Live data from Hacker News

Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

buzzfeednews.com

181–190 of 198 posts

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#181
post #48

Twitter by design encourages trite / curt posts that have to be outlandish to get any attention. Nuance and understanding are not encouraged ... just based on how the whole thing works. The medium is the message.

Well, your comment fits in a tweet...

A tweet can be true, in fact many are, but the medium can still be dumb / encourage dumb things.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#182
post #89
post #23

Twitter mostly proves that a lot of people are not happy unless they're outraged.

I feel like there's a mental illness the entire world is seemingly ignoring, whose symptom is constant, floating disgust and contempt and despise . The ability to be offended by anything, because it's not the stimulus that offended you; you were already offended as an equilibrium state. Let me attempt to describe this mentality as a recipe (because I don't have a good name for it, but I'm sure you can recognize it):…

Outrage culture is nothing new. Orwell wrote about it, in 1984 outrage culture in Oceana was boiled down to a daily 'two minutes of hate.' It's just moved to twitter rather than the dinner table or the work cafeteria or other meeting places, where you might see the same circular outrage opinions although perhaps with more restraint. The trope of 'racist grandpa' goes back a while, for example.

That said, when everyone you know or follow is echoing the same thing, there's a sense of entitlement that builds. That you are entitled to outrage, and now with social media you have a platform to echo like minded opinions from the hilltop. It's easy to forget that you inhabit an echo chamber on the internet (1), and all too tempting to equate it into a worldwide crusade. You used to have to earn a platform through persuasive arguments or hard earned authority and expertise.

1. https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-use...

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#183

Solution: people pay to use twitter. Kill advertising as the main model. Either Twitter will do this or the future decentralized apps will do this naturally through micropayments of having to pay for compute through the network. I see a distributed p2p database that costs money to interact with and anyone can build a client for it. Go ahead, build a client - maybe it's free, maybe it costs money because it uses the p…

One issue is there's a huge number of fake/bot accounts on the site that won't be subscribing. Since twitter is a public company, shareholders would not be pleased with loosing a huge swath of user base as it would indicate they've been deceived on the scope of their investment the whole time.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#184
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets suggested as the solution to privacy/junk content/etc for every social platform - why have none of them (that I am aware of) adopted this model?

If you look at it a certain way, this is what email was before ISPs and bigcorps gave away email addresses; everyone who had an email address was paying their sysadmin for the privilege of having one (through their tuition at a university that has email services, or through the cost-center of the company they work for.) In either of those cases, people were more careful with email, because postmasters were easily ang…

>rather than some admin owning the group and maybe paying, the group has a tip-jar and anyone/everyone in the group can contribute.

There are plenty of forums and private servers (for video games) that are donation supported by the regulars. It's a struggle though.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have nazis in your timeline in the first place? I never understood the people that always complain about nazis on twitter. Like seriously what are you clicking 'Like' on that your twitter is fully of nazis?

It’s not my Twitter that is full of Nazis. It’s Twitter in general. And their tweets make it into my life because non-Nazis respond to them, and those responses then become popular and are shared.

Unfollow people who are sharing these easy jabs at hateful people all day.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#186

I used blame twitter for creating at outrage culture. But then I realized I had it backwards. There have always been people who find it fun to vent outrage, moral indignity, and condescension. They just got it from TV blowhards before.

Agreed. News junkies aren’t after the truth / meaningful debate. They are after confirmation bias and seeing people they hate get rekt.

Headline junkies more like. Nearly every linked article reddit thread has a comment along the lines of "No one read the article." Twitter is even worse about this.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reality on Twitter is that only a very few people are unhappy and outraged and a very many people without the strong emotions empathise and amplify it. This is actively encouraged and labeled in some groups by "being a good ally" for example.

But to what end? The end result of all this for me has been that I simply quit Twitter. And here's the thing: I generally agree with them, but it's so annoying I can't even engage with them anymore. So sure, maybe they're amplifying somebody's message, but I'm no longer there to hear it, no matter how loud it is. They're mostly just shouting at each other at this point.

I'm with you here, I wonder if it encourages people to shout even louder as "these people aren't listening as much any more"?

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#188
post #182
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there's a mental illness the entire world is seemingly ignoring, whose symptom is constant, floating disgust and contempt and despise . The ability to be offended by anything, because it's not the stimulus that offended you; you were already offended as an equilibrium state. Let me attempt to describe this mentality as a recipe (because I don't have a good name for it, but I'm sure you can recognize it):…

Outrage culture is nothing new. Orwell wrote about it, in 1984 outrage culture in Oceana was boiled down to a daily 'two minutes of hate.' It's just moved to twitter rather than the dinner table or the work cafeteria or other meeting places, where you might see the same circular outrage opinions although perhaps with more restraint. The trope of 'racist grandpa' goes back a while, for example. That said, when everyon…

I’m not sure this is the entirety of the explanation. It seems that being default-disgusted has passed some sort of threshold of social acceptability, where it’s no longer something you are friends with someone despite, and become something that you befriend people because of.

I see people voicing their opinions on the things they hate on blogs, social networks, dating sites—and successfully connecting with others who hate the same things! This was not a thing even ten years ago. Making your “about you” on any social system a list of things you hate would have been seen, as recently as 2010, as an uncouth mistake by someone who has no emotional intelligence. (Even if you’re also someone who hates the same things, you’d understand that doing this is a sign of a general willingness to violate social norms, and so feel vaguely put off by the person.) But, these days, it’s not a mistake to present yourself this way; there’s no penalty to doing it, only benefits.

I think what this might be, is the final death within Western “Christian-descended atheist/agnostic” culture of the social mores that were inherited from religion, e.g. the idea that wrath is a sin that you should feel bad for embodying, and at least shouldn’t advertise in public as a positive aspect of yourself. (I say this because I suspect—though I’m not sure—that this change isn’t nearly as pronounced in Western religious communities.)

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#189
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, your comment fits in a tweet...

A tweet can be true, in fact many are, but the medium can still be dumb / encourage dumb things.

I agree, it was just some sarcasm on the 'trite / curt' part of your comment.

Re: Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other

#190
post #89
post #23

Twitter mostly proves that a lot of people are not happy unless they're outraged.

I feel like there's a mental illness the entire world is seemingly ignoring, whose symptom is constant, floating disgust and contempt and despise . The ability to be offended by anything, because it's not the stimulus that offended you; you were already offended as an equilibrium state. Let me attempt to describe this mentality as a recipe (because I don't have a good name for it, but I'm sure you can recognize it):…

>disgust and contempt and despise

Word of the day: "despisal", noun form of "despise".

Post reply on HN