might be many reasons invoked for it, but the main reason is that it's just what people in the US are familiar with. Even with no real trade-offs it's fairly clear that Google would still have picked it.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#136

Post by vintermann »

This blog does not inspire confidence when it cites studies which classify people from "extreme liberal" to "extreme conservative". Much of the US left has rejected the term liberal for decades (check out Phil Ochs' classic "Love me, I'm a liberal"). You throw away way too much information when you just use people's self identification on a scale like that.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#137

Post by philippejara »

jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #24
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...

There is a different explanation about the 'power posters' - not that they are "insane", but that it's their job. They get good amounts of money for doing what they do. As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a single person, but multiple people, posting under the same name.

There's another side to it as well, the people who want it to be their job, and just see it as another avenue to deliver contest similar to a stream.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#138

Post by Test0129 »

rr888 wrote: post #114
thrown_22 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm really not sure who you're talking about now. Sounds like Russian BS. Do you have a source for any of these three things? > were pushing for the OK sign to be classified as a hate symbol used by secret Nazis > Ukraine having 20% of it's army wear literal swastikas > Today they argue that [Ukraine swastikas] isn't that bad.

No post body was provided.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#139

Post by quantified »

thrown_22 wrote: post #125
rr888 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really not sure who you're talking about now. Sounds like Russian BS. Do you have a source for any of these three things? > were pushing for the OK sign to be classified as a hate symbol used by secret Nazis > Ukraine having 20% of it's army wear literal swastikas > Today they argue that [Ukraine swastikas] isn't that bad.

> were pushing for the OK sign to be classified as a hate symbol used by secret Nazis https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-gesture... > Today they argue that Ukraine having 20% of it's army wear literal swastikas https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukraine-turns-a-... > Today they argue that [Ukraine swastikas] isn't that bad. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32868328

First, "neoliberals" aren't supporting any of this.

Second, your facts are wrong. The ok sign stuff was some very sensitive people pushed by foreign propaganda. Militias aren't the army. That's why they're militias. Like calling the Wagner Group the Russian Army.

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