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The tyranny of the supertweeter

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#241

Post by BlueTemplar »

cinntaile wrote: post #10
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.…

> The significance of Twitter users' opinions is blown way out of proportion because the medium itself is easily accessible and attractive to journalists. This has given rise to what I saw coined as Twitter professors a couple of days ago (I read it somewhere on HN), their fame made it easier to get funding was the claim. This is a bit problematic because that should be based on the merit of the research. The same is…

I am happy to see professors engaging with the public, especially if it helps to make the underappreciated half of their job that is teaching more glamorous. I am very unhappy that some of them would debase themselves by using Twitter to do so.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#242

Post by bombcar »

enviclash wrote: post #108
bombcar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quite large group of people call it a hellsite precisely because there are people on it who disagree with them. The real red pill is realizing it is a hellsite because it is full of people who agree with you.

I wonder if Discord will be one day a sort of "Twitter of Twitters" dealing with all these issues, with some servers focusing on Echo Chambers and other servers on either organized discussions or flame bait.

It’s already that; we just don’t see it because the servers are default private (not indexed).

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#243

Post by mattgreenrocks »

xhevahir wrote: post #115
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…

> If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes... Or, more painfully, you'll see a lot of derisive quote-tweets, subtweets, hostile screencaps, the dreaded "ratio"... Twitter users are a catty bunch.

It all looks so pathetic once you put some distance to it.

None of it matters. That’s why there’s so much drama.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#244

Post by _8j50 »

Infosec is partucularly horrible at this. You have twitter rock stars who do legit know their shit but being human means they sometimes lack the right perspective and experience which can lead to posts that are incorrect or lead people to misunderstand their opinions. "AV is bad", "VPN is bad", "just convert your AD network to mac" stuff like that and then you have their fans who sometimes don't think for themselves.

The main argument for Twitter is it has the most reach compared to activitypub or other alternatives.

My main argument against it is it basically turns into an 80s era highschool with "cancel" bullies, popular people and their fans and outcasts and it is not easy to engage in discourse over it.

If only their was HN for the hacking type of hackers (security focused).

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#245

Post by ever1337 »

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…

Professor Hans Georg-Moeller of the University of Macau I think has some really good observations and a systematization of what he calls the "profilicity mode of identity production", as contrasted to "authenticity" and "sincerity". He frequently comments on how social media causes people to view their actions not directly, but on a "second order", through the eyes of the "general peer" as personified by the quantified likes and comments posts get on social media. I haven't done a great job summarizing here but he has a youtube channel with some good videos on the topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMHOsfjHq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSkb1KppNc

I think his framework helps a lot in making sense of the way people act online and offline in our current age, and the implications for "identity production" are quite interesting.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#246

Post by gruez »

anigbrowl wrote: post #235
gruez wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As I said earlier, harping on the cosmetic differences sidesteps the very obvious question of 'does this look like a nazi rally to a casual observer?' But to an casual observer, what makes a rally a "nazi rally"? If you go around saying that a politician just held a "nazi rally", what pops in your head? You seem to think that the answer to both is something along the lines of "collective, coordinated, and directs at…

> But to an casual observer, what makes a rally a "nazi rally"? A combination of Nazi-style iconography and right wing/reactionary rhetoric. I've yet to see a 'left wing rally' in the US but I suppose that could take in center-left rallies by politicians like Bernie Sanders. And people do label such events as a bunch of commies. I'm not sure what you have in mind with 'Bolshevik rallies'. I can't think of anything vi…

>A combination of Nazi-style iconography and right wing/reactionary rhetoric

So a rally with people raising their fists[1] and arguing for state expropriation and/or redistribution would be a "communist rally"?

>And people do label such events as a bunch of commies.

And you think that's a fair label?

>If you're struggling with very common political theory terms used in a wholly conventional way, perhaps you should consult a dictionary instead of asking me to stand in for one.

Sounds like you're trying to dodge the issue, which is that politics lies on a spectrum and there isn't an obvious point between "wants more funding for cops and tighter border control" and "wants to round up and kill a particular ethnic group" that defines "right wing authoritarianism". Even if you were somehow able to come up with a principled definition, I doubt that it's something that most people would agree with, which means practically speaking all these phrases essentially boil down to "people with politics that I find too extreme".

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

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#247

Post by cpurdy »

dexwiz wrote: post #224
Tycho wrote: post #118

I remember @pmarca kept a Twitter list of journalist accounts. It was a pretty good thing to browse, full of stories that journalists were trying to bring to light. Then in 2016 it became unreadable, just a 24/7 TDS group therapy forum.

TDS?

Trump Derangement Syndrome

It's an acronym used by Trump cultists to describe people who don't want to belong to their cult.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#248

Post by yew »

anigbrowl wrote: post #219
thepasswordis wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what effect this sort of "debate" in public is having on people's ability to talk to each other. In a normal discussion if you and I were just talking to each other and nobody was watching, it would be easy for you to just admit that you are wrong. You are wrong about your comparisons between center right American politicians being similar in any meaningful way to Nazis (for instance: both Nazis and American…

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#249

Post by honkdaddy »

trgn wrote: post #200
imbnwa wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dy…

I think so too. It’s become a term which means so many different things to so many different people, I don’t know how much value there is in calling someone a “postmodernist” from a political standpoint these days.

Vonnegut, Pynchon, Wallace etc. are what one should think about when they’re discussing postmodernism. People relating it back to gender or race theory is kinda silly IMO.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#250

Post by guerrilla »

bombcar wrote: post #63
guerrilla wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people on Twitter have referred to Twitter as "this hellsite" enough times that I can't say that I think this is anything new. Knowing Twitter is terrible and terrible for you is a prominent part of Twitter culture. There are many memes around the subject.

A quite large group of people call it a hellsite precisely because there are people on it who disagree with them. The real red pill is realizing it is a hellsite because it is full of people who agree with you.

> A quite large group of people call it a hellsite precisely because there are people on it who disagree with them.

This very far from my experience. I've pretty much never met an avid Twitter user who doesn't think Twitter is a personal and societal problem. As I said, it's banked into the culture and there are tons of memes about it. You won't even find journalists not speaking in this self-deprecating way...

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