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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#191

Post by trgn »

PKop wrote: post #177

>Twitter Is Not Real Life Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality. Quoting comment section of that article: "This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world." Is TV real life? Are movies? How…

Wrt baudrillard. It always strikes me how well the modern condition was understood by the 70s. It's equally baffling how little has changed. Perhaps more specifically, the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology than say the industrial processes that enabled commoditization or the telecommunication and image reproduction technologies that enabled instant broadcasting.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#192

Post by anigbrowl »

tlholaday wrote: post #20

Is this tool feasible? Block user @A, and also block any user who has chosen to `follow` user @A. Ideally: > twitprune --block --recursive --depth 2 @A Edit: API Review Time!

Oh absolutely and it's not that hard. But that's an overly crude filter, because following is a one-way operation on Twitter so you might well follow people you actively dislike in order to keep tabs on what they're saying. Twitter Lists allow for much finer segmentation but because users get a notification about this many of them block people who add them to lists, and the List infrastructure is kinda mediocre.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#193

Post by imbnwa »

PKop wrote: post #177

>Twitter Is Not Real Life Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality. Quoting comment section of that article: "This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world." Is TV real life? Are movies? How…

During the Bush era, my debate coach in HS made the interesting point that neocon conservatives were more 'post-modern' (a tortured term 20 years later) relative to old-school 'truth-seeking', anti-imperialist Leftists like Chomsky

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#194

Post by gruez »

anigbrowl wrote: post #186
thepasswordis wrote: post #159

Here is an example of how insane twitter is: https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1571629917372039168 This person, a "verified user", is claiming that this group of people is performing a "nazi salute". This claim has 20,000 likes, meaning it has influenced at least that many people. The video is very obviously a group of people praying. This person is perpetuating the idea that there are mainstream American polit…

Disingenuous BS. Since when are political rallies doubling up as evangelical revivals, and why? If I wanted to live in a theocracy I would move to Iran. I don't care for this Tristan Snell person, an obvious political shill. But your protestations ring hollow. The psychological manipulation in this example and a recent Trump rally at Youngstown, Ohio (music playing over the speech, similar coordinated gestures of rel…

It's ironic that you're accusing the parent poster of "Disingenuous BS", when you yourself are engaging in moving the goalposts. The parent post was complaining about how a tweet was unfairly describing a political rally as a "nazi salute", but you're changing the topic to "political rallies doubling up as evangelical revivals" and "psychological manipulation". It's fair to be against this political rally for those reasons, but it's unfair to accuse them of "nazi salute".

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#195

Post by marcosdumay »

jimmaswell wrote: post #72
ufo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 examp…

You could also say your attention span in real life overrepresents people who talk your ear off about Joe Biden at the checkout line or protest on the road. Maybe it's not really so different.

Except that it doesn't, at least not on the same scale.

If people start talking all the time in real life people will first start ignoring them, and then isolate them.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#196

Post by thepasswordis »

anigbrowl wrote: post #189
thepasswordis wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Nazis were openly and explicitly engaged in genocide . They killed millions of people in death camps. They didn't talk about it, they didn't allude to it. They did it. MILLIONS of people were killed like cattle. This happened in real life. White nationalists are bad. Racists are bad. The people associating themselves with those people shouldn't be. Being a stupid ignorant racist, and building actual in real life…

> They didn't talk about it, they didn't allude to it. They did it. Of course they talked about it, they did so for years before putting their genocidal aspirations into action. > Is there a single US politician calling for this or anything even remotely aligned with it? Sure: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washington-state-r... This guy is popping on stage with Michael Flynn, who is doing a national tour…

I think this conversation is an example of people living in different worlds, and it's the type of thing that has been created out of the place that things like what I linked above have pushed the discourse.

In my world: the nazis were essentially a psychotic death cult who engaged in genocide. They didn't work up to this. This was core to their political ideology starting in 1920.

But there seems to be another world where the Nazis were just some bad guys with some bad ideas or something, and in that world random politicians who say anything outside of mainstream, American leftwing political ideology are "nazis".

Obviously I think that's bad, since like I said before I think its a form of holocaust denial. In fact this was something that soldiers and journalists worried about when they found the nazi death camps at the end of the war. They worried that in the future people wouldn't believe that this had happened, or wouldn't understand how bad it was.

It seems like that has happened. I think that in a large part mass media like twitter has facilitated it.

What I would say is: please study history. The nazis weren't just some bad guys. They tried to kill several entire races of people, and erase their existence from history. They succeeding in killing a lot of them before we were able to stop them. It cannot be overstated how evil the Nazis were, and I wish people would stop trying to downplay this.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#197

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

tenpies wrote: post #176
bachmeier wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The best part is the reward of lying for "journalists". If you lie and get caught, ignore it. If the person who called you out has too much of a following to ignore, then just write a small sentence at the bottom clarifying how you're not lying, you just interpreted things different. They still won't go away? Find one of their followers who makes a comment that's just a bit out of line. Can't find one? Well a Twitter…

Don't forget that if there are many different people calling you out for telling lies, it's obviously targeted harassment.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#198

Post by dexwiz »

Super tweeters are very likely narcissist, possibly psychopaths, if they are not actually a front/shill/bot. Think about the people in real life who always have to be the center of attention. Rarely you will find someone with a virtuous mission, who recognizes the power of a group. Most often you just find an emotionally damaged person who is trying to fill a hole.

Either these narcissists develop a cult of personality or move on once the narcissistic supply dries up. Twitter is just an endless supply of attention, and we all know the most divisive get the most attention. Do they want to be divisive? Maybe, but they certainly want the attention it provides and act accordingly.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#199

Post by yamtaddle »

parasti wrote: post #84
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 also take issue with the headline. "Tyranny" is when you have no choice. That is not the case with Twitter. First of all, there is the choice of using Twitter. Secondly, there is the choice of who to follow on Twitter. I would hazard a guess that "tyranny" is not a thing that most Twitter users experience on Twitter.

It's a common usage, not meant to be taken quite so literally. Try something that will autocomplete search for you and start with "the tyranny of..." and see what happens.

I get:

- The tyranny of structurelessness

- ... of merit

- ... of tears

- ... of the dark

- ... of metrics

- ... of weakness

and I'm sure they'd just keep going if it could display more entries at once. While typing, it brought up an article complaining about Millennial design aesthetics containing the phrase, "the tyranny of terrazzo".

It's like "goto considered harmful" but with a longer history, and way more popular—familiar to a much wider set of readers than "... considered harmful", that is.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#200

Post by trgn »

imbnwa wrote: post #193
PKop wrote: post #177

>Twitter Is Not Real Life Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality. Quoting comment section of that article: "This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world." Is TV real life? Are movies? How…

During the Bush era, my debate coach in HS made the interesting point that neocon conservatives were more 'post-modern' (a tortured term 20 years later) relative to old-school 'truth-seeking', anti-imperialist Leftists like Chomsky

> a tortured term 20 years later

To me, it has helped to see postmodernism more as a literary term, rather than an epoch.

Postmodernists looked at the modernist hellscape and understood it completely: its mechanisms, its origins, its technology, its social dimensions. Then, rather than to draw the correct lessons, they threw up their hands in defeat and capitulated.

In the 2020s, we are still in the same modernist dystopia from the 70s, the wagon kept rolling down the exact same mountain as it has since then.

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