If that's true, I'm deleting my Twitter account.
Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
61–70 of 121 posts
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that as a larger and larger percent of the population has a cringey internet past to look back on, the power of old tweets will fade somewhat. It'll take a while though, and of course depends on how vile the past actions are.
I feel like this is an optimistic take. I know a strong number of people that have never thought up a controversial opinion in their life. They will always have that power over the rest of us.
I see it sort of like pot smoking. In about a two decades, we went from "probably the most dangerous drug in the United States today" (Reagan), to "I smoked but I didn't inhale" (Clinton) to "Of course I inhaled, that was the point." (Obama).
It's not that pot suddenly epically skyrocketed in the voting-age population, it's just that enough people either had smoked pot, been around those who did, or watched media that made light of it to realize it wasn't a 100% mark of evil.
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suggest email for such a use case. To have public conversations is to open the door to public criticism in perpetuity of what was discussed. https://definitions.uslegal.com/n/new-york-times-rule/ "New York Times rule is a commonsense rule of ethical conduct that a person should not do anything arguably newsworthy in public or in private that one would mind having reported on the front page of a major newspaper. The…
> or in private . Not sure how email is an answer. It sound like the rule is "don't do/say it at all, if you didn't want it to be public."
It used to be that a private conversation with another person was private. At worst, it was "one person's word against another" so you could operate on a basis of "don't write it down" if you wanted something to be private.
Not sure how much longer that will be the case. People will soon be walking around with the personal equivalant of a police officer's body camera, always on, recording every moment and every interaction with another person.
I would be reluctant, and probably refuse to talk to anyone wearing such a device, but it won't be long before it's not even obvious.
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#64Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was twee…
But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements. Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not. Which is EXACTLY why I personally th…
One of the first things I did when I graduated from high school was delete my twitter account. It was in an effort to get myself together and become more focused in school. Seeing people's careers damaged by tweets when they were kids makes me feel more and more that deleting my account was one of the best decisions I have made.
If I ever have kids, I'll make a concerted effort with other parents to prevent them from joining any social media before they turn 16.
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.
Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration. That seems pragmatic and polite to me.
The "words have consequences" line of thinking doesn't provide a rationale for the consequences. It is simply a way of avoiding critical thinking about harsh reactions to unpopular statements. You might as well say, "all fallout is good fallout."
Quoting Mohandas Gandhi: "Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err and even to sin. If God Almighty has given the humblest of His creatures the freedom to err, it passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human Beings of that precious right."
Most of those words that have "consequences" nowadays aren't unlawful or even particularly malicious, and some are in fact just jokes and statements of opinion that go against the grain of the zeitgeist. Often, the reaction is more damaging than the words themselves.
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.
Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration. That seems pragmatic and polite to me.
The trouble with that is that the old tweets from an immature brain are amplified beyond their original context, intentionally, so that they hurt a lot of people, and then a punishment is applied as if the author had just deliberately blasted the world with their remark yesterday. People are using the private conversation analogy because so many teens just meant to write to a few friends or use it as a sort of diary. To make them responsible not only for their youthful immaturity their whole life, but for any mental health struggles, and for not having a perfect understanding of the nature of the service, is cruel and non-productive social behavior from the adults.
You’re having trouble understanding because you are only imagining yourself making these decisions, and you are a fully grown adult who handles life’s pressures well and you understand Twitter from a product perspective. You will need to consider how others use the service to understand why expecting perfect behavior across every person’s entire life is unwise collective behavior.
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory isn't a new thing.
The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement so we get judged by how we are now, not how we was as kids. While I agree people should be held responsible for things they say/do, I also think that at this exact moment in history, people give little to no thought to the idea that people change/grow as they age. Just look at J…
> The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement
Well, I found some of my conversations on BBSs or Fidonet from over 25 years ago are now on the Web...
So what you say was right as long as it was indeed just 'said', but as soon as something was written and/or recorded somewhere, it may resurface on the Internet one-day, even though it was never intended to appear on the Internet.
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#68Basically people should be posting anonymously on the internet (via distinct handles with no connection with one's real name), as is done in Hacker News (although a small percent do post enough details in their posts to connect with their real name). Lots of us started out posting with our real names in the last century (on Usenet for example) and after a while realized how poor an idea this was.
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
How has Twitter ever been "practically private"? We're talking about tweets-- not direct messages.
If 10 people follow you, then you are talking with family, not broadcasting to a nation, in practice. The audience can change when years pass.
But even then you know your tweets can be read by anybody. If a platform is fundamentally public, I don't understand how can anyone use it as a form of private communication.
Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets
#70Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was twee…
But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements. Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not. Which is EXACTLY why I personally th…
> It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements.
I'm afraid it really isn't the same at all. Even when I was 25 I did stupid things. I would get drunk in a night club, like everyone else in my age, and on our way home we might have a piss in the middle of a big public square at 4am because we were drunk and stupid. Does that mean I would also get my bits out in the middle of a public square when there are 200 people staring at me? No.
Doing or saying things in a public place != Publicly saying or doing things
You can do private things in a public place, and that's how many people with a very small following feel on social media.