81–90 of 116 posts
And Kevin Smith should make a second movie.
And Event Horizon sucked.
I never got on the twitter boat. After reading articles like this, I'm glad I never did. However, why doesn't everybody else get off? People must like it enough? Then the cycle will never end.
IMHO Twitter is great, I think I find more interesting things there then HN. I't more how you curate your own feed, don't follow people that are "political" or have some "agenda". My feed is mostly about math, art, physics and EU policy level discussions. Same thing with youtube, you just have to train the AI so it knows the sort of things you like. And don't comment, no one cares.
Its not cancel culture because no one was cancelled. A woman posted a shallow and clechéd understanding of what a horror movie is and it went viral. She wasn't banned for "community guidelines", she wasn't fired from her job she didn't have her paypal confiscated. She got some angry emails and retweets for a flippant opinion of the kind she regularly makes irl with zero consequences. This is rule 37 in action and bla…
I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this (I just upvoted you), it's spot on. My tl/dr for the incident described in the story was "idiot treats Twitter like it's the group of friends she's at the bar with, the expected happens, idiot is surprised". It's a "platform failure", in the sense that hawking addictive products to people naive enough to use them does not speak well for the people who do it; in this case they did it with a platform on the Internet. But the general problem is much older than the Internet and I don't expect it to change any time soon.
I never got on the twitter boat. After reading articles like this, I'm glad I never did. However, why doesn't everybody else get off? People must like it enough? Then the cycle will never end.
People get a kick out of that stuff, literally. Likes, Retweets, these stimuli are like a drug. So is being part of a harassment brigade born out of nothing apparently...
Personally I never "got" Twitter. How Am I supposed to understanding anything to these chaotic and fractured conversations? They make no sense, who is responding to whom exactly? there is something very wrong with the format to begin with. It's like everything is engineered to generate strife and arguments in order to drive up "engagement".
> Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage Twitter is simply not a conversation platform. The medium is optimized for publishing small blurbs to as many people as possible. It's not designed for serious back-and-forth discussion. It rewards quips and got-ems, not nuanced debate. It's almost like a giant comments section with no subject.
I think the best content I've read on twitter are blog posts chopped up into twitter posts and reassembled on some 3rd-party viewing tool.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think technology is changing which kinds of gossip get spread. It used to be either things you heard directly from the people in your circle, or on tv / newspapers / magazines. Now it's algorithmically determined to be the stuff that's most likely to be shared out of a giant planet of random gossip. Algorithms reinforcing these kinds of vices make it far more extreme.
There are people who wake up and say "I'm gonna get involved in some gossip today". I'm not sure how much the algorithms create this behavior, or just facilitate them doing what they already wanted to do Algorithms don't choose stories that appeal to the lowest common denominator. People do that. The algorithms just reflect what people are already talking about
> "We Need To Get Rid Of Twitter Trending Topics" "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists. Twitter is not about cancel culture. It's about using outrage to increase engagement. Cancel culture is just one natural outcome of the outrage mach…
Had a short internal argument if I should downvote you for the line above or upvote you for the rest of your comment.
Ended on upvote, but if you harvest downvotes that likely is the culprit.
> "We Need To Get Rid Of Twitter Trending Topics" "We"? Are you Twitter CEO or on Twitter board ? Right now Twitter trending topics are specifically designed as part of the big outrage machine. Many of those topics are obviously written by professional outrage activists. Twitter is not about cancel culture. It's about using outrage to increase engagement. Cancel culture is just one natural outcome of the outrage mach…
Do you have proof for this? What distinguishes the writing of a professional outrage activist vs. an amateur outrage activist? What's the difference between an activist and an outrage activist? I hope it isn't whether you agree with that particular bit of outrage or not.
Without proof of your claims, is your comment outrage about alleged outrage?
I think the issue here is human socialization and not twitter or technology. People love to play the "did you see what so-and-so said?" game in all its variants, and as far as I can tell this has been true for millenia. It has nothing to do with a trending topics feature I feel like there are many articles and books that attribute basic elements of human interaction to whatever platform the author was using to observ…
I either completely agree or completely disagree, not quite sure. On one hand, yes, it is not exposing things that don't already exist in human nature. On the other hand, I've seen lots of things said on Twitter (and other social networks) that I've just never seen people say in in-person interactions, because the normal rules of social interaction would make people feel an intense shame/embarrassment to say it face-…
People will use any medium to express things they won't express in in-person interactions.
I've seen things written on bathroom stall walls that I've never seen people say in in-person interactions. Is that a problem with bathroom walls?
It's not the medium that's the problem. If there is indeed a problem then it's a matter of reach and not the medium.