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The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

newyorker.com

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Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#61

Post by saiya-jin »

eksemplar wrote: post #24
sonnyblarney wrote: post #7

" you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not." I have no problem. The press needs to take more responsibility for this as they are the primary enablers of Twitter. Tweets are presented all the time in articles as expression of legitimate opinion, and often used as the basis for some kind of rally bad straw-man argument the author wants to make. I think Twitter will wane but it won't go a…

The only people I know with twitter accounts are journalists. One friend in particular has a hard time understanding how you can function without twitter. I tried using it, like most people, but when you work a job that doesn’t involve trolling the internet for news, it’s really hard to use twitter in any meaningful manner. You’ll post something and a few days later you’ll have time to post a reply. Or you’ll follow…

Same here, never jumped the wagon and for a rather introvert person like me, it seems a bit absurd concept to begin with. Extroverts must be having a blast, but who cares about them. I don't know a single person around me who is active there. As an IT guy. Maybe its more of an US thing?

I understand it in context of professionals using it as their free sales/promotion channel (Trump, Cardashians or whoever is in vogue these days). There it makes perfect sense, not that I would like to anyhow participate or care about their opinions.

I use BBC Android app to read some news when having few minutes break ie in public transport. Over last years they started to put these tweets of random folks in the articles (so no Trump tweets iframe in the article about his latest tweets, but rather some random folks expressing their opinions about Brexit, olympics or anything else). Those articles really feel much worse because of this - I go to BBC for some serious journalism, not this.

It really feels like they try not only persuade me by stating facts in the article, but appeal to my potential 'sheepish' personality trait of accepting popular opinions of others, rather than making opinions from the facts on my own. My main issue - whatever narrative you want to push as a journalist (and they often do), you just look for tweets that you like in the sea of all possible opinions. Just give me the facts, and let me do the thinking and opinion making, please

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#62

Post by vlehto »

What bothers me more than anything in that article is superficially smart people pouring all of their concentration onto stupidity of obviously stupid people.

With my university educated 25 - 35-year-old social circle, I can easily generate boring conversation about Trump, climate change denialism, right wing activism, situation in Palestine or how facebook is cancer to regular people.

15 years ago my 15-year-old social circle would discuss climate change, US election system, nature of capitalism, future of internet and how to approach war in philosophic sense. Notice the difference? Those discussions were not too intelligent, but at least the subject matter was actually challenging.

This piece seems symptomatic of the disease. The writer appears potentially capable brain user. But fails on several occasions to actually use that brain. And it seems like the culprit is again over concentration on the stupidity of the stupid people. Feels like wasted effort and the left leaning boogie mans he does offer as culprit don't seem to be at all believable.

Where are the people looking to engage the smartest person they know of? (HN is quite solid, but also very coding specific.) Has there ever been a time when that was an actual thing? How could I do that?

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#63

Post by randomsearch »

“Enragement is engagement.”

Social media is full of hot air and a lot of people producing nothing. Who cares. Most of the tweets on twitter are written by a tiny minority of people who like to hate or judge rather than act.

Quit social media and leave that crowd to waste their time whilst you build something that actually improves the world.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#64

Post by MaxBarraclough »

randomsearch wrote: post #63

“Enragement is engagement.” Social media is full of hot air and a lot of people producing nothing. Who cares. Most of the tweets on twitter are written by a tiny minority of people who like to hate or judge rather than act. Quit social media and leave that crowd to waste their time whilst you build something that actually improves the world.

> whilst you build something that actually improves the world

Or, failing that, chat on Hacker News ;-P

Seriously though, I'm thankful that the quality of this forum is so high. When I see YouTube comment threads, I sometimes forget that Internet forums can be worthwhile, if they're done right and attract the right folks.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#65

Post by oblio »

ndnxhs wrote: post #35
rococode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that many regular people have given up the notion of actively tweeting their own content. The friends I follow on Twitter don't tweet very often nowadays, and when they do it's often in response to a tweet made by an account with a large following. I mostly stay on Twitter to keep up to date with news from certain groups and organizations (for example, YC). To me, at least, it doesn't really feel like "Faceboo…

>place where you can read and comment on casual thoughts and updates from your favorite celebs and companies Sounds like hell

Why?

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#66

Post by Nition »

czechdeveloper wrote: post #54
freshwaters wrote: post #38

The most alarming part of the article for me was the reference to climate change and its impending consequences. I I may say I've been living under quite a rock for I hadn't thought of it as mentioned here in this paragraph: " The book’s most fascinating and disturbing chapter is about how the Internet, the primary vector of information about climate change, is increasingly a vector of the problem itself. The world’s…

This actually paralyses me a bit. Nice vacation? All I think is footprint I'm making and how I'm destroying that very beautiful nature I wanted to visit. Start enterprise? I'll just add another CO2 to provide people with service they don't really need to survive. Like this new gadget? I can't buy it, I don't need it and again, just another item in vicious cycle or consumption. But what can I do. I want my enjoyment o…

I know what you mean, and you didn't even mention the thing that makes it extra stressful: The fact that other people keep doing all that stuff anyway. So you either disadvantage yourself against them while having no real effect as an individual, or you do the same as them while always feeling bad about it.

Although some of those things don't necessarily make life better anyway. Sometimes I'm happier having a break at home vs. trying to plan a vacation, and new gadgets often just mean more work in your life to maintain them. Not to mention the extra work you have to do to afford it all, that you could instead have as free time.

But in the end, I think individual change on a large scale requires government legislation, and government legislation requires worldwide agreement, because no-one wants to be disadvantaged against everyone else. Tragedy of the commons. But we do what we can.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#67

Post by oblio »

watwut wrote: post #36
sonnyblarney wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are irrelevant when they are cited as in any way representative. "People are clamouring for more of X in Y" and then they show three tweets. When really maybe nobody cares. Or maybe they care in the other direction entirely.

How you know they are not representative? If that tweet has considerable response, then those who liked it are represented by it. Most of those who retweeted it are too.

Representative of what? First of all, there's many, many bots on Twitter. So the replies or the likes can be fake.

Secondly, even if they're real, how do you know that they're representative of anything? Twitter is global. US politics, for example, could be followed by Afghan kids. Why would US news care about likes from people half a world away?

Thirdly, there's a lot of dumb people around. There's several reasons old media is tightly curated, and not all of them are related to making money or to censorship. A good chunk of it is to not show (just) garbage.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#68

Post by oblio »

ryandrake wrote: post #29
doctorpangloss wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BBSes were never as great of an advertising buy as an image-adjacent to an Instagram pic. Nobody looking at a BBS could anticipate why BBSes would eventually vanish, while Instagram is truly here to stay.

Depends on how you define "here to stay." All fashions come and go. I am willing to absolutely guarantee that there will be no trace of Instagram in 50 years, maybe it would vanish in 20 years. It could be irrelevant even earlier than 10 years. Same with Twitter, Facebook, and other so-called giants. 50 years ago, Woodstock didn't even happen yet. A lot changes in that amount of time.

Depending on how big they are, they can sustain themselves. The pioneers have a high mortality rate, but the survivors are usually pretty rugged.

Commodore and DEC went under, but Apple and Microsoft will probably bury us both.

Facebook, via both its main site and also WhatsApp and Instagram, seems to be solidifying its position.

Google's already there.

Twitter: hard to say, they're the ones most likely to go under in my opinion.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#69

Post by hiddevb »

eksemplar wrote: post #24
sonnyblarney wrote: post #7

" you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not." I have no problem. The press needs to take more responsibility for this as they are the primary enablers of Twitter. Tweets are presented all the time in articles as expression of legitimate opinion, and often used as the basis for some kind of rally bad straw-man argument the author wants to make. I think Twitter will wane but it won't go a…

The only people I know with twitter accounts are journalists. One friend in particular has a hard time understanding how you can function without twitter. I tried using it, like most people, but when you work a job that doesn’t involve trolling the internet for news, it’s really hard to use twitter in any meaningful manner. You’ll post something and a few days later you’ll have time to post a reply. Or you’ll follow…

Twitter can be and is used for way more than just spamming bad opinions. There is a lot of subcultures active on twitter because of the vapid manner of content sharing. Small artists, game developers, etc.. posts loads of drawings, artworks, screenshots and gifs to show of their works. It's actually really nice to create a good feed of people who create stuff you like and love.

I think this is the superior way to use twitter. Just stay away of all the politics and meme bots.

Re: The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media

#70

Post by EcoHobbies »

czechdeveloper wrote: post #54
freshwaters wrote: post #38

The most alarming part of the article for me was the reference to climate change and its impending consequences. I I may say I've been living under quite a rock for I hadn't thought of it as mentioned here in this paragraph: " The book’s most fascinating and disturbing chapter is about how the Internet, the primary vector of information about climate change, is increasingly a vector of the problem itself. The world’s…

This actually paralyses me a bit. Nice vacation? All I think is footprint I'm making and how I'm destroying that very beautiful nature I wanted to visit. Start enterprise? I'll just add another CO2 to provide people with service they don't really need to survive. Like this new gadget? I can't buy it, I don't need it and again, just another item in vicious cycle or consumption. But what can I do. I want my enjoyment o…

Your conclusions are rational.

If sustainability is important, we'll have to rethink our actions.

Imposing constraints inevitably reduces choices, but there remains plenty of options: * local vacation (this is a tough one, I realise) * enterprises that are sustainable: either marginal negative emissions (e.g. durable goods) or carbon neutral (perhaps via credits) * sustainable activities: hiking, sailing, stand up comedy * start cycling * reduce meat consumption

Admittedly I do poorly at adopting sustainable choices merely for the sake of sustainability.

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