On Using Twitter

For this case to happen, a few things must align:

1) Important and accessible to enough people on that platform such that effective hashtags "coalesce" and the event becomes searchable

2) Recent (or ongoing/changing) enough that new information available in first-hand accounts has not yet made it to news reports.

3) Not flooded or taken over by bots and malicious accounts.

I wish there was a platform (or ideally an open standard linking multiple platforms effectively) where I could have the interaction I just described but on a much smaller scale. An up-to-the-minute first-hand witness of "whats going on". Essentially, the "raw" news. Technologically, Twitter should work just fine for this. But there are significant problems currently with reliability, trust, and misuse that I believe lead to the general problems people have with twitter which then prevent it's use for the type of "first hand accounting" I've described here.

I have thought about this before. I believe internet lacks enough echo chambers. In real world, people automatically segregate based on their income bracket, community, values, lifestyle, job, family (kids or not?), healthcare, accessibility to various things, etc. People have all sorts of stereotypes and things they expect other people to conform to based on visible factors. This isn't possible online. There is too little information and our stereotypes will never be correct (too big number). It shocks people. In real life, oh that's a catholic person. Of course I would expect them to say this. Too much difference in opinions leads to defensiveness rather than acceptance. You cannot accept 180 degrees but you can accept 10 degrees slightly left.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23937973

a single human isn't evolutionarily equipped to tease out useful information from that much constant and ever-present signal. we're designed to tell if an eye crinkle means the coincident stream of words are more likely true or false.

we're also constantly making attribution errors via twitter in the same vein, attributing to individuals things that only apply to systems and groups (akin to the idea that there is no average person), generalizing in ways that are bound to be flawed but unable to help our collective selves.

i say all this to disagree with the idea that avoiding (angry) opinion is necessarily the "right way to use twitter". it's maybe a way for an individual to avoid drowning in the deluge of signal, but it does nothing to find the truths that must be washing over us at the same time.

1) that this information is the most or some of the most salient information about you a reader could now. Author may also be a professor of a certain field, may be confrontation averse, or a stubborn, vocal politico, or someone who studies conflict negotiation for fun or whatever. Why do none of these things matter when introducing yourself or the article you are writing?

2) this strips the individuality away from the author in a piece where that isn't necessary