Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The tyranny of the supertweeter

omnibudsman.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 259 posts

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#201

Post by rconti »

dexwiz wrote: post #198

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 personali…

Often the super-Tweeters will be people who literally have nothing better to do (eg, their time is worth very little), or who are being paid to do so one way or another, and all of the things that implies.

Remember that whenever spending your valuable time arguing on the internet :)

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#202

Post by unwise-exe »

iancmceachern wrote: post #96

I thought this was going to be about speakers.

Sure. Being active online is one way to try to drum up expose if you're trying to make a career out of public speaking.

Which potentially has implications if your area of interest isn't inherently tied to the main polarization axis.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#203

Post by dang »

tchock23 wrote: post #131
dang wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I haven't read the OP but if you're asking whether 10% of users log in and 1% actually post things, that's pretty close IIRC.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#204

Post by sangnoir »

SamBam wrote: post #79
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.…

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…

The NYT also engages in the opposite of like-based reporting: contrarian articles that target engagement via outrage.

The "relatable racist next door" stories are a recurring motif for the NYT (alternatively, look at any prepandemic article that mentions "economic anxiety" from 2015/2016 onwards)

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#205

Post by anigbrowl »

thepasswordis wrote: post #196
anigbrowl wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> random politicians who say anything outside of mainstream, American leftwing political ideology are "nazis"

> its a form of holocaust denial

This is nonsensical and self-contradictory. People on the far right today are compared to Nazis because they are articulating the exact same ideas of genocidal elimination, sometimes with explicit reference to and endorsement of the Nazis. you're invoking 'random politicians' as if they were quirky nobodies in unimportant political backwaters, but this is demonstrably not the case. I can point to members of Congress and and successful state level politicians that openly endorse far right anti-Semitic propagandists.

> 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's because I've studied history that I think you are (at best) staggeringly naive. The Nazis were clear about the intensity of their animus towards Jews and lots of other groups, but not explicit about how they were going to achieve their goals of eradication (because they didn't know). As a result few took them particularly seriously at first, and even when they took power foreign observers assumed they would set aside their bombastic demagoguery in favor of mundane administrative efforts. The same sort of unwillingness to contemplate political risks obtains now, and it is just as foolish.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#206

Post by suoduandao2 »

ProAm wrote: post #152
snarf21 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is true but don't just blame Twitter. Look at the major "news" networks. Look at the poor quality of "reporting". The bigger cause is the engagement above all else mentality of generating advertising. Click-bait, faux outrage, sensationalism, half-truths, posting 5 year old images out of context as "just in", creating scary fake crises, etc.

I agree but how do you suggest they make money?

The sci-fi seried Buck Godot proposed an entertaining solution - allow only a limited number of journalists to exist, and let the aspiring journalists sort it out between themselves.

The one living journalist in that story was completely amoral, but boy was she willing to go to great lengths to get the story!

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#207

Post by sangnoir »

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #187
pphysch wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joseph Pulitzer, the prize's namesake, was simultaneously a media mogul and U.S. congressman. His name is often associated with the dawn of "yellow journalism" and USA imperial war propaganda. Point being, unethical incentives and corruption are at the foundation of the American journalism tradition. It did not start with Twitter or the internet.

Basically all of history was powerful people lying to everyone and mass media helping them do it. For some reason people think the world is different today.

Absolutely: Hearst's "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war" predates social media by quite a bit

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#208

Post by crazygringo »

pessimizer wrote: post #166
crazygringo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. B…

> I've tried googling but can't find anything related to a right-left-liberal distinction. America is the only country in which "liberal" is thought have any relationship to "left." In Australia, the right-wing party is called the Liberal Party. "Liberals" are free market advocates who support change through competition and a hands off approach by government. "Conservatives" prefer the government support of firm mora…

> America is the only country in which "liberal" is thought have any relationship to "left."

That's simply not true. Because "liberal" is a word that means many different things in many different countries, it's a famously malleable term.

For example, Wikipedia says (emphasis mine):

> The definition of liberal party is highly debatable... This is a broad political current, including left-wing, centrist and right-wing elements. All liberal parties emphasise individual rights, but they differ in their opinion on an active role for the state. This list includes parties of different character, ranging from classical liberalism to social liberalism, conservative liberalism to national liberalism... [1]

Indeed, a quick search for the term "left" on that page shows that "liberal" is used to describe leftist parties in the Bahamas, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Croatia, and North Macedonia at least. It's not just an American thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_parties_by_country

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#209

Post by plonk »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #133
delecti wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't check the trends. Find a circle of people with your interests and stay away from political spam you're not interested in. That makes Twitter very useful for e.g. following research or getting informed opinions.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#210

Post by anigbrowl »

gruez wrote: post #194
anigbrowl wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Right, it just looks like a Nazi salute and it serves the same psychological purpose, but as long as we call it something else it's perfectly OK. I think it would be wiser to ask yourself why this is being deployed at political rallies, rather than complaining about how it is 'unfair' to draw comparisons just because you can identify superficial differences.

It's so odd how every time there's an instance of a group of people throwing up what looks just like a nazi salute, some people rush in to explain why it's bad to take note of the similarity. It seems to me that if you're in a culture where people are widely familiar with Nazi iconography, and you're not exploring Nazism in some fictional or educational context, then you'd want to avoid doing and saying things that make you look and sound like a Nazi, such as training a crowd of people to do a stiff-arm salute at a political rally for theatrical effect, the same way it's a bad idea to hold up swastika flags and claim you were being 'ironic' or 'trying to provoke a discussion'.

Post reply on HN