[HN Gopher] A Twitter addict realizes she needs rehab
___________________________________________________________________
A Twitter addict realizes she needs rehab
Author : DLay
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-07-05 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _It was time for Twitter rehab.
|
| It was to be a battle of wills between one aging, chemo-addled
| brain and_
|
| So the real story is she had chemo therapy at some point,
| presumably for cancer, and was still impaired and during
| presumably her recovery, Twitter became too big a thing in her
| life. Either out of prosaic misattribution or intentionally
| creating drama for the sake of writing a story, she frames it as
| _an addiction_ she needed to beat.
|
| This really had nothing to do with Twitter. If Twitter hadn't
| existed, there would be some other thing she got stuck on during
| recovery.
|
| Twitter was the right amount of mental engagement for her during
| recovery when harder things were beyond her reach. When she was
| more recovered, she recognized it was time to move on and do
| other things. And she did so.
|
| The end.
| nickkell wrote:
| I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. She mentions
| chemo once in passing, but not when she went through it. Her
| profile says she joined Twitter in 2009, so quite a long time.
|
| Anyway, what do you think she'd be addicted to if not Twitter?
| Crack cocaine?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _Anyway, what do you think she 'd be addicted to if not
| Twitter? Crack cocaine?_
|
| Maybe crossword puzzles, which were the go to back in the day
| for people who liked words.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| They hide the tweet counts for a reason.
|
| It's hard to respect the "Verified" users if you knew they all
| have tweet counts that when divided by hours since they joined
| the platform it comes out at over 1 tweet an hour every hour for
| 9+ years.
|
| You can check this yourself using the wayback machine to see all
| their counts from before it was hidden. Pretty much every popular
| personality on Twitter is hopelessly addicted to it and you
| realize how little value their views have when they must be
| staring at it for hours and hours a day.
| danso wrote:
| But tweet counts aren't hidden? In the iOS app, they show up at
| the top when you scroll down a user timeline. On the web app,
| it's always visible on the sticky header of a user's
| profile/timeline
| pixxel wrote:
| I quit Twitter around 2014/5. I couldn't figure out why people
| were posting about inane topics (what I ate for breakfast etc.)
| and not talking about subjects that matter (politics, corruption
| etc.). In particular why weren't celebrities with huge followings
| not talking about important issues.
|
| Well, how wrong was I. I'd love to go back to that time.
| swader999 wrote:
| I find twitter really good for staying abreast of local
| emergencies. Fire in the area, road closed etc. All the EMS are
| on it and post near real time updates when stuff is going on.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| The only utility I ever got from Twitter was negotiating
| favorable rates for Xfinity via the Comcast Twitter handle.
| Otherwise it feels like a complete waste of time.
| tifadg1 wrote:
| I never found the appeal. If something important is posted, it'll
| be picked up by everyone, otherwise it's 99% likely noise, and
| not even the interesting kind.
| axaxs wrote:
| Same. I don't really use social media, but see the appeal of
| some. FB for staying in touch with family and friends. Insta
| for sharing photos. Heck even TikTok looks like a lot of fun.
|
| Twitter just seems like narcissistic self important people
| yelling over each other. Guess I never figured that one out.
| [deleted]
| captainmuon wrote:
| Besides my personal account which I rarely use, I collaborate on
| another account that is mostly write-only, to be honest.
|
| Social media is good if you want to spread a message and reach
| other interested people. It is also good to find interesting
| stuff as a distraction.
|
| Social networks _used_ to be good to represent yourself, to keep
| contact with friends, and to meet new real people around you. It
| 's really sad nothing like that exists anymore.
| xg15 wrote:
| Out of couriosity, with all the attempts to create a "healthy"
| social network, has anyone attempted to build one that has a
| defined downtime for the _entire_ network? (I 'm thinking at
| least a consecutive week each month, possibly more)
|
| After all, a large part of "withdrawal" seems to be FOMO, i.e.
| the feeling that _everyone else_ is having the time of their life
| while you are missing out. However, if you can be sure nothing is
| happening because the network is shut down, FOMO might be greatly
| reduced.
| batch12 wrote:
| Interesting. This reminds me of the bank of time I used to have
| to manage on a BBS. Imagine being limited to 30/60 minutes a
| day. Would that make interactions more valuable?
| david_allison wrote:
| https://www.sundayy.app/ does this
| tayo42 wrote:
| I guess the author was kept around by the need to comment and
| interact. Seems like an aspect that I don't hear about to much.
| Usually people seem to talk about scrolling, consuming and time
| wasting on these sites. I can kind of relate to this
| behavior.(even here I'm commenting, sharing my pointless thoughts
| lol)
|
| I guess she just has a need and strong desire to share thoughts
| and write them down. Considering she seems to be enough of an
| author to be published writing is something she likes to do.
| Twitter would be another outlet for that. Is that so bad, as long
| as its not interfering with the rest of her life. Seems like she
| still is writing long articles regularly.
|
| I feel like i got wrapped up in the need to comment too. I did do
| some similar experiments on my self. The trigger for this was
| political stuff. A little more drastically i went and deleted my
| twitter account, to my surprise the account is actually fully
| gone after 30 days. I never felt like putting the effort to get
| an account back so that habit is pretty much gone. Facebook
| doesn't have much of a network for me anymore, feels like its
| dying so it doesn't get much use from me except for linking with
| instagram. Instagram i only use as a photo sharing place and to
| see artwork, not really a commenter there. Disconnecting from
| reddit was interesting, i found my self still wanting to comment,
| and make throwaway jokes. Nothing thoughtful, dumb shit i thought
| would be funny. Sometimes I would see a small comment suggesting
| something wrong and wanted to them know. It feels like weird
| behavior.
|
| Overall i guess i wonder why we make comments, like what drives
| this behavior. Then why most other people don't participate. I
| think only 1% or something of an online community actually
| contribute. These comments seem to be somewhere between actually
| sharing thoughts and socializing but not quite either.
| allenu wrote:
| I think we make comments because we want our thoughts and
| opinions to be validated by someone else. With Twitter, you
| have an endless list of trending topics to discuss, and an
| endless list of people to discuss them.
|
| In real life, you have to bring up a topic and provide some
| context surrounding it before you can even share your opinion
| on it. Even then, your conversation partner may not even be
| interested in what you have to say. But on social media,
| someone out there must be interested in your thoughts, and is
| likely well-versed in it (they're also tweeting actively), so
| you post it. You get a 'like' or a response for your thought or
| opinion. You feel good.
|
| The thing is, opinions require zero energy or effort. You just
| have them. I think that's part of what makes it addictive. You
| don't have to do any work, just share your thoughts, and you'll
| get feedback from the system. That feedback feels good. With
| enough feedback, you're soon sharing the most pithy thoughts,
| or most banal facts just to get another hit.
| nickkell wrote:
| I got the feeling she wanted to write something pithy in
| response to current events (understandable as she's a good
| writer), but it was eating up her time. She mentions the site
| effectively stopped her reading books.
|
| It's also bizarre that people need to share every private
| thought and action with the world. An author died and she re-
| read their book. How much of that impulse stemmed from a inform
| the public about it?
| lovelyviking wrote:
| Oh ... Twitter! How about those who never joined the Twitter?
| Should I join the Twitter? Serious question. Why to join it in
| the first place? What are the reasons to join it?
| FilMo wrote:
| I don't use Twitter nor Instagram. I'm not a social media
| addict. I always can join my friends by phone. Or if I need to
| meet new people, I can easily find communication or get a gf at
| one of the top rated hookup sites (https://www.besthookup-
| sites.com/). So there is no need to join all those junk social
| media and stick there for a long time sorting someone's else
| garbage.
| sylens wrote:
| A bit from Bo Burnham's new special "Inside" has really resonated
| with me. He essentially says that people are increasingly
| treating real life as some sort of coal mine - a place where they
| go to extract something (an experience, an opinion, whatever) and
| then bring it back to the surface to share and use in the digital
| world.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| This has always been the case.
|
| To live for onself onto one self is hard. Much easier to share
| your life and convince yourself it has meaning through external
| validation.
|
| There's rarely peace in one owns head. The hollow solace lies
| outside of us, with true peace hard to achieve, if achievable
| at all.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| It used to be that art imitated life.
|
| It is now that life imitates art.
| underseacables wrote:
| Im surprised by The Atlantic publishing this, so much of the
| media are dependent upon twitter for stories
| wutbrodo wrote:
| The Atlantic has consistently done a good job of balancing
| perspectives, at least along certain axes. They were the first
| mainstream/prestige publication I can recall that dared to
| criticize the illiberal swing the left was taking, during a
| period when there was quite a chilling effect around doing so
| (with Haight's Coddling of the American Mind article, in 2015).
|
| They're exactly the publication I'd expect to publish something
| that breaks with the groupthink infecting the rest of the
| industry.
| Popegaf wrote:
| Twitter is about the worst platform I've seen. It's worse than
| all the "chan" websites and I don't know how they are allowed to
| continue.
|
| The only major difference I can see between the two are the
| political and ideological opposites. On the chans it's A-OK to
| post about wiping out some "inferior race", while on Twitter
| wiping out or mistreating men is accepted. All kinds of kink porn
| is easily found on Twitter (which was a big surprise), people
| confess to crimes, harass each other, dox and send death threats
| to "the other side", spread fake news, falsely accuse each other
| with real world consequences, and so much more. Yet somehow,
| Twitter is a standard app on devices, newspapers, governments,
| underage kids and grandpas use it.
|
| Is it just money?
| bastard_op wrote:
| I get annoyed every time people post twitter links here and wish
| they'd stop. Since twits requires javascript (to infect/track
| everyone) now, I just will not. It's like the old paywall site
| argument, will you sell your soul?
| dave_sid wrote:
| Okay
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I guess as long as you're not addicted(?), Twitter is a great
| research tool for specific kinds of things. For example open
| source intelligence topics.
|
| Or general learning about a given topic. Tons of writers and
| journalists use Twitter, so if you're interested in higher-
| quality takes on a given topic, or just updates on e.g. author
| interviews and upcoming events, it can be a really good resource.
|
| I tested Twitter while doing some research on astrology and found
| that some of the most on-target astrology advice I could find was
| found in the Twitter Topic for my ascendant sign (different from
| the typical sun sign used in astrology). It was far better than
| some of the paid services I tested. Very subjective-anecdotal (I
| ended up making my own lists based on what was interesting/useful
| to me) but I think it shows that it helps to consciously examine
| what Twitter is good at.
|
| Lists can be really good too. Like this one for Open Source CAD:
| https://twitter.com/i/lists/963793700190146560
| leesalminen wrote:
| I quit Twitter 1 year ago this week and couldn't be happier about
| my decision. The time distance has made me realize how banal the
| whole thing is. I used to think I was staying in the loop of what
| society is thinking about. In retrospect, it was really just the
| loudest 1% and didn't represent what anyone I know in real life
| was talking about.
| prasenjit_pro wrote:
| At a personal perspective it is best to quit most social media
| channels including Twitter for a daily surfing craving because
| only a handful people whom you care & whom you matter the most
| would be there waiting on social media. Most of my closed
| people miss the personal touch, some free time jumping around
| to the ground and spending time at some pals place and hate to
| talk on Social media while we can do many more things out of
| the Internet box. It's what matters. History of our online
| usage can be used by advertisers but not by our loved ones.
| altano wrote:
| The internet in general is prone to "the loudest 1%" problem,
| but Twitter is something special where it's the craziest and
| loudest 0.01%.
|
| It's so sad because all JS related discourse moved to Twitter
| at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but have to
| keep quitting for my sanity's sake.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Was JS Twitter itself toxic? Because if not I don't see why
| you wouldn't just follow the relevant accounts and not see
| any of the stuff the article talks about.
| lhnz wrote:
| Yes. A lot of JS Twitter is extremely toxic.
| g00gler wrote:
| It's absolutely _insane_ and there's really no reason for
| it.
|
| Controversy with the angular team or high profile
| developers -- why?
|
| I've been off social media for years but I'd hear about
| it second hand from coworkers.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| A lot of JS is extremely toxic.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| JS is actually okay. Horrible, horrible language, but
| like PHP there's some decent stuff in it. The only bad
| things about JS (other than JS itself) are the "write
| everything in four layers of frameworks" (but that's more
| a webdev thing than a JavaScript thing) and "four billion
| node dependencies that re-implement JavaScript built-ins"
| (bad, but not "extremely toxic").
| altano wrote:
| Yes, even JS Twitter is extremely toxic by my definition.
| But more importantly there is no group of people you can
| follow to keep the ratio of JS related content above even
| 10%. It's not a reasonable way of following a topic.
| FreeSpeech wrote:
| It extends beyond JS Twitter. Every second JS project
| website or repo reads like a tribal Twitter bio.
|
| The more accessible the language, the more politicised.
| j4yav wrote:
| I have had a simple rule to unfollow anyone who posts off
| topic, and honestly it works pretty well. A lot of people
| have accounts just for talking about whatever topic they
| are interested in.
|
| It does mean occasionally unfollowing someone who has
| otherwise great content, but often it's retweeted by
| someone else I do follow, and anyway - it's worth the
| cost.
| whatever_dude wrote:
| Same. I keep my Twitter feed extremely on topic of what I
| enjoy/want and it's a great experience as a result.
| Anything proud gets culled via muting specific keywords
| or unfollowing.
| tayo42 wrote:
| You cant filter topics, like I followed kenji from serious
| eats on twitter for food stuff but kept posting about
| politics. I guess he eventually quit and just posts food on
| instagram now.
| undfg wrote:
| Even if you could filter topics somehow, many users would
| do whatever to bypass the filters to get their political
| messages through them.
|
| It would reach the point where not trying very hard to
| bypass the filters would make you liable somehow: "you, a
| JavaScript developer, should've tried harder to bypass
| the politics filters when you posted your pro LGBT tweet.
| What are you, an anti-Semite?"
| tomjen3 wrote:
| The problem is that you can follow lists of people related
| to, say, VueJS (how these lists are create I don't know,
| but they are more or less accurate), but you don't
| subscribe to their VueJs posts, you subscribe to their
| twitters.
|
| Google Plus got this right in reverse, in that you could
| organize your people into circles based on your interests
| and then you could choose which circles to share any post
| with. If they had done it so that I could subscribe to you
| for either everything or just things about VueJS, than they
| would probably still be around.
|
| In fact if somebody is trying to start a Twitter
| competitor, there is a space for a copy where you must
| select at least one tag for your posts and where I can then
| subscribe to intersections of tags and people.
|
| It doesn't even have to be anything about politics, but
| Cpervia tweets about cryptography and FreeBSD. I have no
| interest in the latter, but I have to skip over the tweets
| that he makes because there is no good filter for them.
|
| Now suppose It was somebody posting about compilers and
| upsetting pictures of aborted fetuses. In theory I could
| still skip those, but it would be far harder.
| colordrops wrote:
| I created two accounts, one for political screaming and the
| other for "sane" follows, like programmers and scientists and
| artists etc. I ended up only paying attention to the
| screaming Twitter just deleted it.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It's not so much the internet as it is websites with voting
| and "like" systems.
|
| I notice it too on _H.N._ ; it would not surprise me if 75%
| of votes on posts come from 25% of users, if not more
| extreme.
|
| The people that vote on posts, not the people that comment,
| dictate what becomes visible, and it stands to reason that
| the former group is considerably less prudent and more prone
| to impulsive angry decisions than the latter.
|
| I've certainly noticed quite a bit on _H.N._ , and even more
| so on _Reddit_ that upvoted threads with sensationalist
| headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for
| being misleading.
| tester756 wrote:
| upvotes/downvotes/likes are in my opinion net negative
|
| It's hard to convince world to move from this thing, but it
| promotes some kind of addiction, an ability to manipulate
|
| web 2.0 is kinda mistake when it comes to news and stuff.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It exists on many websites because that userbase wants
| it.
|
| Virtually all websites that have them such as _Reddit_ ,
| _Facebook_ , and _Youtube_ are known to promote isolated
| echo chambers and extremist views, but that 's what they
| attract so it's not going away or they would loose their
| userbase.
|
| I do not believe that _Reddit_ was started with this
| mentality, but at it 's start wanted to promote
| decentralized leadership, but by now they must have
| realized this and their current policy seems to be to
| capitalize on their current userbase, which is known to
| favor and enjoy echo chambers. -- _H.N._ is to a certain
| extent spared from this because it only has one page
| rather than attempting to divide itself into semi-
| isolated communities, but it 's still quite obvious in
| distinct threads that one can be upvoted for saying the
| same thing one can be downvoted for in another thread,
| and that in general threads are filled with agreement.
|
| Ironically, in this very comment train, people are mostly
| agreeing with each other that the voting system creates
| too much of an echo-chamber.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I don't agree with this take. I run multiple small
| Reddits, though several are _restricted_ which means no
| one but me can post new content (though other people can
| comment).
|
| There are a lot of small Reddits that are off the beaten
| path. It's a diverse ecosystem and you aren't required to
| participate in the larger subs which may well be "an echo
| chamber" because they were started for a specific
| interest and you either are into that or not and if not,
| it's not really the place for you.
|
| I don't think you need to be fighty and actively oppose
| every single "popular" opinion to provide a different
| take. I say a lot of unpopular things on HN and, so far,
| they haven't banned me.
|
| I'm older than I used to be. I'm more inclined to pick my
| battles and I have a different understanding of how to
| introduce other ideas. If you do it right, you can get
| taken seriously sometimes though it's a slow process and
| not for the innately impatient or the folks looking to
| grab karma or the folks wanting to make a splash.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _I say a lot of unpopular things on HN and, so far,
| they haven 't banned me._
|
| They certainly don't ban for opinions that would be
| upvoted in another thread, but one will be downvoted, and
| _H.N._ seems to limit posts to five per day to any user
| with any recent downvoted comment.
|
| Just yet I was limited because a single one of my
| comments received a downvote, but that comment has now
| been upvoted again, so I am no longer limited. -- This
| does not seem like a particularly good system to me and
| scares people from saying anything that goes against the
| mentality in any particular thread.
|
| > _I 'm older than I used to be. I'm more inclined to
| pick my battles and I have a different understanding of
| how to introduce other ideas. If you do it right, you can
| get taken seriously sometimes though it's a slow process
| and not for the innately impatient or the folks looking
| to grab karma or the folks wanting to make a splash._
|
| There are certainly strategies and diplomatic tactics
| that can aid one, but I do not feel one should need to do
| so if absence of such would leave one upvoted in another
| thread depending on what way they mentality of the thread
| swings, which is of course vicious, since this system
| further diminishes dissent.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _seems to limit posts to five per day to any user with
| any recent downvoted comment._
|
| I seriously doubt this is true.
|
| I generally stand by my right to my opinion. I have
| worked at figuring out how to do that without making
| every single comment a hill to die on. It's taken time
| and effort. I used to be a walking, talking train wreck
| waiting to happen and I still have personal challenges to
| being me and not being overwhelming amounts of drama for
| existing.
|
| I don't like drama. Accusations that I say and do things
| for dramatic effect or similar are inaccurate
| understandings of who I am and what motivates me.
|
| I view HN as an opportunity for growth. I have had the
| experience of feeling like "a big fish in a little pond"
| and I generally gate it.
|
| I enjoyed being here at first because I was a little fish
| in a big pond and was free to just enjoy the opportunity
| to engage in meaty discussion. And then that turned into
| drama and I began trying to figure out why and yadda.
|
| These days, it's less drama than it used to be. I'm still
| trying to find my sea legs here with no effective role
| models, but I still prefer to see it first and foremost
| as an opportunity to engage in meaty discussion and to
| whatever degree it still serves that function, it's life
| enhancing.
|
| Upvotes, downvotes, etc are all niggling details. The
| opportunity to enrichment my mind without paying tuition
| or leaving home etc is extremely valuable to me and has
| caused me to be thick skinned about a great many things
| for nearly twelve years now.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _I seriously doubt this is true._
|
| Why do you think this is not true? This is something that
| is quite often discussed and just happened to me.
|
| One comment I made today had one downvote, and I was met
| with the dreaded " _You 're positing too much_" message,
| but shortly thereafter someone else upvoted it again to
| bring it to 1 again, and I could post freely again.
|
| Your opinion seems to be conditioned upon that this is
| false, but even if it were false, votes simply have a
| habit of scaring people into saying something others
| might disagree with. And even _Reddit_ in a less extreme
| fashion limits one to 1 post per hour on any subreddit
| where one has negative total karma, which is certainly
| less extreme, but one can very easily receive negative
| karma for simply disagreeing and being well within
| _Reddit_ 's rules in how one phrases such disagreement.
| Simply going to say, _r /movies_ and saying " _I
| disagree, I personally did not like this film at all and
| thought it was overrated._ " too much is all it takes to
| be limited to one post per hour on _r /movies_.
|
| > _Upvotes, downvotes, etc are all niggling details. The
| opportunity to enrichment my mind without paying tuition
| or leaving home etc is extremely valuable to me and has
| caused me to be thick skinned about a great many things
| for nearly twelve years now._
|
| Even if these websites did not limit one in any way for
| being downvoted, they still give visibility based on
| upvotes, and the psychological effect on others is real,
| which leads to such places slowly but surely becoming a
| monoculture which attract more and more users that simply
| desire an echo-chamber which will lead to more and more
| users that do not like it, or simply desire a different
| ech-chamber, to leave.
|
| A real problem I have with _r /manga_ on _Reddit_ is that
| really only one specific _genre_ is read and discussed
| there, because all threads about anything else obtain no
| visibility due to the voting system, the _genre_ is
| controversial in most other paces, but anyone who
| criticizes it there is downvoted.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| You come on really strong. You and I have tangled before
| and you assumed the worst about me and yadda.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622148
|
| I've been here a lot of years. I was rate limited at one
| time. I'm not currently.
|
| I framed that very carefully as my opinion and not an
| assertion of fact.
|
| It's possible to be Dutch and strongly opinionated on HN
| and in good standing (not rate limited).
|
| Maybe you are right and I'm wrong. It ain't no big thing.
| I'm not trying to win an argument here. I'm just making
| conversation and trying to be helpful, which is something
| of a bad habit of mine and habits die hard.
|
| (Shrug)
|
| You have a good day.
| blooalien wrote:
| > "I've certainly noticed quite a bit on H.N., and even
| more so on Reddit that upvoted threads with sensationalist
| headlines are more heavily scrutinized in the comments for
| being misleading."
|
| Exactly why I read the comments _before_ I click the link
| to the article, and why I 'll read the article (assuming
| the comments give me a valid reason to) before commenting
| about it. ;)
| all2 wrote:
| dang,
|
| Could we try "influence" boosting posts? Some kind of
| combination of "this person has X karma, commented on Y
| post, that yields the same result as upvoting in Z fashion"
| and normal upvotes?
|
| I don't know that this would solve the above described
| problem (and it will likely introduce other issues in the
| social fabric of HN), but it might be interesting to see
| the outcome...
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| That feels like it would just turn into some type of
| toxic popularity contest where prominent posters that get
| a lot of engagement get boosted to the top, irregardless
| of the actual quality of said engagement. In addition it
| may also create some type of gatekeeping effect, though
| in my opinion that's not exactly a bad thing for niche
| communities such as this.
| batch12 wrote:
| You could use the API to get historical posts and
| comments and run the numbers to get a taste of the
| outcome instead of testing on the live site.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I personally think the best way to rank posts is by
| simple activity myself, the system that _DeviantArt_
| uses, a simple recursive algorithm where the top post is
| the one that had a reply in one of it 's children of the
| same level twice, but the tree is maintained.
|
| So say we have a these posts: A
| - B - C - - D E - F
| - - G - H
|
| Say that a new post, I, be made, which is a reply to H,
| then after that the tree would appear so:
| E - H - - I - F - - G
| A - B - C - - D
|
| By replying to H, I has now pushed H to be the top child
| of E, and also pushed E above A.
|
| This results into posts whose children have the most
| activity statistically are more visible, but if an
| inactive post be replied to, it will briefly be at the
| top and more visible, and any new post will also start at
| the top.
|
| Essentially, it is the treed evolution of the traditional
| linear thread system where threads are simply ranked
| based on most recent replied. _DeviantArt_ uses this
| system and it 's boards do not feel as though they be an
| echo-chamber and are full of people challenging each
| other's views and trees seem to be more balanced out
| rather than al replies being under the top post, which
| became the most visible due to upvotes such that others
| are ignored completely.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| This seems identical to futaba/chan-style "bumping" which
| is imo easily gamed without having some other variable
| (logarithmic time fall off or something) AND (has
| significant spam protection OR has significant
| moderation/user reporting system). It is usually paired
| with a post limit as well, so that eventually old
| conversations fall off and disappear and/or get archived.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Most traditional forums never had a timer system, and it
| did not seem to be needed.
|
| It indeed resulted in some threads being alive for
| months, but that was only because the discussion in it
| was healthy and interesting, and new input on the same
| subject continued to be had.
|
| They typically also do not have an archival system and
| often praefer that one revive an old thread that was dead
| for years rather than make a new one on the same subject,
| as in doing so all the old content becomes visible again
| for a fresh perspective.
|
| I agree that often it is quite interesting to receive new
| replies with new input to a thread that died off three
| years ago.
|
| I am not seeing these fora being gamed at all: in order
| to game them, one must provide content interesting enough
| to draw replies. -- Visibility is purely a function of
| the number of replies, not of agreement.
| all2 wrote:
| I like the simplicity of it, but it could very easily be
| a victim of "forum sliding", where new posts are made
| with the purpose of moving undesirable topics out of
| sight.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It's possible, but they would be spam and dealt with, and
| I do not see this problem on _DeviantArt_ at all.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Twitter is something special where it's the craziest and
| loudest 0.01%
|
| > all JS related discourse moved to Twitter
|
| The jokes write themselves at this point :v
| rektide wrote:
| > It's so sad because all JS related discourse moved to
| Twitter at some point so I keep trying to make it work, but
| have to keep quitting for my sanity's sake.
|
| Imo there haven't been any competing attempts. There's been
| nothing remotely as interesting or viable as a system for
| many broad discussions about JS to happen. The ability for
| someone to take an old post, staple a new opinion on top, &
| retweet it, and for anyone to engage with it as they like is
| pretty unsurpassed. Nothing remotely comes close. Everywhere
| else on the planet, once a thread is 2 months old it's dead,
| never to be seen again. Relying on individual people to be
| the relays, the beacons in the conversation was a huge plus,
| something exceedingly unique & powerful & special about
| Twitter that nothing else comes close to capturing.
|
| I've been off twitter semi-involuntarily for a year now. I
| still think the network of people model is incredible. But
| also, JS Twitter had been in bad decay for a number of years.
| There's problems & problematic issues, but to me, the
| defining problem was that there was much less interesting
| stuff to talk about. We are way latter in the game, everyone
| seemingly works for gigantic humungo corporations closed-
| source systems. There's way way more stuff that just works,
| way more really good libraries. And there's way way less
| inter-action among the different tech-stacks. Where-as before
| JS Twitter made sense, now the massive audience is pretty
| heavily divided into various stack pieces. There are some
| general-JS tweetings that happen but the common thread is the
| slowest, least interesting part of JS & JS Twitter & what it
| was, which was more cross-ranging & examining of new ideas.
|
| JS left college, got a job, got boring.
| tunesmith wrote:
| What do you use to check news every day?
| underseacables wrote:
| Hckrnews.com
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Add RSS feeds for news sites to inoreader.
| iliekcomputers wrote:
| Taking a step back, do we really _need_ to check news every
| day? I read The Economist which is weekly, and I haven't felt
| like I'm uninformed much.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I didn't need to before Covid, but our government decided
| that it was okay to change rules (drastically), on a day-
| to-day basis, then when they got called out for changing
| them with less than 24 hour warning, decided that 48 hours
| was fine. If you didn't follow the news, you could get
| caught up and have to pay a not insubstantial fine, or more
| realistically you were planning to do something that was
| deemed safe enough some days earlier.
|
| An older example: if you didn't pay attention to the news
| on 9/11 you risked being stuck in the airport for a very
| long time.
|
| So yeah, there are situations where you do need to follow
| the news. Not often, but two global events have happened in
| my lifetime (3 if you count the fall of the Berlin wall)
| where you really did need to pay attention to the news.
|
| Maybe some sort of exponential back-of is warrented? Say
| you check the news and if nothing relevant happend you
| check in again the next day, then you skip a day, then two,
| etc. When an event happens where you need to follow the
| news (say a local flood), you go back to an hourly checkup.
|
| The final thing I have noticed is that the news you need to
| follow are mostly very local. What happens in other
| countries is, relatively speaking, of no importance to you.
| ptk wrote:
| This is me too. And the me of 2 years ago would have been
| aghast about that. But I now finding myself missing pretty
| major news cycles regularly because eventually you learn to
| trust the fact that you can "catch up" at any point in
| time. I've really enjoyed letting news happen and not
| getting caught up in the immediacy of it.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I've stopped. I check my local news, I still read HN daily,
| but I don't watch or read any TV or national news. 99.9% of
| it has zero impact on my day-to-day life.
| Torwald wrote:
| We don't have to check news everyday, but on that day when
| the BIG news hit, you want to be there and soon enough.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| If it's that important, either I'll get an emergency
| broadcast text or it won't be televised. Otherwise, a
| family member will call me or I'll hear about it from
| other people.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| What would you say were the big news hits of the last
| year? Also why do you need to be there soon enough?
|
| Reflecting for myself, I used to feel the same way, but
| quit news about 6 months ago and have never felt happier.
| No longer am I sinking valuable hours into something that
| didn't bring me happiness or help me better myself.
| all2 wrote:
| Replying to throwawayboise:
|
| I've done the same exact thing.
|
| I find very little usefulness in the national and
| international posturing, blaming, and virtue signaling that
| makes up most broadcast, cable, and print news.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Anything curated and not subject to engagement algorithms.
| Every publication has a newsletter, or you can just check
| their websites directly once per day.
| tehjoker wrote:
| wsws.org
| handrous wrote:
| Outside those who perform certain uncommon jobs, paying
| attention to non-local news more frequent than quarterly, at
| most, isn't of much more value than keeping up with a soap
| opera, or a reality singing competition, or reading tabloids.
| It's a low-value entertainment pastime. Fine in the same way
| those other things are, but not more laudable. People trick
| themselves, or get tricked, into thinking keeping up day-to-
| day or week-to-week matters and that doing so is somehow
| improving, but it doesn't and it's not. The time would almost
| always be better spent--if being better-informed or a better
| citizen or whatever is the intended outcome--reading a book.
|
| That's even more true when the news takes the form of
| something like Twitter.
|
| If you enjoy it, keep it up, but don't think it somehow
| capital-M Matters.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| I don't know; I had concrete plans to quickly leave the US
| if Trump had actually retained the presidency after losing
| the election. I think it would have been a smart move, and
| wouldn't have been possible without close attention to the
| news.
|
| One of the nice things about Biden's presidency is how much
| less attention the news seems to merit, these days.
| handrous wrote:
| The thing about "there's been an actual, successful coup
| in the world's (for now) only superpower" or anything
| similarly unusual is that it tends to break through
| simple disregard for the news in a hurry. Something like
| that seems to happen once a decade, or maybe once every
| five years at most, and are of the "say granddad, where
| were you when..." variety. Even the studious news-
| avoiders might wish to watch history unfold, and even
| they will rarely miss it unless they actively _try_ to,
| given how _everywhere_ information is now.
|
| Meanwhile, did you find any of the Trump-related news for
| those four years (hell, over five, really, counting the
| election) particularly actionable, in an "I really needed
| to know that right this minute" sort of way? I kept up
| with all of it (it _was_ entertaining, for sure) but
| never did, personally. Even CDC guidance and such during
| the pandemic filtered down to state and local ordinances
| by the time they mattered much. Mask mandates quickly
| resulted in posters at store entrances, and most provided
| free or cheap masks, especially at first, so there was
| little likelihood of being caught out there. I
| anticipated panic-shortages before the news caught on
| when I saw a way-above-normal number of household paper
| products in shopping carts at the local bulk store-by the
| time it was in the news or became a meme a few days
| later, the shortages were already a problem. Some help
| that would have been--and realistically, we 'd have
| probably been OK if we'd been affected by them, we'd have
| figured something out with only very little
| inconvenience. Regardless, even a news-avoider would have
| realized that they should maybe pop in slightly more
| often than usual to see what's up, specifically, with the
| whole pandemic thing, well before it had much effect in
| the US.
|
| Most big stories still don't actually _matter_. Pulse
| nightclub shooting, or the one in Vegas, or the Boston
| Marathon bombers? Quick news mattered-- _locally_. Living
| several states away, I could have found out a month later
| and it 'd have made no difference. Assange extradited, US
| pulling out of Afghanistan--US _invading_ Afghanistan,
| for that matter? Russia invades Ukraine? Brexit? Libyan
| revolution? "Immigrant caravans"? I care because I'm a
| bit of a politics and news junkie, but if I'd ignored
| those the harm to my life would have been zero. They're
| not local events, for me, and they're just not _that_
| important to my day-to-day life. I could have found out
| about Brexit a year after the vote, would have made no
| difference (there 's a joke in there about how long that
| process has taken).
|
| 9/11 disrupted air travel and phone service nationwide,
| but was of the rare "you could hardly miss it" variety so
| one was unlikely to encounter those problems before
| becoming aware of it.
|
| I'm actually having trouble thinking of another event in
| the last 30+ years, in the US, that wasn't local and that
| had a "light cone", if you will, of actual effects on my
| life that hit in less than a week, and for which
| foreknowledge was in any way actionable. Typically, they
| never "hit". If they do, then finding out when that
| happens is just as good.
| tolbish wrote:
| Public radio. For example, here is Chicago's local version:
| https://www.wbez.org/
| rodamaral wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/
| leesalminen wrote:
| News.Google.com for a max of 30 minutes per day.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I think a big thing is that _Twitter_ can often repraesent
| itself as though what many outside of it call " _Twitter_
| views" are more mainstream than they are.
|
| _4chan_ , for instance, also comes with rather _niche_ views,
| but does not attempt to convince one that it 's views are
| anything but niche.
|
| Being immersed in _Twitter_ , and many other websites known to
| create "filter bubbles", eventually might make one believe it
| is the mainstream.
|
| In fact, it is not so dissimilar from how I think U.S.A.
| culture works; it is often noted how often inhabitants inside
| of it loose perspective of how idiosyncratic U.S.A. cultural
| memes are nothing more than that, as the people there often
| phrase them as though they be of a more global, even timeless
| nature.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| Caitlin Flanagan is one of the most entertaining writers around.
| [deleted]
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| Curate aggressively.
|
| A gun is dangerous. Twitter is dangerous.
|
| Both are useful if used appropriately with the right training and
| safeguards.
| brink wrote:
| A gun won't actively bait you into fights.
| jgerrish wrote:
| Such a sad outcome for something that could have been magical
| together.
|
| I was there in the Usenet days, and it was beautiful. I was
| there when Compuserve and Prodigy and Mozilla burst forth.
|
| It's not the platform though.
|
| We're seeing a retelling of the Eternal September story, and
| it's sad. Yeah, some historical context will be passed on,
| reframed for the new century. But there's a core philosophy
| that will never be "recovered." Because it didn't truly arise
| from sharing.
|
| It's right there in the name.
|
| Beware the tempers wasn't part of the original dream.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| As you allude to, this is a very straightforward
| phenomenon. The founding population of the Internet is not
| identical in distribution to the population that now exists
| on it. Most people are small and vicious and incredibly
| stupid, and now the population of the Internet[1] looks
| more like "most people" than it did in its early days.
|
| There's practically nothing to see here. If a bunch of
| chimpanzees join a club, it's not that interesting to note
| that there's suddenly shit being flung everywhere.
|
| EDIT: just to be 3000% clear, given the current obsession
| with the topic, my comment and use of "chimps" has less
| than nothing to do with race. It's a reference to our
| entire species' primate past and the tendency to
| underestimate our similarity to those ancestors.
|
| [1] Limit this to the developed world if you'd like.
| Countries that came online much more rapidly and recently,
| and continue to have large portions of the population come
| online every day, are dealing with a different but related
| set of problems.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It doesn't matter how agressive your filtering is, it doesn't
| matter how many accounts you mute, it doesn't matter how many
| words you block.
|
| It'll still seep through the cracks because that's what Twitter
| wants.
|
| I got to the point of 1000+ accounts and 1000+ words muted and
| it's still a bad place. To Twitter it is more valuable to them
| that I have to hear about the issues Twitter considers
| important than for me to have a healthy Twitter feed.
|
| A global "Politics on/off" switch is 100% possible and they
| choose not to do it because they consider it more important for
| the world that I hear the correct politics than be able to just
| hear none.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| I follow 50 people with only a couple active posters.
|
| I agree that stuff gets in. It is a trade off.
|
| maybe i should try third party apps vs fighting twitters
| algos.
| altano wrote:
| This is exactly the problem: Twitter, unlike other platforms
| like Reddit and even Facebook, make curation impossible.
|
| Want to follow someone who posts a lot of interesting things
| about JS? Be prepared to see posts they like about curry
| poodles. Oh here's some worst-in-class topic recommendations
| barfed out by depressed ML, and you can't turn them off. What
| do you mean you don't like Roseanne Nostalgia? Here are some
| Binky The Clown Stock Tips.
| dewey wrote:
| > make curation impossible
|
| You can just use any of the numerous third party clients that
| have a sorted timeline and don't inject random posts in your
| timeline.
| rand0mx1 wrote:
| you can choose latest tweets, no recommendations from ai
| syshum wrote:
| Ironically Google's platform in their "circles" where an
| attempt (kinda) to solve that problem.
|
| All social media should be topic, not user based IMO. This is
| the way the internet was originally, it was not really
| personality, or people based. you joined a forum about
| fishing, woodworking, programming, or politics to engage with
| other people on those topics. Off Topic things where either
| isolated to a specific area of the community or banned
| completely.
|
| Today however we do not see to have topics on social media is
| it just a stream of everything about a person...
| fruityrudy wrote:
| For tech it's very important for staying up to date. There is a
| lot of content there that is not elsewhere.
|
| The best strategy is to block keywords to avoid all the social
| justice and politics. I just wished they allowed blocking more
| than 200 words.
| u678u wrote:
| I've gone in a cycle through different Social Media sites, after
| a year or so I manage to get the strength to leave but usually
| end up on a different site.
|
| One thing is I always delete my account after 3-6 months and
| create a new one, following different people/groups etc.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I was hoping the article would end with the author deleting her
| twitter account altogether but it seems she recently "straw-
| tweeted" a link to this article:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/CaitlinPacific/status/14120919506...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I suspect she thought it'd be more helpful to share that with
| Twitter users than delete her account. (But I do share the
| sentiment - why keep an account with a system that's doing you
| harm?)
| underseacables wrote:
| Actual title: You Really Need to Quit Twitter
|
| Not that I disagree, but it is a rule
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-05 23:01 UTC)