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The tyranny of the supertweeter

omnibudsman.substack.com

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Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#51

Post by busterarm »

crmd wrote: post #14
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.…

>finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the right combination of search terms. This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".

"sources" are taken at face value as well and aren't reported critically at all.

If your personal narrative drives clicks it will not be challenged in any way...whether you're a random poster on twitter or a participant in the story itself.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#52

Post by busterarm »

polytely wrote: post #19
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.…

It is very convenient if you want to run influence operations, to change the perception of reality for news consumers you only have to influence a handful of journalists by planting some tweets on their timeline.

Interesting how you see people "leaving" careers in the CIA and NSA for posts in news organizations.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#53

Post by bombcar »

nradov wrote: post #30
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.…

Substack is trying to provide an intermediate channel where journalists can develop an audience independently of publications, but allowing for long-form content. It will be interesting to see if that works but I suspect only a small number of journalists can be successful in that model.

It also introduces even more weakness to certain types of influence. The NYTimes has some defense against people not liking an article because while people can cancel a subscription it’s not directly tied to the editor-author/journalist.

But substack is directly tied - so unless people really trust the author and refuse to cancel if they write something they don’t like you’ll be more inclined to avoid going outside the margins.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#54

Post by CharlesW »

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!

The Chrome "Twitter Block Chain" extension does this, with the bonus of not blocking users you're following: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-block-chai...

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#56

Post by mistermann »

h2odragon wrote: post #18
jiggywiggy wrote: post #3

Twitter is one of the worst places I've ever visited. In general makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets. It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage. Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.

The PA cartoon, "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" really summed up the potential of the service right at the beginning. Twitter steamrolled other, better discussion sites with a sub-optimal design because it's impossible to have a real discussion there. Look who backed them, look at their early marketing efforts: This shit here was the goal all along.

It's almost the perfect design for dumbing down topics and the population, keeping them fighting among themselves so they don't unify and fight the real enemy.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#57

Post by CharlesW »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #3

Twitter is one of the worst places I've ever visited. In general makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets. It thrives on snarkiness, rage, anger and outrage. Even though there are some gems in the mud. In this case it would be best to shut it down and start over.

> Twitter is one of the worst places I've ever visited. In general makes me feel bad after just reading 1 to 3 tweets.

The Twitter experience depends mostly on who you follow and how.

The "who" is self-explanatory, and for the "how" I recommend solely using Twitter Lists almost exclusively.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#58

Post by jqgatsby »

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.…

"It's the Mercator projection but for the opinions of people who don't touch grass."

Well said!

Also, the sample bias phenomenon being raised in the article comes up so often, and is so easy to be deeply fooled by. It's the same type of issue that makes people think that recidivism rates are much higher than they are:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/why-do-so-many-p...

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#59

Post by bombcar »

yew wrote: post #46
jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a different explanation about the 'power posters' - not that they are "insane", but that it's their job. They get good amounts of money for doing what they do. As an addition, for the extreme cases it's most likely not a single person, but multiple people, posting under the same name.

Some of them probably are effectively paid advertising teams. That doesn't really explain some of the people you used to get on forums though. Why pay someone to write 24/7 micro-serial "Transformers" fan-fiction?

Anyone who has been on the internet for awhile quickly realizes that the “all the posters I don’t like are paid shills” argument doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s often a cope - “my side/the good side would obviously be winning if it weren’t for these paid shills”.

There are way too many true believers who are terminally online and you can find almost anything out there.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#60

Post by ajross »

crmd wrote: post #14
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.…

>finding a great source for a story is as easy as finding the right combination of search terms. This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".

> This is the true poison in my opinion. Journalists can in seconds find random tweets stating any conceivable narrative they want to create, and then launder their personal opinions by pretending to "report" on "what sources are saying".

That... not remotely true. No one writes stories for major organizations based only on tweets[1]. Go pick up (figuratively) a newspaper and read the front page stories carefully, and make note of how the sources are identified. I'd be beyond shocked if "twitter" appeared even once.

IMHO the real reason for "collapse in confidence in journalism" is that this is itself a meme driven by people who, for partisan reasons, simply don't want to have confidence in media reporting things "their side" doesn't want to be true. In a world where truth (about climate change, election results, disease impact, etc...) is a partisan thing, those whose job it is to report the truth become part of the war.

But reporters today are doing the same thing reporters have always been doing.

[1] Except the occasional circumstance where someone specific says something notable and it happens to be on twitter. Trump said lots of weird stuff and it got reported, but it's not like someone went around filtering his otherwise-not-notable tweets for juicy stuff. "He Just Tweeted it Out" is a meme for a reason.

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