[HN Gopher] Quitting Twitter
___________________________________________________________________
Quitting Twitter
Author : thewarrior
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-02-25 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nindalf.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nindalf.com)
| [deleted]
| rriepe wrote:
| These are all great points. I recently quit too. It was mostly
| because like this post, I found someone I really respected and it
| turned out he was a raging bigot against people like me.
|
| The site's tagline should be "Meet your heroes!"
| paulhallett wrote:
| I quit about six months ago. The majority of people I followed, I
| felt obligated to follow, in order to keep ahead of social
| issues. But the toll of "doom scrolling" constant
| negative/angry/depressed posts really hammered my own mental
| health. I also developed a habit of refreshing the feed on my
| phone every five minutes.
|
| I quit, and I found myself lost when I picked up my phone, like a
| lingering habit (I see someone mentioned it being similar to
| quitting smoking).
|
| On reflection, I think the reason I felt an obligation to keep up
| with social issues etc, was because I was using my real name
| (ironic that this HN account is also my real name!). I felt like
| I had to show I was caring and keeping track of it. I do wonder,
| if I create an account without my real name, I can just use it
| how I like, and maybe it will be a different experience.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > I felt like I had to show I was caring and keeping track of
| it.
|
| I don't think this is necessary. A lot of people tweet about
| purely "professional" subjects and never tweet about social
| issues. If you stick to that, your followers will know what
| (and what not) to expect.
| maitredusoi wrote:
| who cares ?
| shruubi wrote:
| I've more or less removed Twitter from my life. From my
| perspective, Twitter turns people into the worst versions of
| themselves and in some ways has gamified social interaction to
| the point of making toxic behaviour and witch hunts the default
| simply because it's the best way to "win points".
|
| To quote WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play."
|
| For the odd occasion when I do log on to Twitter, my rule is
| simple - if I see a tweet that annoys me or I just don't like,
| then I block them. I have no wish to spend any time or energy
| even allowing that stuff around me.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Very empathetic and solid writing. Here's my generalized
| experience https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/703
| hankchinaski wrote:
| i quit twitter after years of using it when i got exhausted of
| having to see political tweets from anyone i was following in
| tech. i just want to follow certain topics, but unfortunately the
| mute feature is not enough to filter out all the crap
| mberning wrote:
| If as many people quit twitter as talk about it, the company
| would be bankrupt. There are a lot of people "sneaking a smoke"
| on twitter when the kids are at school.
| superkuh wrote:
| Yep. A lot of people "quit" these nasty centralized you-as-a-
| product services but what they mean by quit is that they don't
| use their account anymore. They still use the services.
| liminal wrote:
| I check Twitter to learn what I should be outraged about. I
| literally say to myself "I wonder what I should be outraged about
| today?" and then lo and behold, Twitter tells me. I don't know
| where else to get that information. I wish I did, since Twitter
| is very inefficient with too many people retweeting the same
| tidbit so they can try their hand at a witty rejoinder. Don't get
| me wrong, I enjoy the rejoinders, but they're also exhausting and
| lower the signal to noise ratio a lot.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I don't know where else to get that information.
|
| The Daily Mail is a fairly good source of 'fury' (a term they
| use a lot in their headlines).
| nercury wrote:
| It's possible to unfollow everyone who posts outrage tweets,
| give it a try. It will become eerily quiet, and hopefully only
| occasional once-a-day quality tweet will remain.
| garmaine wrote:
| Why do you want to be outraged?
| ThankYouBernard wrote:
| Why do you not want to be outraged? Do you have a source to
| say that being not outraged is better than being outraged?
| liminal wrote:
| There's a lot of stuff I want to know about that I don't know
| where else to find out about it, and much of this is
| outraging. For example, a lot of my Twitter feed is people
| pointing out how the Canadian media misrepresents events with
| a pro-conservative bias. Perhaps ignorance would be bliss,
| but I opt for a daily dose of poison to keep my tolerance up.
| asim wrote:
| Quitting Twitter is by far the best thing you can do for your
| mental health.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| you can only speak for yourself.
| ourcat wrote:
| You should create a new blog category, containing only posts with
| titles up to 280 characters and just post the tidbits you'd
| otherwise post to Twitter. Styled accordingly.
|
| If worthy enough, you could even share the link to any one of
| them on Twitter. ;)
| tradesmanhelix wrote:
| I recently "quit" Twitter myself. I say "quit" because if you
| actually delete/remove/whatever your account, your handle may
| then become available for others to use. To avoid that, I used a
| combo of scripts/services to remove all of my Twitter data
| (tweets, likes, follows, etc.) and scrubbed my bio, profile pics,
| etc. I also set a reminder to log in every 6 months to avoid
| being purged and have my handle become available that way.
|
| I'm using https://fraidyc.at/ in Firefox to follow any Twitter
| accounts I still care about and it works great, even better than
| Twitter honestly as all tweets are now chronological and I can
| segment accounts based on how often I care to view their updates,
| tag them to organize them, etc. Next, I need to move all my
| YouTube subscriptions to Fraidycat or similar, but, other than
| that, I'm done with modern social media (deleted Facebook in
| 2016). YMMV, but the less I use modern social media the more my
| quality of life and mental well-being have improved.
|
| I say "modern" since social media has really been around since
| email and it's really only the more recent incarnations that have
| gotten so toxic. Communities like HN and some sub-Reddits are
| actually still quite enjoyable.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| fyi they never actually implemented that "purge inactive
| accounts" thing. I remember people bringing up the issue of
| dead people's accounts being deleted/taken over, but idk if
| that was why they shelved it.
| grioghar wrote:
| Thank you for that. I am going to investigate this further. I
| didn't think there was a functioning way of doing this.
|
| I'd really like to find something similar for Instagram. I want
| to consume that without creating an account, but haven't figure
| out how.
| cdnsteve wrote:
| I've also stopped using for a few months and found more time and
| focus without it.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I have been on Twitter for 10+ years. It was exciting the first
| few years, but I honestly don't know why I haven't deleted my
| account yet.
|
| I have tried to "reboot" my Twitter account several times during
| this decade, but my timeline eventually gets full of random
| political diatribes, passive aggressive tweets, and cliquey
| inside jokes. It's as if Twitter's algorithms were designed to
| amplify toxic content and hide thoughtful, assertive stuff.
| ketzo wrote:
| For a post called "Quitting Twitter", I think this piece actually
| does a great job summarizing the really _cool_ things about
| Twitter. I think there 's something a little magical about
| finding someone you really respect in your field, responding to
| one of their tweets, and getting a thoughtful response six
| minutes later!
|
| The toxicity is rough, though. It exhausts me on big subreddits,
| too -- it's impossible to have conversations with anyone because
| the focus is on "dunking" people for the benefit of other
| readers. Like anything else reddit, it gets better the smaller
| you go.
|
| I find this is actually true on Twitter, too. I've had some
| positive interactions in the replies under a @patio11 tweet with
| 120 likes. But any moderately popular tweet is just a shitshow.
|
| Twitter (and Reddit, and HN, etc.) are sort of pretending to be
| conversation-software, when really, they're tiny blogs; by and
| large, you don't write replies for the benefit of the person to
| whom you're responding, you write them for all the people who you
| know are going to see your reply. That's the source of _so_ much
| of the toxic feeling, IMO, but it 's also the entire value
| propositon: come see the interesting (or funny, or infuriating,
| or horrifying) back-and-forth of internet strangers!
|
| Maybe the toxicity can be eliminated or mitigated somehow, but I
| really think it's part-and-parcel with the format of "public
| conversation."
|
| God knows I'm part of the problem; I write between 1 and 10
| HN/reddit comments every day. It's an addiction! External
| validation feels very, very good. I try not to "dunk" people, but
| if there's one thing the internet has, it's no shortage of
| idiotic comments, and it's hard for me not to take a
| condescending tone when someone's talking about how women don't
| deserve to play videogames or how Joe Biden wants to eat babies
| or whatever.
|
| I guess the best you can hope for is a community spirit that
| encourages thoughtful conversation and discourages shit-talking.
| And I think that's where Twitter, by and large, _really_ fails.
| Twitter culture at large is so, so based around "look at this
| dumb shit this idiot said! aren't they stupid?" It sucks, and it
| absolutely warps people like the author says.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Somehow I managed to swim only good parts of twitter. It was
| full of smart creative people doing only peaceful things. A few
| thin feud here and there but nothing crazy.
|
| Not to pick on it but compared to curated reddit / twitter, I
| found it very hard to find anything interesting on discord I
| kept jumping from server to server.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Toxicity on twitter is huge but once you unfollow toxic users
| (or any user who tweets nonsense too often) things look much
| better. Tbh I don't use twitter to engage in conversations. I
| use it mostly to consume interesting content.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Same here. My overall Twitter experience is great! Every time
| I had a bad experience, it was something I could have easily
| avoided by just not joining a conversation that I kind of
| knew was going to be a flame war.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Unfortunately there are a lot of people who behave really
| well and have really interesting things to say _about tech_ ,
| but for anything political, they just vent really hateful,
| angry things (or retweet the same). The Go community has a
| fair amount of this, sadly. It sucks to have to choose, but
| more importantly I think Twitter actually radicalizes people
| toward hate and divisiveness. I don't think these people were
| so hateful or angry ~7 years ago. When I look at the curated
| news section, it seems purpose-built to make me mad, with the
| dumbest, most toxic comments at the top.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I honestly think Twitter has managed to rewire our brains,
| with people being shocked/offended by things that 7 years
| ago wouldn't have turned heads. Twitter has recognised
| this, and feeds this effect to increase engagement. Also
| see Facebook.
|
| I'm not sure where this leads but it can't be good.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Agreed. I can't help but think that outrage is an
| addictive substance that would make Phillip Morris green
| with envy.
| twic wrote:
| Something about all your expressions, questions, and
| silences being visible to everyone else, all the time.
|
| You can see everyone else is constantly tweeting about
| how awful the Capulets are - your friends mostly aren't,
| but they're retweeting people who are. You remember one
| time you expressed some doubts about something the
| Montagues did and people you don't know turned up to tell
| you off. You think the Capulets might actually be right
| about something this one time, but you don't dare say it.
|
| Private conversations give you more room to be wrong, to
| be uncertain, to be curious, to be uninterested. On
| Twitter you always have an audience.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Similar. Recently I've also started using twitter only on
| weekends, to minimise distraction and ensure it's more
| consumption based (who in twitter has the patience to wait 5
| days for a reply?!).
|
| Observations: I know longer expend energy thinking about the
| terrible state of discourse on twitter, the sanctimony, bad
| faith, etc. Also, my thought patterns seem to be changing, my
| brain feels like it has "spare capacity" and I find myself
| starting new hobbies. Just anecdata, but I am certain I am
| calmer and less worried about twitter destroying humanity!
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah if you aggressively block, unfollow, and curate Twitter
| can be really great.
|
| I think it's super cool to be able to interact with different
| people doing interesting things (a little like HN, but it's
| easier to remember who the people are where as on HN I never
| remember 99% of the usernames in threads).
| randomsearch wrote:
| The problem I found with blocking and muting people is that
| twitter continues to show tweets from people I don't follow
| - entirely in the hope of engaging me of course, which most
| of the time means trying to pull me into an argument.
| fossuser wrote:
| Sometimes it introduces you to new people though that are
| interesting to follow (usually because people in your
| network liked their post or something). I find this
| generally valuable.
|
| If you want to be extreme about it, you can put everyone
| in lists and then this won't happen. You can also use a
| third party client that doesn't do this.
|
| My main Twitter complaint is the ads. There are so many
| and they suck. I'd much rather have Twitter premium that
| removes the ads.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > My main Twitter complaint is the ads. There are so many
| and they suck.
|
| There are no ads in third party clients such as Tweetbot.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| When I was on Twitter I found the ads so distracting that
| I used the web version on my phone with Firefox and
| ublock origin. This did the job, just about if you can
| cope with the web client clumsiness and lag.
| fossuser wrote:
| I tried to use tweet bot for a while, but I couldn't
| stick with it.
| hntrader wrote:
| Using twitter lists might solve that?
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > twitter continues to show tweets from people I don't
| follow
|
| Are you using the reverse chronological timeline? That's
| the only way to fly.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| reverse chronological?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I think its inherent to the setup of the ecosphere and has
| similarities to high school politics of everyone desperately
| trying to get noticed that can lead to bullying.
|
| To get noticed everything has to be larger than life and this
| tends towards hostility and partisanship.
| firebaze wrote:
| You're still supporting a platform where avoiding toxic
| content is active mental work.
| firebaze wrote:
| Apparently this comment is wrong according to votes.
| Logically, I'm wrong by either:
|
| * assuming that Twitter is mostly toxic
|
| * or that avoiding toxicity isn't mental work
|
| What is it where I'm wrong, and if so, why?
| el-salvador wrote:
| Twitter's algorithm has a way of showing most toxic or
| controversial posts and comments first.
|
| There are people that are very good friends of mine in Real
| Life, but their Twitter profiles show a completely toxic
| persona. This doesn't happen with their other social media
| profiles.
|
| TikTok on the other hand shows up higher more "feel-good"
| content which is why it's the only social media app I have
| installed on my phone.
| firebaze wrote:
| I wouldn't be able to replicate your experience. My
| friends on twitter are either sidelining toxicity (by
| simply ignoring the usual in/outgroup messaging) or by
| just posting their (non-political, non-controversial,
| technical) stuff.
|
| I don't know toxic people on twitter behaving the same on
| other social networks.
| kevinherron wrote:
| Life is a platform that requires active work to avoid toxic
| content.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Life happens to be so because of external factors nobody
| is benefiting from, and you can't avoid it.
|
| Twitter is so because it is designed to encourage
| arguments (to generate "engagement") and you _can_ avoid
| it.
| minikites wrote:
| Twitter could be doing so much more to fix this problem.
| It's abundantly clear that "hands off" moderation doesn't
| work. It doesn't work for Twitter, it doesn't work for
| Facebook, it doesn't work for any shared social space
| online or offline.
| Groxx wrote:
| While I absolutely agree with this, and think Twitter
| does things that make it worse: no automated (or human-
| driven in bulk) abuse-detector will ever work perfectly.
| People are creative. Some amount of manual blocking _is_
| a reasonable expectation... just not as much as is
| necessary now :)
| minikites wrote:
| I'm not asking for perfect, I'm asking for anything more
| than the literally zero effort they're putting forth now.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Twitter actively encourages the outrage machine. They
| aren't an organization that just needs to work a bit
| harder.
|
| They tell you when your tweets are reported even if no
| action is taken, just to make you mad that people are
| reporting you.
|
| They tell you when someone blocks you and you can't visit
| their twitter anymore even though you can if you log out.
|
| Who would build a system like this unless they wanted to
| fuel drama?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This was possible before Twitter. I remember back in the phpBB
| days, I was in a group where people were discussing the work of
| the philosopher Daniel Dennett and I had just read his book and
| didn't think people were reading him correctly. Instead of
| immediately taking to the "submit" button to tell them what I
| thought, I just emailed Daniel Dennett and asked him. He was
| head of the Tufts University Cognitive Science center and his
| email was publicly listed. He answered pretty quickly.
|
| I wonder if he still would or if the amount of spam hitting
| public figures from every direction is so overwhelming that
| they can't possibly respond to it all. And I wonder how much of
| the "responses" you get from blue checks on Twitter is really
| them and how much is a hired social media manager running their
| account.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| This SMBC was written in 2013, and I still think it's the most
| accurate simplified explanation of how social media on the
| internet tends to work I've come across:
|
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939
|
| I don't have a solution. But it's a real problem.
| bhaak wrote:
| Aren't we now seeing a reaction to this with the cancel
| culture? Getting rid of the assholes as vehemently as
| possible?
|
| Even though cancel culture is probably overreacting, I'm not
| sure if there is another way than to get rid of the toxic
| loud minority.
|
| I'm a mod in a subreddit that has a very toxic circle jerk
| sister subreddit. Like "jokes about the recently died father
| of one of the persons the main subreddit is about" bad. Some
| people frequent both subreddits and while they are just
| behaved enough to not be straight banned in the main
| subreddit, their behavior in the circle jerk would well
| justify a perma bann.
|
| In my experience there is no reasoning with certain persons.
| Even if they seem reasonable 80% of the time, the 20%
| completely destroy any basis for normal discussions. There's
| a latent sentiment that creeps into every discussion if you
| don't remove these persons. Even if they haven't shown their
| bad side in the main subreddit.
| ketzo wrote:
| Yep. Related is what SlateStarCodex called the "weak man"
| argument.
|
| Basically, you make a strawman argument: rather than arguing
| whatever point your opponent was claiming, you make something
| up and argue against that instead.
|
| But since you're arguing on the internet, you can _always_
| find some dipshit somewhere who actually supports the insane
| thing you made up. So you turn to your opponent and say
| "look at what your side believes!"
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-
| superweap...
| dumb_troll wrote:
| One of the cooler exp in my career was Theodore Ts'o responding
| to a (in retrospect dumb) query about some latency issues we
| were witnessing with fsync. I feel like twitter enables more of
| those interactions
| alessandroetc wrote:
| Agree with a lot of these points, but not quite sure how you
| solve them with a better solution.
| tanylak wrote:
| Who needs twitter anyway? Right? We have hacker news :)
| b3lvedere wrote:
| It's a huge difference for me though. Most of the items here
| are quite interesting to me and not all critics are stomped
| into the ground relentlessly. It looks like there is some
| strange level of respect.
|
| I have written mistakes and apologized for them. It seems most
| of you accept that. Or maybe it's so heavily moderated i only
| see the stuff i'm allowed to see. I don't know.
|
| I've tried Twitter a few days and decided it's not for me. Same
| with Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, forums, irc, etc. Some parts
| of them are quite useful, but for the most they are a very
| stressful environment to participate in.
| nom wrote:
| Twitter seems to have some unique properties, especially for
| users that don't have many followers. It feels like you have
| friends even if you don't know them at all. On other platforms
| it's way more one-sided, more passive. Something about the way
| twitter works makes you think you belong to the groups you share
| interests with - but most of the time it's just a false feeling.
|
| I know several people that are glued to twitter, 50k+ tweets and
| more (for some reason they have mostly niche interests) thinking
| they belong and have friends, not realizing how toxic it actually
| is for their mental health. Something about twitters formula
| works very well for certain kinds of personalities, but what is
| it?
| sneak wrote:
| Even if you have followers, if your individual tweets don't
| engage well, Twitter won't show them to 100% of the people who
| explicitly follow you, thanks to their algorithms. YouTube is the
| same way, which is why you see channels telling users to do three
| clicks to _actually_ follow: subscribe, notifications on,
| notifications set to "all".
|
| They censor you from your own opt-in audience unless your content
| is clickbaity enough and benefits the platform's own advertising
| metrics. You can only ever be a sharecropper on censorship
| platforms, no matter how successful you become.
|
| I had >20k followers after more than a decade on Twitter, and I
| deleted. Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people
| who want to see 100% of the things I send.
|
| Fuck censorship.
| raunometsa wrote:
| >> Now I use an email mailing list, and 100% of the people who
| want to see 100% of the things I send.
|
| I totally agree that you should have a direct channel (email)
| to your internet friends.
|
| I think what Twitter can offer is to let new people discover
| you. Email lists don't grow that way on their own (people won't
| really forward your email to their friends, but they retweet
| your tweets and so their friends find you).
| sneak wrote:
| The vast majority of my email list is strangers who signed up
| on my website, after they got linked to something I wrote.
| That is to say, people don't sign up for my emails because of
| my emails, they sign up for my emails because of my website.
| I'm yet to actually send a single email, but I will probably
| start soon as I have some cool things to announce.
|
| I got to 25% of my Twitter numbers (after 12 years on
| Twitter) within only a year or two of writing consistently on
| my own site. By those figures, I am discovered and followed
| more and faster on my own site than I ever was on Twitter.
|
| YMMV, of course.
| sago wrote:
| > YouTube is the same way
|
| I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I
| subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in
| my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released.
| Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?
| sneak wrote:
| Yes. YouTube deserves a little bit of credit for preserving a
| chronological view, but this is perhaps cancelled out by
| their draconian restrictions on what you are allowed to
| publish.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| What you describe in the first paragraph is not censorship.
|
| There's a whole thing around censorship not applying to private
| platforms, but even if you argue that the word "censorship"
| applies to a private entity moderating the content it publishes
| with its own money (like Hacker News: It definitely moderates
| content), the thing you describe is _still_ not that kind of
| "censorship."
|
| Showing or not showing your tweets based on Twitter optimizing
| for engagement and advertising is not like a government
| deciding that nobody is allowed to criticize the Dear Leader.
|
| It's actually like a grocery store that promises to stock your
| product for free, but you aren't Coca-Cola, so you get shitty
| shelf space and positioning, until you either pay up for shelf
| space, or build enough demand for your product that the store
| decides it can make more money giving you better positioning.
|
| Twitter _also_ moderates content in a way that has nothing to
| do with engagement and making them money. But if you give
| someone free content, you have to accept them deciding how they
| feel like monetizing that content.
|
| If you don't like it, write a blog.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Censorship is maybe the wrong word, but we all understood
| what he meant and agree that this behavior wrong.
|
| Twitter misleads you into believing following someone will
| deliver you 100% of their content (and similarly, that
| someone who follows you will see 100% of your content) while
| that's not actually the case.
|
| It might not be censorship, but it's still a terrible move,
| and frankly a sign of a defective product. The whole point of
| Twitter is to "follow" accounts you're interested in - if the
| tool can't do this with 100% reliability it should be
| considered as broken.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| We don't get to declare what Twitter is or isn't. It has
| evolved over time from a kind of microblogging platform
| into an algorithmic-timeline social network.
|
| As a user, I don't care for it much, but in no way is it
| "defective." It does what it does, and if we don't like it,
| it's our obligation to make sure the door doesn't hit us in
| the ass on our way out.
|
| The thing we have to understand is that we who want a
| microblogging platform aren't their market. They're not
| interested in people with 500-5,000 followers using Twitter
| to publish things that every one of their followers will
| see.
|
| Likewise, they're not interested in people who want to just
| follow certain people and see 100% of their tweets. That's
| not their business model. Do I like that? No. But I'm not
| their customer, I'm the product they sell to their
| customers.
|
| ------
|
| One thing I find very interesting about discussions like
| this is how closely they resemble discussions from the
| 1970s and 1980s about what computers were for. It seems
| quaint now, but people once said computers were for
| business, not games.
|
| Then a younger generation came along and when all the old
| fogies died off or retired, gaming became a gajillion-
| dollar industry.
|
| Now we get pronouncements like "That's not what Twitter's
| for." Obviously it _is_ what Twitter 's for, because
| millions of people are using it that way and are "Happy as
| Larry," oblivious to the fact that it used to be a
| microblogging platform, and if we ask 100 randomly chosen
| Twitter employees, exactly zero of them will say Twitter is
| defective and they're working hard to restore its value as
| a way to subscribe to everything people tweet.
|
| I kind of feel like those of us who miss its microblogging
| origin are metaphorically members of an older generation
| than those who are happily Tweeting, TikToking,
| SnapChatting, &c.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The concept of following still (at least to me) implies
| seeing all the content said person is posting. Twitter
| liberally uses the word "follow" but then doesn't
| deliver.
|
| They are not being transparent about your experience
| being manipulated for the purposes of generating
| engagement either. Most non-technical people don't
| immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all
| kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking
| at said ads".
|
| ---
|
| > are "Happy as Larry,"
|
| Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that
| despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts
| about quitting the website every so often) suggests they
| aren't?
|
| > exactly zero of them will say Twitter is defective
|
| They profit from the fact that it's defective, so of
| course to them it is not a defect, just like a printer
| manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge DRM is not
| a defect, or some smart juice press manufacturer will
| tell you that its online-only requirement and juice pack
| DRM is also not a defect.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| _They are not being transparent about your experience
| being manipulated for the purposes of generating
| engagement either. Most non-technical people don 't
| immediately associate "contains ads" with "will use all
| kinds of nasty tricks to make you spend more time looking
| at said ads"._
|
| You have something there that applies to all of social
| media (and just because others do it doesn't make it ok).
| Algorithms are black boxes. Even if you make 100% sure I
| read a disclaimer explaining that the timeline is curated
| and algorithmic, I still will never know what I'm getting
| and what I'm missing.
|
| The lack of control and transparency is abhorrent to a
| certain type of person, and you and I are probably those
| kind of people. But there's a vast world out there that
| simply. doesn't. care. Even after we explain why they
| ought to care.
|
| Compare and contrast to walled gardens like iOS. There's
| a certain type of HNer who talks about iOS the way we're
| talking about Twitter. And yet... Many, many people are
| happy with an opaque system deciding which apps they can
| install, which apps appear on the front page of the app
| store, &c.
|
| It can be very frustrating, but there it is. People like
| Twitter, and no amount of explaining why they shouldn't
| like it will change their minds.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The fact that some people are blind to these issues
| doesn't mean we shouldn't be calling out unethical,
| malicious, misleading or defective behavior and/or
| software.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| 100% agree. It may be futile with the vast majority of
| their users, but every person who actually cares about it
| and becomes more informed though advocacy is a modest win
| of some kind.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| _Are they? The amounts of arguments and toxicity on that
| despicable website (enough to prompt highly-upvoted posts
| about quitting the website every so often) suggests they
| aren 't?_
|
| This is a very interesting point, to which I will say
| that people who complain or praise any product are always
| the vocal minority.
|
| As I alluded to in another reply, we regularly get
| impassioned posts and comments about what's wrong with
| iOS on HN, and yet we know for a fact that many, many,
| MANY people are happy with their iPhones, iPads, and
| Apple Watches.
| sneak wrote:
| Most people are happy with censorship and a lack of
| freedom of speech, because most people have nothing to
| say, and a lack of such never affects them.
|
| Most people are fine not having any privacy, because they
| believe that they have nothing to hide.
|
| The danger comes from making it impossible to publish
| unpopular things or publish anonymously, or making
| privacy impossible. There is a percentage of people for
| whom these things are not only important but essential,
| and when we close off those options then we lose the
| important aspects of society facilitated by those people.
| Those aspects benefit everyone.
|
| We should pay very close attention to the complaints of
| those people, even if (or perhaps especially because)
| they are a minority of users.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| _a printer manufacturer will tell you that ink cartridge
| DRM is not a defect, or some smart juice press
| manufacturer will tell you that its online-only
| requirement and juice pack DRM is also not a defect._
|
| There's a phrase for this: "Defective by design."
| Meaning, what we the observer consider to be a harmful
| quality of the product is not an accident or oversight,
| but a deliberate choice.
|
| I say similar things about Slack's iPad client. It's
| defective by design.
|
| Likewise, web sites that choose not to be accessible are
| defective-by-design. If you ask their product manager,
| the response will be, "Accessibility is not a priority,
| and we can live with people who need accessible web sites
| doing business with someone else."
|
| Of course, it's implicit in the phrase "defective by
| design" that this kind of defective is not exactly the
| same kind of "defective" as the product not doing the
| thing its creators designed it to do, or not doing the
| thing that their target market expect it to do.
| sneak wrote:
| You can't promote some things to the top without
| simultaneously demoting other things down the page. Such is
| the tyranny of spacetime.
| rriepe wrote:
| I had a tiny amount of followers and quit. There's a very quiet
| voice in the back of my head that wonders what I would have
| done with something like 20k. You're the real deal.
| trestenhortz wrote:
| I quit Facebook the other day. I didn't like my online persona.
| I'd rather friends and family knew me in person or not at all.
| minikites wrote:
| >I didn't like my online persona.
|
| I think this is one of the bigger factors when people choose to
| quit social networks, even if they don't realize it explicitly.
| There's such a "hustle culture" to get likes and favorites that
| it really warps what you can post. You can't really be
| vulnerable on a social network because it either gets ignored
| or interpreted as another hustle ("You got this!!!") because
| the surrounding content from everyone else is "Look at how
| great I am!". YouTube creators have to explicitly say "Please
| like and subscribe!" but that's implicit and pervasive on
| Twitter and Facebook by their very nature.
| An0mammall wrote:
| I used facebook for promoting local events but in the last ~5
| years it was less and less effective for that. Then I used it
| only for meme groups and getting angry at strangers. Hard quit
| last summer and never looked back.
| An0mammall wrote:
| I never really used it much, but sometimes there are really
| interesting threads or content on local events. There also seems
| to be a massive amount of vile and rude commenters.
| murat124 wrote:
| The other option would be, which could be applied to anything we
| do, to be a responsible consumer/user but just like with
| everything else in life it is hard to do primarily for the reason
| that most services feed on our attention.
|
| The amount of your self you open up to public is the amount you
| lose from it and the more you put in the more you depend on and
| are addicted to the feelings that rise from using the service.
| You liked the feeling of being acknowledged by total strangers?
| Here, some more tweets for you strangers! You want to argue with
| me on this trivial subject? I'll prove you wrong!
|
| On the flip side, you can still both use Twitter and keep your
| sanity, but to me, it just isn't worth it. Life is too short to
| pay attention to every little thing that one comes across to.
| cambalache wrote:
| Out of all the good reasons to quit Twitter, not having enough
| likes, and observing the proverbial assholes who share one's
| nationality must be in the bottom 1%
| acd wrote:
| Considering quitting all social media. Twitter - Quit, Facebook -
| Quit, Whatsapp - Quit, Reddit - quit, LinkedIn - Under
| consideration.
|
| Freetime++ Focus++ Adtracking--
| edmundhuber wrote:
| I quit everything but Reddit (which I pretty much only lurk in,
| and only do hobby talk) and LinkedIn (until I strike it rich, I
| still gotta have a job). It's been excellent since I no longer
| waste my time being angry about things I can't change, or
| seeking attention or approval. Obviously some people can cope
| with the demands of social media more than others, but it
| didn't work for me, and I think, like me, a lot of people are
| putting themselves through unnecessary pain to stick to a
| platform which actually brings little or no value to
| themselves. In short, fuck social media.
| bandwitch wrote:
| I personally do not care about Problem 1. I mostly use Twitter in
| a passive way -- following people that are experts on the topics
| that I'm interested in. I assume if you want to get a reasonable
| following you need to put quite the effort in it.
|
| Problem 2 appears but I've noticed that muting works well enough
| to avoid it.
|
| Problem 3 does not seem to be Twitter-specific but again blocking
| and muting seems to work for me as well.
|
| My personal take is that something brings value to you or not
| depending on how you use it. Here is a quote from
| (https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/) that
| resonates with me: "The Explore Tab on Twitter is the most
| important newspaper in the world. It's littered with celebrity
| gossip and exaggerated political drama -- both of which yield a
| wide reach but incentivize empty content. And yet, as the Paradox
| of Abundance predicts, Twitter is also one of the world's top
| intellectual communities. It's the bedrock of my social and
| intellectual life. It's a place to make friends, raise your
| ambitions, and connect directly with people at the top of their
| fields. And yet, most people use Twitter to consume information
| with no nutritional value."
| rcgorton wrote:
| If you live the twitter life, you ARE A TWIT
| asjkaehauisa wrote:
| I tried to use Twitter for cyber security news. I followed very
| smart people and i hoped to see their research about new
| vulnerabilities etc. but what I mostly saw was shitty posts about
| politics, theirs kids and daily life and rare about my topic of
| interest
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I am perfectly fine using Twitter by following carefully via
| lists only and not following anyone who regularly makes Twitter
| storms, not following any celebrities, very few journalists, no
| major publications/tv networks whatsoever
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I know it is more of a disengagement strategy, but with Twitter
| in it's current state ...
| catillac wrote:
| All wonderful points. I also stopped using Twitter a few months
| ago, not for me. I especially like the point about piquing
| interest on "who the dunkee" is -- wow what a waste of time.
| undefined1 wrote:
| quitting Twitter will improve your life, but here's the problem:
|
| it leaves it to the most radical.
|
| and why is that a problem?
|
| because there is a pipeline from Twitter into the real world,
| especially via journalists and politicians who live on there.
|
| what's the answer?
|
| I'd love to hear ideas! but I think either we need many, many
| more reasonable voices on Twitter (an uphill battle, given the
| platform rewards and optimizes for outrage) or the pipeline needs
| to be severed or replaced. the latter is probably the way to go,
| but how?
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Journalists outsourcing their job to squeeky wheels
| volunteering outrage is a problem with the journalists'
| superiors, customers, and sense of duty, not with the channels
| of communication available to us by technology and law.
|
| But instead, we will suffer through algorithmic and legislative
| harrassment because the user is always the problem, not the
| corporate marketeers.
| russellendicott wrote:
| Reasonable voices get downvoted. Social media rewards extremes.
| randomsearch wrote:
| To begin with: we're a tech community. Building a better
| twitter is possible, so build it. Even if you don't build a
| winning app, you could demonstrate ideas or designs for
| alternatives. It could even be mock ups or prototypes.
| Contribute ideas to making a better world.
|
| One approach is to leave twitter to the addicts manipulated
| into rage and just waiting. Either people will "develop
| antibodies" to twitter (PG) or it will destroy itself.
|
| As others have pointed out, the real world institutions can
| solve the problem by breaking the connection between ML-induced
| outrage and their policy decisions. You shouldn't feel like you
| have to take that on yourself, but I guess if you liked that
| idea then you could campaign for it.
|
| If you stay on twitter you might improve the average level of
| discourse, but don't overestimate your ability to resist the
| feedback loop that will constantly be trying to find new ways
| to trick you into engagement (and most of the time,
| enragement). You're only human and it's relentless. It doesn't
| seem very sophisticated but even a random search algorithm will
| work given enough tries. You'll also be legitimising twitter,
| which is questionable because they are knowingly creating this
| problem (disclaimer: I'm on twitter).
|
| Regulation of social networks is on the way, twitter probably
| peaked with Trump, and I think you also have to think about
| opportunity cost, eg arguing on twitter vs building something
| that improves the world.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > Building a better twitter is possible, so build it.
|
| It's been done. For example, app.net.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net I deleted my Twitter
| account and joined ADN. But not many followed that example.
| Most people stuck with Twitter, ADN never reached "critical
| mass", and it eventually shut down.
|
| I don't think this is a technological problem. You could say
| it's a marketing problem. The critical mass is essential to a
| social network. ADN didn't get it. Mastodon hasn't got it.
| Twitter has it, Facebook has it, and it's just hard to
| compete with that.
| hvocode wrote:
| Muted words is the only thing that makes Twitter useful for me.
| Totally takes the temperature down by just excluding things that
| aren't useful to see. I mute everything from specific words that
| I know are going to spark useless arguments to phrases/emojis
| that show up in intentionally provocative tweets (eg, "that's the
| tweet" or the clap emoji).
| HgW33WiY6m3W4H9 wrote:
| I joined Twitter in the spring of 2009 and immediately began
| grooming a set of programmers to follow. These were, in equal
| measure, interesting people I've worked with, famous open source
| developers, and random interesting folks who tweeted about
| programming. I really loved it. As a recluse who has no friends
| IRL, I found Twitter to be my one respite from extreme social
| isolation.
|
| It all changed when Trump announced his candidacy for president.
| As a staunchly apolitical person, I found it painful to watch my
| corner of Twitter lose its mind. Formerly engaging and
| technically curious folks reverted to feverishly decrying each
| new political development and news story. Outrage became a badge
| of honor among techies.
|
| I did what I've always done before: fell back on curation as a
| means of keeping order. At first I shunted specific individuals
| into a separate Twitter list. This worked for a while until it
| turned out that each visit to the "special" list caused me
| aggravation and disgust. After a few more attempts at re-
| shuffling my follows, I gave up and unfollowed everyone, renamed
| my account, and deleted the mobile app.
|
| That was in late 2015. I haven't looked back since then, although
| in the early weeks of my Twitter abstinence I found it difficult
| to keep away. But I persevered and never came back.
|
| I believe I'm better off. I still have no IRL friends, and there
| isn't a social platform on which I'm active. This may not be
| ideal, but it's better than watching supposedly intelligent
| people descend into madness. I won't have any part of that.
| nercury wrote:
| Twitter has a useful feature: unfollow. Just follow what you want
| to read, and curate the content this way.
|
| The other issue, getting more followers, is all about posting
| something worth following.
| dionidium wrote:
| Twitter has anti-social behavior built into the UI. Everybody
| understands why it would be rude if I were talking to you at a
| party and mid-sentence I turned my head to somebody else and
| said, "can you believe what this idiot is saying to me?"
|
| Well, that's a quote tweet.
|
| And, crucially, while it feels nearly as bad when this happens to
| you on twitter as when it happens in real life [0], it _doesn 't
| feel as bad to the perpetrator_ as it does in real life.
|
| It's baked right into the UI.
|
| [0] _In fact, it actually feels worse, often, because if an
| account with a lot of followers does this to you, then the
| website will be unusable for you for at least a day, as hordes of
| people fill up your mentions with vitriol._
| bachmeier wrote:
| I've used Twitter for more than a decade. I check it maybe once a
| day, and when I do, I read maybe 10% of my timeline and move on
| to something more productive.
|
| The biggest problem is viral misinformation combined with a focus
| on people that are "good with Twitter". Someone with a bunch of
| followers tweets something like "the sun rose in the north this
| morning" and if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't
| have happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll
| be offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you and
| all their tweets will be liked and retweeted.
|
| The reason I used Twitter back in the day was to find out what
| was happening in the world and to interact with others. These
| days there are too many that think a big follower count means
| they can tweet stuff that's wrong.
|
| Then there's the other stuff where you have to see someone called
| out for calling women brilliant (yep, happened today).
|
| Try as I might, I can't return my timeline to what it was, and I
| can now go a week without looking at it and I don't miss
| anything.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| >they'll be offended and block you
|
| To them, their timeline is "curated" to remove "toxic"
| elements, which makes their filter bubble more pleasant. Then
| they blame you, even in this very thread, for finding these
| interactions useless. That isn't misinformation, that is a
| point of view.
|
| The biggest problem is that Twitter- and Mastodon-style
| blocking make it impossible to engage with people who need to
| be engaged with, regardless of why (whether informational or
| emotional).
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > people who need to be engaged
|
| Who needs to be engaged with? On Twitter, you choose who to
| follow. Why in the world would you have an obligation to
| listen to random strangers who want to argue with you?
| Imagine if you were in a restaurant talking with your
| friends, some stranger sitting at another table overheard
| you, and then decided to come over and butt into the
| conversation? And when the stranger is told to go away, they
| complain "You're talking in a public place where people can
| hear you, what did you expect?" And somehow the _stranger_
| feels that they 're wronged by that.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| One man's need is not your obligation, and Twitter is a
| public place. I don't understand your analogy.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > One man's need is not your obligation
|
| I don't understand your reply.
|
| > Twitter is a public place. I don't understand your
| analogy.
|
| The point is that in order to meet other people, you have
| to go out into the public. But that doesn't mean you want
| to meet with and talk with anyone and everyone out in the
| public. It's a terrible tradeoff if the only way you can
| get pleasant social interaction with others is to also
| suffer unpleasant social interaction with strangers who
| want to argue with you.
|
| None of us designed Twitter. We have to take it as it is.
| Twitter is public, yes, but that's not an excuse for you
| personally to debate with every stranger you happen to
| disagree with. That's not on Twitter, that's on you.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| You personally debating every stranger is not the same
| thing as _not_ blocking anybody who gets a rise out of
| you. Maybe that clears the confusion.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > if you respond "that didn't happen and it couldn't have
| happened because science" you'll either be ignored, they'll be
| offended and block you, or they'll start cursing at you
|
| Have you considered that the problem might be you, and "Someone
| is wrong on the internet" repliers are super tedious?
| bachmeier wrote:
| Yes, and that's not the problem at all.
|
| But I do want to thank you for a perfect demonstration of how
| misinformation spreads. Folks like you don't even care that
| the content of a tweet is factually incorrect, and in most
| cases, it's made up so they can get likes and retweets. The
| post-truth world is alive and well. And, unfortunately,
| profitable for some.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > a perfect demonstration of how misinformation spreads
|
| Which misinformation did I spread?
|
| > Folks like you don't even care that the content of a
| tweet is factually incorrect
|
| That's quite an interference.
| brianjunyinchan wrote:
| We might solve some of these problems with a 3rd party reader
| that uses Twitter APIs but with a differently structured feed
| (focus on X people, ignore Y term, etc). Anybody else?
| mariodiana wrote:
| The world would be a much better place if Twitter were used only
| by mouth-breathing weirdos battling one another in full-on flame
| wars over which is better: vi or emacs.
|
| I'm not joking. I think the pathology that exists on Twitter has
| always been with us. But, years ago, there was only a "select"
| group of individuals who had their pathology amplified by
| Internet forums. Now, people who have no idea what a flame war
| even is -- much less vi or emacs -- go to war day after day. And
| there are millions of them, from every walk of life.
|
| So, we've demonstrated flame wars are scalable. Hooray.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > I still want to read what people like Patrick McKenzie, Zach
| Weinersmith, John Carmack and others have to say.
|
| I quit twitter years ago for some of the same reasons mentioned
| in this blog post, and I 100% agree with this quote. I would love
| a way to get at the good content from twitter without all the
| constant rage.
|
| Does anyone know a good tool or way to get a much more curated
| Twitter experience?
| dpifke wrote:
| After I quit Twitter a few months ago, I set up a private
| instance of Nitter[0], and use Huginn[1] to forward posts from
| it to an instance of Pleroma[2].
|
| Which reminds me, I need to clean up and publish my Huginn
| agent for posting to Mastodon/Pleroma. :)
|
| (Nitter supports RSS, so you could probably use a regular RSS
| reader instead of Huginn/Pleroma. But I also configured some
| other, non-RSS, content in my feed.)
|
| [0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [1]
| https://github.com/huginn/huginn [2] https://pleroma.social/
| jdminhbg wrote:
| What works best for me is using a third-party client like
| Tweetbot. It has no algorithmic timeline at all. Just follow
| the McKenzies, Weinersmiths and Carmacks of the world, and
| that's all you will see.
|
| Edit: The other big thing for me is just unfollowing/blocking
| people who post garbage, with no remorse. It doesn't matter if
| your feed is 95% gold, the 5% that isn't makes you not worth
| it.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I just keep a markdown file with links to Twitter profiles from
| people I care about. Then I visit the links directly despite
| not having a Twitter profile, I get to read what they have to
| say. I also added the "Calm Twitter" plugin to my browser that
| strips out Trending stories, hides like counts, etc. It makes
| for a better, focused Twitter experience. I don't care about
| posting, so I get the info I want without needing to
| participate in the gamification.
| chc wrote:
| That seems exactly equivalent to following those people and
| not posting, but more work. How is this better?
| randomsearch wrote:
| Because twitter will constantly try to show you content you
| don't want in order to engage/enrage you.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's not. I don't have to rely on Twitter's algo to pump
| irrelevant crap, replies, etc. I don't have to scroll an
| infinite feed. I just check the influencers that I care
| about, to get whatever they posted that day. I don't need
| to see all the noise. It takes me 15-20 minutes a day to
| catch up and then I move on.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| There are tools that produce an RSS feed from Twitter feeds, so
| you can subscribe to them via RSS. This gives you their tweets
| (in a chronological feed - what an achievement) while hiding
| any of the noise such as like/retweet counts and other crap
| Twitter puts in there to increase engagement. You also don't
| need an account so you wouldn't be tempted to participate in
| any toxic conversations.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| There are many ways to use Twitter, the me of them isn't to try
| to build followers, but to build a good follow list to learn from
| the best
| tester756 wrote:
| it's insane how slowly people realize that social medias are
| trash
|
| I'd say that only small communities are worth something,
| especially forums.
|
| only forum's format is good for discussion unlike fb groups or
| reddit/hn's format
| azornathogron wrote:
| I've been on Twitter for several years now, but not posted much.
| I used to find it interesting because there was a lot of good
| technical articles and information being shared by the people I
| chose to follow. Then over time that mostly stopped, but it was
| still good because I followed people who posted the kind of dumb
| jokes I like.
|
| And then I felt increasingly disconnected from everyone because
| of being stuck at home in a pandemic. And I started tweeting a
| little more, and getting pretty much nothing back. And then I had
| a bad interaction (nothing abusive, just confrontational), and I
| uninstalled the app from my phone.
|
| I basically agree with everything in TFA. There is fun,
| interesting and sometimes even insightful stuff on Twitter. But
| people become warped. It's incredibly difficult to actually have
| a two-way communication on Twitter; people will misinterpret and
| assume the worst about everything you write.
|
| And I was not immune to this effect either - I realised when I
| went back over the back-and-forth that had felt so emotionally
| charged at the time, that I had _also_ been assuming the worst
| and replying without the open mind that might have led to a
| better interaction.
| MrPowers wrote:
| Twitter is the best place to reach some of the top people in tech
| (in the big data niche at least). It's a great place to market
| projects, get a following, and find open source collaborators.
|
| It can also be a toxic place that puts you in a bad head space
| and wastes time. A ticking time bomb that can blow up your
| productivity at any moment.
|
| I recommend aggressively muting / unfollowing to keep your feed
| clean. Anything offensive / negative deserves an unfollow.
| Irrelevant stuff deserves a mute.
|
| For me, ratio of programming posts / other posts should be 10:1.
| Also mute people that retweet too much.
|
| Having a follower strategy is also important. For me, Twitter is
| a part time job, similar to open source work. It's not "fun".
| andrew_ wrote:
| 90% of Twitter:
|
| "Someone I don't like did something I don't like and I'm so angry
| and you need to know about my anger because that will make a big
| difference to absolutely no one."
|
| I've kept my profile/account up, but I've stopped participating
| and nuked all but a handful of tweets that I thought may be a
| reference for folks, and didn't want to turn them into dead ends.
| It's too hard (or requires too much effort) to avoid the toxic
| stuff that makes Twitter a hellscape. I'd like to go back to the
| days when people didn't think everyone else was interested in
| them airing their bullshit to the world.
| benibela wrote:
| I had an account, but never used it.
|
| But recently I noticed, it is really important to tell people
| about your projects. No one else you get that much visibility.
| Thus, I have now started using it more
|
| However, I have barely any followers, so I am not getting any
| visibility
| phailhaus wrote:
| These problems with Twitter don't just "happen". Twitter, like
| other social media companies, have unparalleled access to some of
| the best talent out there. Then they target that talent at
| maximizing comically reductive metrics like "engagement" and call
| it a day.
|
| Twitter's design is extremely naive, that design leads to rampant
| toxicity and misinformation, and then they
| _surprised_pikachu.jpg_. For example: no matter how you interact
| with a post, you will boost it. So if you say something horribly
| toxic that incites outrage and reactions, Twitters dumb blind
| algorithm goes "NICE! Engagement!" and goes off to show that
| tweet to more people. Facebook does the same thing; every news
| article posted on Facebook has the most toxic comments right at
| the top.
|
| These sites have designs that are not expressive enough, but they
| think they can get away with throwing ML algorithms at them; it
| does not work, and we end up with toxic cesspools.
| im3w1l wrote:
| As a former user of the Fediverse, I disagree. Every problem he
| describes are present there too. It goes deeper than the
| algorithms: it's because of the fundamental design choices.
| Default visibility: public. Follow instead of friend. Mentions,
| hashtags, quote tweets, retweets, likes.
|
| But these features are also why it's so popular with
| celebrities, which is Twitter's unique selling point, so it's
| not like they can just change it up either.
| phailhaus wrote:
| A thousand times yes, this is exactly what I am talking
| about! I don't mean just ML algorithms, I mean everything.
| mellosouls wrote:
| _I won't miss people dunking on each other while also not
| mentioning the dunkee, piquing my curiosity to the point where I
| investigate who the dunkee was and why. A waste of time_
|
| Next sentence:
|
| _Some guy with 14k followers said something._ [proceeds to
| "dunk" on dunkee not mentioned]
| jnymck wrote:
| I too deleted my Twitter account. And because I too also want the
| upside of reading what interesting people there are saying, what
| I now do is simply save their profiles in a browser bookmark
| folder. Every morning I open each profile in a new tab and skim
| what they've shared since I last visited. The added benefit is
| that this friction has forced me to keep the list small, thus
| optimizing the signal-to-noise ratio.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow anyone
| posting content that I don't want to be consuming. That ranges
| from constantly dunking on every opportunity to people who simply
| tweet too many times per day.
|
| The best content and discussion comes from small groups of people
| with similar interests who aren't using Twitter simply to fill
| time or to build their personal brand. Removing everyone else
| doesn't take as much work as I expected, as long as you're not
| hesitant to unfollow (or even block) those who distract from your
| desired timeline.
|
| The mute function is also highly useful. I often add trending
| topics like GameStop or Bitcoin or Tesla to my mute list simply
| because I don't need to hear everyone's take or dunk on a popular
| topic.
|
| Finally, taking breaks is important. If you can't resist checking
| Twitter 5, 10, or 50 times per day then maybe it's better being
| removed from your routine altogether. With a curated follow list,
| I don't feel like I miss much by checking every other day or not
| looking on weekends.
| chaosharmonic wrote:
| > Removing everyone else doesn't take as much work as I
| expected, as long as you're not hesitant to unfollow (or even
| block) those who distract from your desired timeline.
|
| It's also not even necessarily _them_. Twitter is enthusiastic
| in assuming that, because you 're engaging with one person, you
| must also be interested in what _they 're_ engaging with.
|
| My efforts to have reasoned debate with one person in my life
| who was becoming more and more aggressively MAGA (prior to some
| rather extreme takes on... well, _several_ different incidents)
| did not in any way equate to having even a remote interest in
| being flooded with content from Ben Shapiro or Turning Point
| USA, just because she happened to give it fake Internet points.
|
| I gave up on her Twitter well before I gave up on her as a
| person for this exact reason.
| 7800 wrote:
| Doesn't this by definition mean that you're in a social media
| bubble with those who agree with you?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Following that logic, you are in a bubble in any situation
| except where you have a feed of every single person's tweets.
| I don't think that is a very sustainable view.
| jasonmp85 wrote:
| I challenge you to explain why this matters.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Sure but it's a bubble of comic book artists, people that
| like video games, comedians cracking jokes, etc.
| tjr225 wrote:
| I've started to wonder if "bubbles" are a good thing. Others
| beliefs shouldn't be foisted on me at any given moment of my
| day, and if I don't care to hear them there isn't anything
| wrong with that.
|
| Moreover, communication seems less hostile and more nuanced
| when we aren't forced to discuss everything with everyone at
| once. That is why more focused communities like this one seem
| to be more enjoyable to use.
| [deleted]
| 888666 wrote:
| Sure, but I use Twitter to relax and enjoy specific types of
| content. It doesn't need to be your source of knowledge.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Only if you get distracted by political bullshit.
|
| I follow on twitter:
|
| - A group of museums and people who work on Roman ruins in
| the UK and post a lot of ancient history content
|
| - Local news reporters in beats I care about
|
| - A few tech journalists and "celebrities" or podcasters
|
| - Cat and dog video accounts
|
| - Some money people
|
| - Baseball related stuff
|
| I do not follow people I know on Twitter and haven't logged
| into Facebook for years. The magic of Twitter is that you can
| purge content you don't want to read very easily. I actually
| have family involved in politics... they never ever want to
| talk shop, ever. There is nothing more vapid and boring than
| yakking about political bullshit.
|
| If you think you are in a bubble about politics because of
| your social media friends, seriously get new friends or mute
| anyone who talks about how great their guy is. It will
| measurably improve your life.
| rablackburn wrote:
| None of OP's criteria for unfollowing/muting people was them
| saying things they disagree with.
|
| It's the difference between not watching NBA games because
| you're not interested in basketball, and refusing to watch
| the local news because "they have a (left|right) bias".
|
| There is more content out there competing for your attention
| than you have time in your life to consume it. Rather than
| letting twitter's default algorithm feed you the most
| "engaging", OP is saying a more mindful approach works for
| them.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'm aware of the bad takes anyway, since they're pretty much
| unavoidable.
| nathias wrote:
| only if what you want to see is just people who agree with
| you, in which case you'll live in a sad bubble in any case ..
| tshaddox wrote:
| That would depend on the person. Lots of people are very
| interested by people who disagree with them in certain ways.
| jug wrote:
| That's an interesting take. What is the difference between
| building a social media bubble and hanging out with friends
| because of shared interests? It's almost as if social media
| comes with this intent that you're supposed to confront
| yourself with the world or you are becoming blind, while this
| can often be a very alien concept in the real world that few
| intentionally do.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I do similarly. My Twitter feed is pleasant and very useful.
|
| Judging from posts like these (and the other comments on this
| thread), most people have difficulty unfollowing others, which
| is a shame.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| yeah, me too. I follow a lot of authors or musicians I enjoy,
| plus a cadre of local and far-flung friends. I am pretty
| politically engaged but political twitter is just gamesmanship,
| so I have no time for it AT ALL.
|
| I also use a 3rd party client, so I'm not subjected to
| algorithmic chicanery in my feed. I mute widely. And I read it
| at most 2 or 3 times a day.
|
| In general, I find it WAY more pleasant than FB. (I'd love to
| ditch FB, but for a number of logistical/community reasons
| that's just not feasible for me, so I try to minimize my
| interaction with it.)
|
| (What I REALLY want is the old GEnie SFRT back.)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _My approach to Twitter has been to aggressively unfollow
| anyone posting content that I don't want to be consuming_
|
| Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people who
| agree with you, and you don't learn anything new?
|
| _people who simply tweet too many times per day._
|
| I'm with you on that one.
| [deleted]
| mac01021 wrote:
| > Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people
| who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new?
|
| Only if the GP does not want to consume expressions of
| opposing viewpoints.
| twic wrote:
| > Doesn't that just leave you in an echo chamber of people
| who agree with you, and you don't learn anything new?
|
| If you follow an account that tweets (reliable!) information
| about space rockets, you will learn a lot of new things about
| space rockets.
|
| Not everything on Twitter is a manifestation of a political
| viewpoint. There is a huge amount of worthwhile stuff that is
| just informative, interesting, beautiful, or fun.
| smithmayowa wrote:
| Paul Graham tweets agressively, but I doubt you will block him
| though, not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic.
| sevilo wrote:
| and you just perfectly highlighted the toxicity of twitter in
| that sentence. Just because someone is popular doesn't mean
| everyone should like/listen to them if they do not find the
| person's content aligns with them.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| I did. I wouldn't unblock.
|
| > not everyone who tweets agressively is toxic.
|
| This doesn't matter.
|
| It's about controlling what kind of energy you let into your
| life.
|
| Negative energy needs to go.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Time and attention. In my mind/book it's where you give
| your time and attention. I really enjoy a couple of radio
| shows, where I need to download the mp3 from their websites
| (they host/share a coupld of hours after their shows), and
| SecurityNow podcast.
|
| The good thing about it, is that I only listen when I want
| to listen, and IF I want to listen.
|
| Social media, slow and steady, absorb you into giving,
| increasingly, more time to them. Either by creating an echo
| chamber, or creating passions, promoting things you
| love/hate. Anything to get you hooked more.
|
| Majority of the people do not filter/reduce the alerts on
| their phones. Good luck working on a project when you get
| 10 _beeps_ per hour from Twitter, CNN, BBC, FB, IG, YT.
|
| Time and Attention.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Paul who?
| dmix wrote:
| I did this for years and then Trump rolled around and every
| developer and interesting person thought it was their duty to
| use their feeds as some form of resistance.
|
| I remember one case in particular where the guy was a genius at
| posting niche Middle Ages history and then every other tweet
| became political and I was so sad, because I absolutely loved
| his content.
|
| As an a-political person who tried hard (but failed
| occasionally) at keeping my stuff a-political or othwise I'd
| start a new account to be political because my main one was
| tech stuff.
|
| Twitters biggest failure was the lack of tagging and filtering
| options it provided. The History Genius could have tagged his
| polical tweets as #political and Twitter could have an option
| to follow someone except their #political ones. Just like
| following without retweets.
|
| The solution is obvious to me. But clearly Twitter founders
| love the political stuff or something. So I just chose to avoid
| Twitter at all costs unless linked to it or researching a
| topic, with the odd time I got dragged into it.
| sevilo wrote:
| Gosh, I particularly resonate with point #2 although all of them
| are good points. It seems people on twitter are all constantly
| angry about something, and it's a platform for the squeakiest
| wheels to find most success regardless of the quality of their
| content.
|
| I never understand why so many people in the tech field are fond
| of it, it's nearly impossible to have any meaningful conversions
| or real connections.
| waprin wrote:
| I agree with most of what the author wrote. I also don't like how
| I can follow something who has good thoughts on Python but get
| their thoughts on politics. Then Twitter turned "like" into
| "maybe retweet" (you see what people you follow liked) so even if
| they don't tweet about politics I see the political tweets they
| liked. I like the focus of subreddits in comparison.
|
| I still use Twitter mostly as a write-only thing if I want to
| drop off a blog post, another place to reach me, and occasionally
| check my timeline. Lists are also a recommended feature.
|
| With that said, I think Twitter has a bright future. Why? Because
| it's always been a good way for celebrities to reach people. And
| in a world of Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok etc there are
| more mini-celebrities than ever and they all use Twitter for any
| quick thought blurbs. So they've really benefited by the
| expansion of what constitutes a celebrity.
|
| My mom also uses Twitter, never tweets, but just follows news
| outlets. And it's the only social media she has as a privacy-
| oriented person which is interesting.
|
| Like most social media apps, if you don't use it compulsively and
| control how you use it, there's usually at least some value in
| having a presence.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| Whenever I think about signing up because I came across some post
| and want to provide an answer, I remember that funny GIF that
| I've seen: "Are u ready to get insanely fucking mad" [1] and
| somehow hold myself back. I think I'll pass ever singing up for
| it.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/legaladvice_txt/status/11630943816389304...
| withinrafael wrote:
| Anecdata: I have the blue check, 15.5K followers, and follow
| exactly 0 people. I found it quite refreshing to use Lists to
| manage collections of people, not unlike what you would do with
| an RSS reader.
|
| That doesn't stop the inbound (or outbound!) barbs, complaining,
| and other garbage though. I've experimented with special tweets
| with replies disabled, deleting often, and leaving Twitter
| altogether. The last option of course is best for mental health
| but really impacted my ability to keep up with important
| developments in the Windows community.
|
| (I explored going private, but that'd require I get 15k people to
| unfollow me as they are automatically grandfathered in. Or
| perform the block-unblock everyone trick via API. Gee thanks
| Twitter.)
| [deleted]
| darkhelmet wrote:
| A slightly less drastic option than quitting is to go into a
| passive, readonly mode and keep a safe distance.
|
| I use https://fraidyc.at/ Seriously, it's a thing. You can still
| follow public social media streams that you're interested in. It
| does RSS, Twitter, as well as the usual social media suspects.
| It's fast and perfect for avoiding getting suckered into a fight
| over nothing important.
|
| If you really have to, you can fire up the real thing but this is
| a good way to get some of your time back.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I like Twitter and use it a lot. I do experience the author's
| "problem one" though. I don't want to connect anyone I know in
| real life to my Twitter account so I just started tweeting with
| zero followers, and the results have not been great. I've gained
| ~30 from a year or two of infrequent tweets and those 30 never
| interact with me so they may all be bots.
|
| In my experience getting followers is different than getting
| upvotes on reddit or hackernews. I think it's relatively rare for
| someone to see a single tweet which they think is so clever or
| informative that they must follow the tweeter, whereas it's
| common to upvotes (or like/favorite) such a comment.
|
| The author's examples of accounts he follows "Patrick McKenzie,
| Zach Weinersmith, John Carmack" aren't famous for their tweets,
| but for blogging/start up advice, comics, and video games. In
| other words, if you're a notable famous person you can probably
| build a following on Twitter more or less as a product of your
| existing accomplishments.
| cutenewt wrote:
| > I think Tiktok gets it right here. No matter who the creator
| is, if the content is good enough it will get hundreds of
| thousands of views. That system feels fairer to than Twitter.
|
| How hard would it be to create a TikTok version of Twitter? (that
| is, a Twitter feed that generated without following anyone)?
|
| Is this simply a matter of nobody having tried this? Or are the
| signals for text posts insufficient (vs. short form videos)?
| leesalminen wrote:
| I quit Twitter about 6 months ago. It was eerily similar to
| quitting smoking (which I did a couple years ago). Honestly, that
| scared me straight. The fact that an app on my phone had similar
| addictive qualities to tobacco was alarming enough to keep me
| off. I still get the urge to log back in sometimes, but luckily I
| perma-nuked the account so I'd be starting from scratch, which is
| a large enough barrier to keep me from trying (for now).
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Is Twitter more addictive than say HN?
| leesalminen wrote:
| For me, yes. My addiction on Twitter was centered around
| real-time news/events. HN doesn't have that focus, so for me,
| it's a lot easier to moderate time on HN. I love HN, and
| probably do spend too much time here, but at least I'm not
| pulling to refresh sorted by latest tweets for hours on end
| every time there's a plane crash (literal or figurative).
| [deleted]
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I much rather prefer discussion on HN for the simple fact
| that it's anonymized. That makes it much easier for users
| to up/down vote comments and it just works better. It shows
| you what people really think. It also makes everything more
| equal because it doesn't matter who you are or how many
| followers you have.
| chanmad29 wrote:
| much like a well managed subreddit?
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Indeed.
| firebaze wrote:
| From my perspective, twitter is toxic as hell, focused on
| out-group shaming, blaming and finally hating.
|
| HN is open discourse, focusing on respect. At least to me.
| picks_at_nits wrote:
| Beware. One thing that happens to people in a homogeneous
| community is that the out-group shaming becomes invisible.
| So everyone in every little community thinks that their
| community is respectful, but the other communities are
| about hating.
|
| Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most
| abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-
| groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread
| about managing developers: At least one person will go on a
| rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing
| useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in
| the form of cushy compensation packages.
|
| That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it
| just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining
| that there are too many women in tech demanding equity.
|
| (I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has
| shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They
| aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are
| not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can
| be hard to judge from within a community.)
| nlh wrote:
| Slight non sequitur here but what you said about addictive
| qualities reminds me of a similar experience I had with a game
| a few years ago.
|
| I've never been hooked on nicotine or similar, but toward the
| end of 2017 a game (Simcity Buildit) dug deeeeeeeeep into my
| soul and for the first time in my life I had to aggressively
| quit something like that cold turkey.
|
| First I should say: It's a great game and really fun! (HA - I
| know I sound like a pusher...) I didn't spend any money on it.
| But man did I spend brain cycles and time on it. A few specific
| game dynamics really get their hooks into you - this concept of
| mini game-within-a-game "tournaments" which require your
| attention over a specific period of time ( _ahem_ weekends).
|
| My "rock bottom" was two things: I was on a long drive from LA
| to SF and I had my girlfriend open up the app to complete a few
| time-sensitive tasks for me while I was driving. There I was
| explaining "ok now swipe this. Drag it there. Great. Now do the
| same on this other thing. Ok thanks love!".
|
| The second was that a common strategy in the game where you
| start a second instance on a different device to mine certain
| resources (it was called a "feeder city"). So there I was on
| any given Friday night sitting on the couch with my iPhone AND
| iPad open, swiping away.
|
| One day it struck me that there was no end to this cycle. There
| was no winning. There was just more building and more swiping
| and more hours to go down the drain, and I just realized I had
| to quit. So I hard-deleted the game from my phone and iPad
| right in the middle of a weekend mini-tournament and never
| looked back.
|
| In the days following, I had very regular twitches and urges to
| go back. "Just one more"....I realized this was real addiction.
| Luckily it passed after a few days. But wow - what an eye-
| opener for me.
| adventured wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised a city builder is highly playable on
| mobile. I've played Cities Skylines on desktop (and versions
| of SimCity in the past). I can't imagine trying to build
| anything of scale on mobile in a city builder though. Is it
| primarily the mechanics, feedback systems, that are
| enjoyable, rather than the visual construction aspect?
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| Twitter was useful for following people in the tech field but
| otherwise I do not miss it. The constant 'gotcha' tweets and
| blue-checkmark posturing... ughhh, so awful.
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