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Twitter's Fucked

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161–170 of 398 posts

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#161

Does Twitter have to be Facebook to not be "fucked"? I don't understand these statements that "Twitter is fucked". Twitter could improve filtering and safety but if it never changed I'd probably still get my news from it for the rest of my life. I just can't think of a better app for my use cases. I often like Twitter Moments, like something funny or some pop culture stuff I wouldn't have picked up on. Every time the…

> I don't want longer tweets. That's what URL's are for.

This right here.

Medium, PostHaven, Wordpress, blog services, etc. All of those products exist for an extended thought. I always believed that where Twitter excels is in micro-sharing/blogging.

I am not willing to read, let alone comment on a 500+ word Facebook status post. But I'm certainly willing to enjoy/participate in a discourse over a 160 character thought.

If I am in the 500+ word reading mood, I goto Medium or PostHaven or the equivalent blog-platform. Where there's a forum, there's an audience. And Twitter's quick digestible tweets cultivates an insane amount of diverse discourse.

Sure, there's harassment. Sure there's spam. But there's a lot of gems on Twitter.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#162

> (edit: I said the article didn't mention. I missed the mention.) Amazing your comment is top—given you didn't read the article. > The man deserved what he got From what I've seen (I'm no expert on the subject), that's debatable.

Wait, missing one mention equates to not reading the entire article? Amazing indeed.

"Milo" appears nine times in the article. The discussion about him is a large part of the content.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#163
post #18

Twitter is best for announcing things: events, blog posts, updates, software version and the like, plus maybe a link. Anything else is unfit for the platform. The strings are too short.

Actually, what I find Twitter best for is directly talking to CEOs, lead developers, lead marketers, or other people in high positions. They usually reply.

For instance, I asked John Carmack if he'd ever consider doing anything on the Atari Jaguar again (he ported Wolf3d and Doom to that platform back in 1993) and he replied saying that he'd more likely do Apple ][ stuff if he went retro.

How many times in a person's life do they directly talk to John Carmack? It's amazing that you can just type a few things in and someone that powerful replies to a relative nobody.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#164
post #85

People are tired from crybullies. We need a place where freedom of speech still matters. Freedom of speech doesn't include invading someone's privacy (this is illegal; doxxing, stalking etc. should be banned and actively fought against). But if you can't handle insults, it is not anyone's job to prevent them. There's always "Block" button, and then, there's always "delete account" button.

Explain to me how effective blocking individuals is when you're being spammed by dozens and hundreds of people with so little to do that they will happily go create egg accounts to continue harassing you. It's not practical or feasible to block all of them. So people should delete their accounts because they get brigaded? To hell with that, and with the people who think that is a social norm worth protecting. "Crybul…

I agree that the person you're replying to is being cavalier, but Twitter does have tools to mass-ignore accounts you don't care about. You can change notifications to only be from people you follow. There's also a "Tailored for you" option for each notification type. I'm not sure if it's the default, but that seems to be the setting on my phone. It basically makes egg accounts invisible.

It's rare that I get involved in drama on Twitter, but thanks to notification settings, I've found it pretty easy to filter out the negative people.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not in the minority, you're in the majority. Not that many people actually use Twitter. That you think you are in the minority is a weird cultural phenom - people with the loud voices behaviours signal to us what is 'normative' even if it is not! Because you see a lot of people using Twitter, you think 'everyone's doing it'. In reality - most people are far more neutral/central than the voices in the web. And…

Twitter had 350 million active users in Q1 of 2016, this is quite a lot actually.

The majority might be bots. Surely for financial reasons the most tenuous definition of "active" will be applied.

Still, its like the old saying about email, I don't care if 99% of email is spam, as long as I get my electric bill email on time, I'm all good.

Twitter might become like TV, where everyone knows everyone watches, but it turns out statistics prove almost no one actually watches.

Its like the endless debates about religion where its a ritual to say X where X is "I believe in Y" and people endlessly argue about the difference between doing something and being something, as if they have to be linked.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, in both cases it's using violence as a rhetorical trick. Verbal and emotional abuse of children are serious issues, but they do NOT have to be violent for them to be horrible. The conflation of the two muddies the language that we have to describe the events that happen to us. If someone says, my parents were very violent to me, what would you assume happened? Doesn't knowing that there was physical abuse help…

Did you even read the links? 'Violent speech' and 'violent communication' are a form of violence. They have a nuanced definition. They can be used in multiple ways. Language is not strict. It is fluid, it changes over time, and in this case, totally applies to the subject. You are arguing for an unrealistic, unenforceable, overly-literal use of language.

We have word-phrases for what you're talking about. More nuanced than your proposed catch-all of 'violent communication.'

As someone who's been on the receiving end of a large portion of 'violent communication', it's much easier, and significantly more validating to say 'emotional abuse' or 'hate speech'.

I don't understand what about asking violence to retain its definition is unrealistic. It's an important word with important implications.

(I did read the links -- that's how I pulled an example out of them. You really are a fan of rhetorical pot shots!)

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#167
post #89
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says that Milo didn't deserve what he got, and I agree. You may not agree with his politics but people of all stripes have done worse. I guess we'll end up with a conservative twitter clone, and a liberal twitter, and no-one will ever face the "danger" of seeing viewpoints they disagree with.

Conservatives are ok with freedom of speech, 'safe zones' are invented by progressives.

Yup. Notorious progressives Bush and Cheney gave us "free speech zones":

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/free-speech-...

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#168
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conservatives are ok with freedom of speech, 'safe zones' are invented by progressives.

Definitely not true of current neocons. They use freedom of speech as a cover for "let me say whatever I want to say" while ignoring it when it suits them. As a live-right-now example, the mods of /r/The_Donald on Reddit are preemtively banning users before Trump's AMA to prevent dissent, and have stated plainly they will delete any unflattering questions.

yeah and that's a Trump specific forum and they have RULES on the side for what is banned. Contrast that with r/news where it's purported to be 'news' not some partisan subreddit. You will get banned for having an opinion mods don't like. Not only that but those same mods will simply ban you from other subreddits they are mods for. r/news and r/worldnews was hit with that the other day.

You're example is false equivalency. And what you call a preemptive ban, you'll actually discover that they are quite used to being brigaded on that subreddit and they know who participates. And bans aren't necessarily permanent there.

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#169
post #41

Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum. What's missing is that other platforms, like Facebook, took a very hard stance on this and forced people to signup as their real identities. Twitter, can easily follow suit. That won't fix all of the problems, but it will go towards improving things and it won't req…

HN is public and anonymous and mostly manages to not suffer this problem, due to the heavy manual labour of the moderators and a whole lot of selection bias in its userbase. To a slightly lesser extent, Slashdot has also licked that problem: for any story that attracts enough comments (more than 300) the top rated ones are often pretty good and the worthless ones start auto-collapsed. Even though Slashdot gets a lot…

HN is not as mainstream as Twitter or Reddit, so I don't think we can really compare it that way

Re: Twitter's Fucked

#170

Does Twitter have to be Facebook to not be "fucked"? I don't understand these statements that "Twitter is fucked". Twitter could improve filtering and safety but if it never changed I'd probably still get my news from it for the rest of my life. I just can't think of a better app for my use cases. I often like Twitter Moments, like something funny or some pop culture stuff I wouldn't have picked up on. Every time the…

People love to hate Facebook and Twitter, but they ain't going anywhere. The service they provide is too useful, and after so many years they are ingrained in people's social lives.

As far as I'm concerned, the only useful service Facebook provides is event scheduling. I don't have a Twitter account. Most of the "needs" they fulfill are either entirely imaginary, or aren't fulfilled in any sensible way. (I.e. the whole notion of "staying in touch" with people via Facebook is a sham. It's more of a simulation of staying in touch.)

If you use popularity as the main measure of usefulness then yellow press is useful too.

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