The tyranny of the supertweeter • Hacker News Board

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#71

Post by nyokodo » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #16

amadeuspagel wrote: post #2

A classic on this topic, more general: Most of Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People [1]. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

I know the article doesn't literally mean "insane" as in mental illness, but it reminded me of something that happened long ago and its implications for the internet. My buddy and I were watching a news show and it had a number to call in and "leave your opinion" - super common back in the 90's. Well, we called and it was a voicemail box. You guess what happened next, but we correctly guessed the admin code and could…

> “insane" in the sense of serious mental illness.

Fatigue, stress, trauma, injury, alcohol, aging, other illness, ideology, anger, envy etc all can also induce irrational thought patterns and behavior for long enough to leave a voicemail. Add in trolls and pranksters and we’re practically doomed to wade through a sea of dross in any public communication mechanism.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#72

Post by jimmaswell » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

ufo wrote: post #17

isaacfrond wrote: post #9

I've admittedly only scanned the article. But apart from a lot of statistics, where is the headline question answered? Neither tyranny nor supertweeter occur anywhere in the article. Is this the tyranny of needing a clickbaity title otherwise no one will read it? I mean it starts off with Twitter is not like real life. Then proves with a lot of statistics that actually, it is like real life. Especially if you are jou…

I think the main takeaway is that twitter over represents people who tweet a lot, because those people are responsible for a larger percentage of the tweets. The author argues that this makes twitter more negative than real life, because negative tweeters post more tweets. They also point out that journalists and politicians, who consider twitter to be very important, are affected by the twitter atmosphere. For examp…

You could also say your attention span in real life overrepresents people who talk your ear off about Joe Biden at the checkout line or protest on the road. Maybe it's not really so different.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#73

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #60

crmd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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, an…

What would you consider a major organization? I'll happily grant that the New York Times won't let you do that, but it's common for your Voxes (https://www.vox.com/culture/23357114/the-little-mermaid-raci...) or Rolling Stones (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/black-litt...) to write articles on the topic of "I found some people saying mean things on social media".

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#74

Post by nyokodo » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #62

Bakary wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need serious mental illness. Just the desire to have someone listen because you are discontent but otherwise sane.

As people’s “real world” connections dwindle the desire to just talk continues - I’ve known people who are perfectly content with their crazy idea if they can talk about it now and then, but if they have no outlet at all it’s like it begins to grow and starts to dominate them.

> if they have no outlet at all it’s like it begins to grow and starts to dominate them.

We’re a social species so a big component of our thinking is in community with others. When that community is healthy our rougher edges are smoothed out, when that community is lopsided or absent altogether then we drift and warp.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#75

Post by mhneu » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

guerrilla wrote: post #42

ceejayoz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't think this is why. Look at the number of Bernie supporters. I think what's really going on is that the right-wing media has a strategy of shifting the Overton window by calling liberals "left" and those same liberals have little problem with that because they consider themselves left, not knowing any better.

It's not just the word liberal, which means something different for most Americans than its meaning in other countries. In Australia, the Liberal party is the conservatives who are allied with Murdoch.

The word "neoliberal" is also a problem. It is used negatively and aimed at a broad swath of center-left to center-right.

But in other countries, the people called "neoliberals" would be understood to be conservatives. Instead of using "n*liberals", we should be calling them "conservatives". Larry Summers, for example, is a conservative.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#76

Post by ec109685 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:17 PM UTC

equalsione wrote: post #38

"Though only around 30% of Twitter users identify as "Liberal" or "Extremely liberal", those users are evidently responsible for around 60% of tweets." Conservatives are less likely to self-report as conservative. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_factor

They don’t ask “are you a conservative” but ask questions to tease that out. Whether they are making accurate classifications, not sure.

And if you look at the graph below, it does seem to show Twitter users who post political opinions skew liberal.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#77

Post by ec109685 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

brezelgoring wrote: post #27

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 idea is nice and technically possible using the Twitter API but the system will clock you and ban you instantly if you try blocking 100 people at once. I used to have an add-on that blocks people with NFT PFPs, and it queued the blocks to be done at random so the system wouldn't be able to tell it was a robot doing it.

Twitter should queue the blocks internally and apply them at a rate they can handle.

Pretty crappy to limit people’s ability to curate.

Go one step further and support block groups, so if NFT’s become interesting you can enable them.

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#78

Post by thrown_22 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

mhneu wrote: post #75

guerrilla wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is why. Look at the number of Bernie supporters. I think what's really going on is that the right-wing media has a strategy of shifting the Overton window by calling liberals "left" and those same liberals have little problem with that because they consider themselves left, not knowing any better.

It's not just the word liberal, which means something different for most Americans than its meaning in other countries. In Australia, the Liberal party is the conservatives who are allied with Murdoch. The word "neoliberal" is also a problem. It is used negatively and aimed at a broad swath of center-left to center-right. But in other countries, the people called "neoliberals" would be understood to be conservatives.…

[flagged]

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#79

Post by SamBam » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

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.

The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if you are a New York Times journalist and you write an environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people who already understand the dangers of climate change, you'll get thousands of likes. But the story won't be impactful because you're preaching to the choir. 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, because the very angles you'd approach the story at would be ones that would be less comfortable to your core audience, your choir.

Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo chambers and widening divides, and it's directly caused by counting likes.

1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-...

Re: The tyranny of the supertweeter

#80

Post by thrown_22 » Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #72

ufo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main takeaway is that twitter over represents people who tweet a lot, because those people are responsible for a larger percentage of the tweets. The author argues that this makes twitter more negative than real life, because negative tweeters post more tweets. They also point out that journalists and politicians, who consider twitter to be very important, are affected by the twitter atmosphere. For examp…

You could also say your attention span in real life overrepresents people who talk your ear off about Joe Biden at the checkout line or protest on the road. Maybe it's not really so different.

Protesting on the road takes time and effort.

Tweeting merely requires a toilet break at work.

Once I started viewing all online media as the equivalent of the graffiti on toilet stalls the world started making sense again.